Monday

For Black Unemployed, Education and Effort May Not Matter

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In the decade leading up to the Great Recession, Wanda Nolan grew accustomed to steady progress.
From an entry-level job as a fill-in bank teller, she forged a career as a commercial banking assistant, earning enough to become a homeowner. She finished college and then got an MBA. Even after the recession unfolded in late 2007, her degrees and her familiarity with the business world lent her a sense of immunity to the forces ravaging much of the American economy. Nolan was an exemplar of the African American middle class and the increasingly professional ranks of the so-called New South.
But in September 2008, everything changed.
A bank human resources officer called her into a private conference room. “All I heard was, ‘Your position has been eliminated,’” says Nolan, 37, who, despite being one of the more than 13 million officially unemployed Americans, still spends most days in her self-styled banker’s uniform of pearls and pants and practical flats. “My mind started racing.”
More than two years later, Nolan is still looking for a job and feeling increasingly anxious about a future that once felt assured. Her life has devolved from a model of middle class African American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend: She is among the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job.
For economists, that number may sound awful, but it’s not surprising. The nation’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons -- ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers -- black unemployment tends to run twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging longstanding ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy.
Millions of people like Nolan, who have precisely followed the oft-dictated recipe for economic success -- work hard, get an education, seek advancement -- are slipping backward. Even as they apply for jobs and accept the prospect of a future with less job security and lower pay, they remain stalled in unemployment.
Trading down has become a painful truth for much of working America, but this truth becomes particularly stark when seen through the prism of race. Only 12 percent of all Americans are black, but working-age black Americans comprise nearly 21 percent of the nation’s unemployed, according to federal data. The growing contrast between prospects for white and black job-seekers challenges a cherished American notion: the availability of opportunity and upward mobility for all.
“Over the course of the recession, the unemployment disparity between college educated blacks and whites actually widened,” says economist Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity, and Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “If black workers who are the most prepared to compete and work in the new economy can’t find jobs, that’s something that we as a country have to take seriously.”
At the request of The Huffington Post, the Economic Policy Institute analyzed several surveys conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure black unemployment both before and after the recession. The result: a veritable epidemic of joblessness that has undone decades of economic progress for millions of African Americans.
In Birmingham, Ala., the unemployment rate among African Americans was 5.3 percent in 2006, the year before the recession began. Last year it was 14.5 percent, according to the EPI analysis. In Miami, the rate went from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 17.2 percent last year. In the Los Angeles area, the black unemployment rate climbed from 8.6 percent in 2006 to 19.3 percent last year.
Meanwhile, in metropolitan areas where African American unemployment was already a major problem, levels now speak to a running depression. In Detroit, black unemployment last year reached 25.7 percent, more than four times the 6 percent mark seen in 2000 at the end of a technology-driven national economic boom. During the same decade, black unemployment in Las Vegas swelled from 8.2 percent to 20.1 percent, according to the EPI analysis.
Charlotte, a city of about 750,000 people,was supposed to be near-impervious to national economic problems, at least according to the guiding narrative in the area.
Communities across the South lost thousands of manufacturing and textile jobs during the 1990s and the early part of the last decade, dealing the region a devastating economic blow. For generations, a job on a textile-mill floor or inside a furniture factory had been a reliable way for people with no more than a high school diploma to support their families. As workers watched their jobs sent off to low-wage factories in Asia and Latin America, many struggled to find new places to work or had to settle for smaller paychecks in new industries.
But something different happened in Charlotte. Though jobs making cotton T-shirts and living-room sets became harder to find, many were replaced by white-collar positions in financial services. Tea is still served sweet in most of the city's restaurants, in keeping with southern tradition, but skyscrapers punctuating the downtown landscape are more likely to carry corporate names such as Bank of America than those of Civil War generals.
And these sorts of businesses have opened fresh pathways for success to black and white residents alike, making Charlotte an aspirational model for the African American middle class. Despite the history of slavery, legal segregation and structural inequality, racial divisions seemed as if they were being eclipsed by economic progress.
“For many of the major corporations here, the demand for labor was so great that it overrode just about any inclination toward discrimination, if it was there at all,” says John Connaughton, an economist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “The financial industry had an incredibly diverse workforce. People were moving here from all over the country. Charlotte was and is that kind of place.”
In 2008, Forbes magazine included Charlotte among its list of “10 recession-proof cities.” That same year, Black Enterprise Magazine ranked Charlotte fourth on its list of the 10 best cities for African Americans. The city’s black median household income compared well to its overall median household income, black unemployment was relatively low and the number of black college graduates and homeowners was fairly high.
Newer neighborhoods in Charlotte seem roughly as racially integrated as personal finances allow. The City Council is exactly half white and half black.
Nationally, the years before the Great Recession were characterized by markedly weak job growth. But fresh paychecks proliferated in Charlotte, one of only five major metropolitan areas to see a net jobs increase between 2000 and 2009, according to a report produced last year by the Urban Institute.
Charlotte saw some 300,000 net jobs eliminated during the recession, however -- Wanda Nolan’s among them.
ENDING THE ASCENT
Serious-minded and intense, Nolan grew up in Charlotte, the youngest of three children. Her father is a veteran and a retired postal worker. Her mother worked for a day care provider. Both considered themselves lucky because they earned enough to finance a stable and mostly pleasant life.
Three years before Nolan was born, her parents bought a three-bedroom ranch-style home in southwest Charlotte, an area developed in the 1950s. They had money for the basics and money to send Nolan to dance lessons. They were able to afford occasional car trips to North Carolina’s Eastern Shore. When she turned 16, they bought her a car -- “a little Mazda GLC,” she recalls.
After high school, Nolan worked at a day care provider and drove a bus. She took some courses at Central Piedmont Community College, guided loosely by the notion that a degree would open the door to better jobs, but she did not graduate. Money and ambition meant less to her than the pursuit of “a simple happy life.”
She fell into a relationship, married, but soon separated after her husband struck her during an argument, she says.
“It only had to happen once,” Nolan says.
Her husband had been the breadwinner, making divorce an event with serious financial ramifications. Before the couple’s relationship was completely over, Nolan became pregnant, intensifying that pressure. Her mother gave her money to rent her own apartment.
She was only 23, but she suddenly had adult responsibilities. A single mother with her own bills to pay, she found herself in need of a solid career. She took a job at a Red Cross blood bank where she earned about $17,000 a year and then moved on to a job at Aetna US Healthcare, where her earnings climbed to about $25,000. She put money aside and, two years later, had enough to buy herself a $69,000 three-bedroom house in her parent’s neighborhood.
When she thinks of those years now, she says, a song comes to mind: “Independent Women,” the 2000 hit from the girl group Destiny’s Child. The lyrics pose a question: “Tell me how you feel about this … The house I live in / I've bought it / The car I'm driving / I've bought it / I depend on me.”
“I really felt like that was me,” Nolan says now. “I thought, ‘you know, I wasn’t raised in an apartment. I don’t want this for my daughter. I’ve got to put some things together,’ and I did.”
Two years later, in 2000, Nolan got herself a job as a fill-in teller at First Citizens Bank, working in different branches scattered across the Charlotte region. The job only paid $25,500. But, Nolan saw what she thought was the opportunity to advance.
She impressed a manager and the bank transferred her permanently to a commercial banking unit downtown. Still, she had a nagging feeling that working hard would not be enough. Her father had been the valedictorian of his high school class and talked a lot about the importance of school. Without a college degree, her opportunities seemed limited -- and she wanted her father to be proud.
In 2002, she enrolled in college. Nolan took classes at night and continued working at the bank full-time during the day. She sent her daughter to day care or to stay with her parents.
She began seeing another man and eventually had a second daughter with him. But the relationship didn’t last. Having another child only reinforced the imperative to advance her career.
“I realized that I needed to be an example to my children,” she says. “I needed to be in a better position to make it on my own. That’s when I got really serious about school.”
She pushed herself through college through a combination of local classes and online course offerings, completing her bachelor’s degree in 2006. Two years later, Nolan finished an M.B.A., emerging with $84,000 in student loan debt, she says, but a powerful sense that she had armed herself for success.
But that same summer, First Citizens began suffering from the effects of the economic downturn. Euphemisms like “rightsizing” came up in meetings and filled office conversation. As news of layoffs began to spread around the bank, so did stress. So many people were developing or managing stress-related illnesses that Nolan’s work area became known as “the sick floor.”
“Everyone was speculating about which departments would stay and which were going to go,” she says.
When First Citizens began laying off employees that fall, Nolan was earning about $40,000 a year. That was about $12,000 less than Charlotte’s median household earnings at the time, but it was enough to manage and still save a tiny fraction for emergencies and retirement. She was owed nearly $35,000 in unpaid child support, she says, but she was able to provide for her family and could lean on a $15,000 home equity credit line as needed.
Positive by nature, Nolan told herself she would endure -- even after a round of layoffs claimed her job.
A few minutes after she got the news in the conference room, Nolan sat in the parking lot and fished though her purse. She was looking for the piece of paper where she’d written down contact information for a woman at a South Carolina collections company. They were hiring.
“At that point, I was pretty optimistic, very optimistic even,” says Nolan.
So optimistic that when she was offered the job with the collections agency, she turned it down because it entailed a commute of nearly an hour and paid $15,000 less than her previous job.
Some 32 months and countless rejections later, Nolan knows some people will think her decision was a mistake.
“But I’m not sure.” she says. “I am a single mother who would be an hour away from her kids if they get sick during the day, making less money and driving a longer distance to work putting more wear and tear on my car.”
THE SEARCH
In the beginning, Nolan set rigid job search goals for herself: She had to pursue a minimum of 10 jobs per day.
Yet despite applying for hundreds of positions, she has received only a few callbacks and been granted a mere handful of interviews, she says.
She has been hired twice, but neither job lasted. In late 2008, she worked as an office manager at an airport concessions company after a friend referred her. But three months later, as business declined, she was laid off again. She soon landed another position as assistant director of sales at a telecommunications company. About 11 months later, in April 2010, a dip in business meant yet another layoff.
“That was rough for me, very rough,” Nolan says. “I am a person who keeps a job, who stays with my job. I don’t jump from place to place.”
She set up automatic email alerts that bring notice of new banking and telecommunications jobs to her email account. At night, while her daughters do their homework at the kitchen table, she sits with them, stares into her laptop and readies her applications.
“I hope they don’t know this, but I’m usually at it well after they go to bed,” Nolan says. “There are so many people looking for jobs. So, I stay up. I apply. I worry. Then I do it all over again.”
Last year, she decided to enroll in a job-training program at the Urban League of the Central Carolinas. She heard about the program on a local R&B radio station. The ad mentioned green job training and the industry’s potential to expand in the future.
The class had 18 students. She was one of four with a graduate degree, she says.
Today, she does not call herself optimistic.
“Now, I would have to say I’m not,” she says. “This has been the biggest challenge of my life.”
INADEQUATE RESPONSE
For most policymakers, the answer to persistently high African American unemployment has been to address overall unemployment: stimulate the economy to create demand and new jobs.
But some experts say that prescription effectively exacerbates the gap between black and white unemployment by failing to address the particularly potent factors at play in some segments of the African American community.
“When you face a large group of people, some of whom are seriously hurt and some of whom are critically injured, you can’t apply the same medicine to the injured and the critically ill and expect a good outcome,” says Patrick Graham, president and CEO of the Urban League of the Central Carolinas.
The Urban League advocates for initiatives aimed at generating jobs in particularly hard hit communities. Last year, Urban League president Marc Morial, together with NAACP President Ben Jealous and activist Al Sharpton, met with President Barack Obama to press for a new jobs program focused on communities where unemployment is highest.
“We were not and are not saying, ‘Give black people jobs,’” says Morial. “We are saying, ‘Focus on the geographic areas where unemployment is the worst if you want to solve this problem.’”
According to Morial, Obama told the group that the administration planned to stick with its universal job-creation strategy.
The administration maintains that it has mounted a considerable response to the unemployment crisis afflicting the African American community.
"I think we are quite sympathetic to the view that African Americans and other groups have been quite hard hit by the recession and to the view that we should help them," says Austan Goolsbee, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and the chief economist for the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
The administration's support for small-business tax breaks helped to drive an increase in the number of black-owned businesses during the recession, Goolsbee says. The administration also intensified efforts to ensure that a broad collection of small businesses -- including those owned by ethnic minorities and women -- are aware of federal contact work opportunities. This work can grow businesses and create jobs, he says.
Stimulus-funded construction projects created jobs that put many workers back on job sites, Goolsbee says. But few African Americans work in the construction industry. Goolsbee says stimulus-funded construction projects may have done more to reduce the Latino unemployment rate, which remains elevated at 11.3 percent.
The Obama administration’s primary effort to create jobs, an $800 billion package of stimulus spending measures, has had negligible effect on African American businesses, according to a recent study by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.
Black, Latino and Asian-owned businesses collectively represent about 21 percent of all the nation’s companies. But these companies have collectively received just under 10 percent of some $34.6 billion allocated by February via direct federal stimulus contracts, according to the same study. White-owned companies represent about 83 percent of the nation’s businesses and won direct contracts for nearly 83 percent of the projects funded with stimulus dollars, the study found.
There are also new problems on the horizon. Nearly a quarter of the nation's employed black laborers work for government agencies. Stimulus funding that went to states during the recession helped to fill or at least shrink budget deficits and delayed many public sector payroll concerns. But, with that money drying up, state and local governments are now shedding jobs.
Some experts see a troublesome paradox at work: Race-neutral policies will not close the unemployment gap, yet a policy that overtly attempts to address black joblessness seems politically radioactive, and trips pervasive notions about race that undermine productive discussion. But, without that discussion and new policy, the black unemployment rate seems likely to stay above 10 percent until 2014, says Austin, the economist behind the Economic Policy Institute analysis.
“We don’t think of unemployment in structural [socioeconomic] terms, what causes unemployment or who might be affected,” says Dorian Warren, a political scientist at Columbia University, who studies race, labor and the politics of inequality. ”Add to that the notion that we are a ‘color-blind’ society now. So, whatever happens or does not happen for black people is their own fault. There is also just this pervasive notion that black people are lazy and don’t want to work. These ideas have real traction and really shape public opinion.”
Many Americans -- particularly white Americans -- dismiss joblessness as a condition indicating lack of commitment, or even moral depravity among those out of work, making the issue of African American unemployment particularly sensitive, Warren says. For African American leaders -- not least, President Obama -- embracing the cause of black employment risks making them seem like parochial figures, offering up past injustices as excuses for current trouble.
A NEW REALITY
The neighborhood where Nolan and her parents live looks like it’s still occupied by comfortable people. Ornamental wells, birdbaths and garden benches nearly outnumber the family-sized Toyotas, Fords and Hyundais parked at the curb. But the foreclosure crisis has hit the mostly black and Latino moderate-income community hard.
At the end of March, all of the homes for sale in Nolan’s neighborhood involved pre-foreclosure auctions or bank-owned foreclosure sales.
Nolan is aggressively working to keep her own home from that fate. She recently qualified for a federally-funded foreclosure prevention program that will cover her mortgage payments for a year while she job hunts or gets more training. She used her tax return to pay off her car. Eliminating those bills is a relief.
“That’s almost $1,000 every month that I won’t have to come up with right now,” Nolan says. “That is huge.”
But Nolan’s $341-per-week unemployment benefits may expire at the end of April if an extension is not approved. Her student loan deferment is set to end in June. Her health insurance ran out in 2009 and she can no longer afford to pay for needed medications out of pocket.
Her health plan today amounts to a southern version of Zen, she says: breathe deeply, pray often.
Looking for work defines her life. That, and family, the one area in which unemployment seems to have delivered benefits. Most mornings, Nolan is up and out of the house by 6:30. She drops off the girls at their schools. Some mornings, she does something she’s never had the time to do before: volunteer at her daughters’ schools.
“That may be the one good thing that has happened,” she says. “I’m able to spend a lot more time with my kids.”
Since she’s been unemployed, Nolan has seen her youngest daughter, who attends what Nolan calls a predominantly white elementary school, do something she finds shocking: At only age 8, Nolan’s daughter approaches other kids and arranges her own play dates. That’s just what kids do, Nolan’s daughter tells her.
To Nolan, who must find the strength to put aside creeping self-doubt on the job trail, the confidence her daughter is displaying is an inspiration.
“At its core, that’s networking,” Nolan says. “She’s saying ‘Hey, we have an interest in common, please take some of your free time and spend it with me. We can do it on your turf or mine.’ If there is anything that I think may be holding black people back, any reason that so many of us can’t find jobs, it may be that. We just aren’t as accustomed or familiar with the art of building relationships that can become business opportunities. Some of us may not know anyone who can help us. I don’t think many white people are in that situation.”
There are plenty of studies that reinforce the importance of networks and network building in crafting and sustaining a career. But, there is also ample evidence that race alone can shape the job search experience. A 2006 Princeton University study found that white men with criminal records received callbacks and job offers about twice as often as black men without them -- even when the men had similar resumes and qualifications.
Most mornings, Nolan heads to a friend’s house to put in a few hours of what she calls “sweat equity” as a receptionist and all-purpose staff member at a start-up telecommunications company. She is not paid, but is hoping that if the business gets off the ground, she will be the first hire.
When the phone rings on a recent morning, Nolan answers.
“How may I help you today,” she says, headset on. “What we need is that one big call.”
When the company owner, who she met while working for the telecommunications company last year, told her he needed help with his books, Nolan found a nighttime QuickBooks software course and got him to pay for it. She figures that mastering basic accounting software might appeal to potential employers.
“I’m hoping that if I plant a seed now, it will grow,” she says. “Of course, it would be great if that seed grew really quickly.”
It’s been so long since Nolan worked the kind of steady and demanding job she likes, that she has begun trying to create a challenging environment for herself. On a recent Thursday evening, Nolan oversees a meeting of her church’s volunteer marketing staff. At six-foot-two, she towers over many of the other women in the room. She is in charge.
“Ladies, based on an average of the last four week’s church attendance, we’re printing 458 programs as we speak,” Nolan says at the start of the meeting. “You’re going to notice the new format. We expect to use 7 to 10 percent less paper this year. We’re going green.”
She lays out her planes to publicize an upcoming weekend food and clothing giveaway at the church. Later, she seeks a volunteer to gather data on the number of people served.
“I like to stay busy,” Nolan says. “And everything I do, I try to do it well.”
The parts of her life that still feel structured, positive, even controlled -- these are the parts that keep her going.
“I’m not going to say that there aren’t moments when it has been difficult,” she says.
She has drained her savings and her retirement account, once stocked collectively with about $8,000. She wishes she had saved more. She and her daughters live off about $200 a month in food stamps along with unemployment benefits -- a long way from the life of the independent women Destiny’s Child sang about.
This is not the first time that Nolan has relied upon public assistance. In the late 1990s, newly divorced and with a newborn to care for, she filed for food stamps and welfare payments. But the moment that her pay increased, she left the welfare rolls -- and the unwanted stigma. In her world, welfare seemed like a program for those she calls “the ghetto fabulous,” people who game the system.
“I remember how happy I was the day I was able to say, ‘Thank you, but I don’t need this help anymore,’” she says. “The woman I talked to was like, ‘Well, why don’t you at least keep the WIC (Women Infants and Children Program) vouchers for milk and juice.’ But I told her I was ready to do it all on my own and I did. I really did, until all this happened.”
Her youngest daughter has asthma and requires medication, so Nolan enrolled both her children in Medicaid. She also signed up both girls for a free school lunch program. Relying on public aid does not sit well, but she sees no other options.
“Any time I’m having issues with my pride, my children help to ground me,” she says. “Do my children need health insurance? Yes. Do my children need to eat? Yes, they do. So, I have to do what is necessary to provide. But that’s not what I want for my family, not it at all.”
On a recent afternoon, Nolan visits a coffee shop near her home. A white man at a nearby table sits hunched over a cup of coffee and newspaper when his cell phone rings. He apparently is also looking for work. A contractor is looking for someone with commercial building experience to finish out some concrete work. The man’s back straightens. He poured his first driveway when he was 17 years old, he tells the potential employer on the other end of the phone.
Nolan hears this and imagines her own phone ringing, her own life changing, all this struggle finally yielding reward.
“I’m keeping faith in that for my daughters,” she says. “They need to know that hard work and education matter.”




Friday

Hiring by companies hits 5-year high in April

Job seekers line up at a recent Job Fair in Los Angeles, CA.
REUTERS – Companies created jobs at the fastest pace in five years in April, pointing to underlying strength in the economy even as the jobless rate rose to 9.0 percent.

Private sector hiring, including a big jump at retailers, boosted overall nonfarm payrolls by 244,000, the largest increase in 11 months, the Labor Department said on Friday. Economists had expected a gain of only 186,000.

The private sector created 268,000 jobs, the most since February 2006, while government payrolls shrank.

The data backed views the economic recovery would regain speed this quarter after stumbling in the first three months of the year. Earlier this week, other reports pointed to a slowing in the labor market.

"What we're seeing is a sustained pick-up in hiring and it suggests that businesses have gained enough confidence to look past short-term fluctuations in demand," said Aaron Smith, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Investors on Wall Street cheered the report, which showed job gains across the board, with the exception of government. U.S. stocks rose for the first time this week, while prices for longer-dated government debt fell.

The dollar rose broadly and some of the gains were driven by a German news report, later denied, suggesting Greece had raised the possibility of leaving the euro zone.

While the economy has created jobs for seven straight months, gains remain too meager to make much of a dent in the pool of 13.7 million Americans who are out of work.

A recent spike in first-time applications for state unemployment benefits caused some economists to worry that job growth could slow in May and June. Initial claims vaulted to an eight-month high last week.

Still, the pace of job growth averaged 233,000 over the past three months, an acceleration from 104,000 in the prior three months that suggests the recovery is growing firmer.

Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, said the rise "shows good momentum that should allow the economy to absorb the twin shocks from the Middle East and Japan without too much damage."
JOBLESS RATE UP

The unemployment rate in April backed away from a two-year low of 8.8 percent to rise for the first time in five months. It is derived from a separate survey of households, which showed a sharp decline in employment and a modest rise in the size of the labor force.

Economists, however, place more weight on the larger, less-volatile survey of employers, which found 46,000 more jobs than previously thought were created in the prior two months.

The report capped a good week for President Barack Obama, whose approval ratings received a lift from the killing of Osama bin Laden. A healthier jobs market could prove key to his hopes to win reelection in 2012.

The White House can also take relief from a big drop in oil prices on Thursday that should soon drag gasoline costs lower. Brent crude futures fell for a fifth straight day on Friday.

"We've added over the last 14 months more than two million jobs in the private sector. This is the best month of private sector job growth in five years. So I don't think that's nibbling, that's clearly a move in the right direction," White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee told Reuters Insider.

The relatively vigorous expansion in payrolls in April, if sustained, could encourage some members of the Federal Reserve to begin pushing for interest rates hikes.

New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley minimized any move soon toward tightening saying the economy has a "considerable way to go to meet the Fed's dual mandate of full employment and price stability.

Most economists agree, noting that there is still a huge amount of slack in the labor market and wage growth remains tepid. Average hourly earnings rose a mere 3 cents in April and are up a modest 1.9 percent from a year ago.

A Reuters survey of economists at top financial institutions showed many expected the U.S. central bank to raise benchmark rates by the end of the third quarter of 2012.

Only a fraction of the more than eight million jobs lost in the 2007-2009 recession have been recovered. Even at April's relatively rapid rate of job growth, it would take nearly 2-1/2 years to reclaim all those jobs.

DETAILS OF REPORT FAIRLY UPBEAT

High gasoline and food prices weighed on U.S. economic growth in the first quarter when the economy grew at a subdued 1.8 percent annual rate. It had expanded at a 3.1 percent clip in the final three months of last year.

"GDP growth should pick up to more than 3 percent in the second quarter. If oil prices stay down ... the economy can maintain that pace in the second half," said IHS Global's Gault.

Details of the payrolls report were generally upbeat, even though government employment contracted for a sixth straight month in April, shedding 24,000 jobs.

The bulk of gains in payrolls were in the private services sector which created 224,000 new positions after adding 194,000 in March. Within that segment, retail saw a surge of 57,100 jobs -- the most since 2000 -- and leisure and hospitality added 46,000 new workers.

Though fast-food chain McDonald's last month announced it was taking on 50,000 new staff, those jobs were unlikely to have been included in April's payrolls as the hiring was done after the survey period for the report.

Employment in goods-producing industries increased 44,000, with construction payrolls climbing by 5,000 and manufacturing gaining 29,000.

Tuesday

Sony Data Breach Exposes Users to Years of Identity-Theft Risk

May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp., maker of the PlayStation 3 video-game console, may have exposed customers to years of potential identity theft after hackers breached the company’s online entertainment networks in mid-April.
The risk will stay with as many as 100 million customers of Sony’s PlayStation Network, Sony Online Entertainment and Qriocity film and music service for years, even as the chance of credit-card fraud recedes, said Steve Ward, a spokesman for Fairfax, Virginia-based online-security company Invincea.
“The attackers may have your name, your birth date, potentially your mother’s maiden name,” Ward said in an interview. “These are all the things used to check your identity, and that can be used to falsify it.”
The value of stolen credit-card numbers diminishes each day after a data breach becomes known because users and bank-card issuers typically step up monitoring. Sony, which was attacked between April 16 and April 19, said it had encrypted customers’ credit-card numbers with security that would make codes difficult to read by hackers who penetrated the system.
“There is no evidence that our main credit card database was compromised,” Sony said in a statement to its users. “It is in a completely separate and secured environment.”
The best sign that Sony’s assertion is true may be the passage of two weeks without reports from credit-card issuers of wide-scale fraud, according to an FBI cyber-crime investigator who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press.
As more days go by, it’s less likely card numbers were stolen or, if they were, that potential losses will be large, the person said.
The FBI’s San Diego office is investigating the matter, said agent Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the office.
Third Service Attacked
Tokyo-based Sony said yesterday that the attack on its PlayStation Network and Qriocity online music and film service in mid-April also gave hackers access to data from Sony Online Entertainment, a separate unit that makes role-playing games. Hackers gained access to 23,400 credit card and debit records from non-U.S. customers and the personal account information of 24.6 million account holders.
The disclosure that a third service was compromised came a day after top Sony executives offered a public apology and said they had no evidence a separate 10 million credit card numbers registered to PlayStation Network and Qriocity had been stolen in the attacks.
“We have to regain the trust and confidence of our users,” Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president in charge of consumer products and network services, said May 1 at a Tokyo press conference.
Financial Impact
Hackers exploited a known security vulnerability to gain access to 77 million PlayStation Network and Qriocity user names, addresses, gender, birth dates and other information, Sony said. It wasn’t clear from the statement how many of the 24.6 million accounts in the newly reported breach share duplicate user information.
The financial impact Sony faces depends on how well the company convinces customers it “will make things right,” Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. He estimates credit-card fraud, repairs to its networks and marketing costs will amount to $50 million.
“There will be a hit if in fact they see their business dip,” Pachter said. “I’d say $50 million, not $24 billion, and I think Sony can handle $50 million.”
‘Hash’ Protection
The breach of Sony Online Entertainment exposed information from an outdated 2007 database, including about 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates, Sony said yesterday in a statement. The credit-card information didn’t include security codes, the company said. The three- and four- digit codes are used as a second source of authentication for many online vendors.
The stolen data may include 10,700 direct debit records of customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The compromised debit account information included customer names, bank account numbers and account names, Sony said.
Sony also suggested customer passwords may have been less vulnerable than originally thought.
Passwords were protected by a level of security called hash algorithm in which the word users type in is converted on Sony’s servers to a string of characters entirely unrelated to the original password, Patrick Seybold, a Sony spokesman, said yesterday on the company’s official blog.
“It is very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the process and find the password from the hash,” according to a security website linked to the PlayStation blog.
E-Mail Vulnerabilities
There were signs the hackers may be trying to hijack e-mail accounts by attempting to access ones provided to Sony, and plugging in PSN passwords to see if they were re-used for both, according to H.D. Moore, the chief security officer for Rapid7, a Boston-based online security firm. Accounts that have been compromised are vulnerable to use by spammers or other malevolent individuals.
Andrew Kovacs, a Google Inc. spokesman, declined to say whether the company had detected widespread password re-use attempts on Gmail, one of the largest free e-mail services.
Sony has been recommending people who use the same password for other unrelated services or accounts change them. The company also said it is moving its data center from San Diego, appointing a chief information security officer, updating game- console system software and requiring users to change their passwords.
Service Restoration
“We expect Sony to be able to overcome this issue by implementing stronger security measures, enabling it to win back the trust of its stakeholders,” Ryosuke Katsura, senior analyst for Mizuho Securities Co. in Tokyo, who has an “outperform” rating on Sony shares, said in a research note yesterday.
Sony said it expected online services to be fully restored by the end of May, with partial restoration occurring in phases around the world beginning this week. Customers may get complimentary downloads and 30 days of free premium services, Sony said.
It takes about a half a year to stabilize sales and confidence in a company’s network after a breach, Lawrence Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, which studies the financial cost of data breaches, said in an interview.
“During that period, a company like Sony can lose millions of dollars,” Ponemon said.

Thursday

Racial undercurrent of 'birther' debate

THE TICKET - During the 2008 campaign, questions about John McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone on a U.S. military base prompted some to ask whether McCain was eligible to be president, since the Constitution stipulates that anyone not born in the United States is not eligible to be president.
Amid a flurry of news reports, McCain's own campaign announced in February 2008 that it was conducting an investigation. When a bipartisan pair of lawyers announced the following month that McCain was indeed eligible, the issue virtually died--apart from a Senate resolution that pretty much laid the question to rest by attesting to the facts surrounding McCain's birth and citizenship.
But the winner of the 2008 election, Barack Obama, has faced a relentless campaign questioning his U.S. citizenship--and thereby the legitimacy of his presidency--that has disregarded the facts.
Questions regarding Obama's birth certificate have persisted for more than two years, as the president noted Wednesday at a press conference announcing the release of his long-form birth certificate. A vast array of evidence attests to Obama's citizenship--including a certificate of live birth, signed affidavits from people who viewed Obama's long-form birth certificate, confirmation by Hawaiian officials, and independent investigations by news outlets. Nevertheless, "this thing just keeps going" as Obama said this morning. Even after the White House released the long-form certificate of Obama's birth, birther leader Orly Taitz—who has filed unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to obtain access to Obama's birth certificate—sought to cast doubt on the document's authenticity, suggesting that in 1961, Hawaiian officials would have classified Obama as "Negro" rather than using designation "African," which suggests, in her view, a more contemporary concern for "political correctness."
So what's fueling the dogged questioning of Obama's origins? Many critics of the birther movement say its core tenets--and its stubborn resistance to evidence disproving those beliefs--can be traced to racial hostilities. The fundamental birtherist conviction, these critics say, is that an African-American can't have legitimately won the presidency--and that his elevation to power therefore has to be the result of an elaborate subterfuge.
"There is a real deep-seated and vicious racism at work here in terms of trying to de-legitimate the president," Peniel Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University, told The Ticket.
"This is more than just a conspiracy," Peniel added. "I think this is fundamentally connected to white supremacism in this country."
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. in early April called for the connection to be publicly drawn between birthers and racism: "So it is time to call this birther nonsense what it is--not just claptrap, but profoundly racist claptrap."
And columnist Michael Tomasky wrote for The Guardian Wednesday that the birther conspiracy "had to be the only explanation for how this black man got to the White House." He added: "And if you think race isn't what this is about at its core, ask yourself if there would even be a birther conspiracy if Barack Obama were white and named Bart Oberstar. If you think there would be, you are delusional."
In a similar vein, Rev. Jesse Jackson told Politico yesterday that Donald Trump's campaign to get Obama to release his birth certificate is deeply rooted in race.
"Any discussion of [Obama's] birthplace is a code word," Jackson said. "It calls upon ancient racial fears." Jackson later added that, in his view, Trump "is now tapping into code-word fears that go far beyond a rational discourse."
Birthers emphatically deny such criticism. But it's difficult to apprehend the ongoing resistance to proof of Obama's citizenship without crediting racial fear as a significant factor. At first, after all, many adherents of birtherism argued that the administration fueled speculation by failing to release the long-form version of Obama's birth certificate, but now that this version has been released to the public, the call continues to go out for other kinds of information about Obama's past to be released--a level of scrutiny that neither McCain nor Obama's 43 predecessors in the Oval Office were expected to face.
Trump, who has railed against Obama as he floats himself as a presidential contender, on Wednesday at a press conference in New Hampshire called for Obama to release his academic transcripts:
The word is, according to what I've read, that he was a terrible student when he went to Occidental. He then gets to Columbia. He then gets to Harvard. I heard at Columbia he wasn't a very good student. He then gets to Harvard. How do you get into Harvard if you're not a good student. Maybe that's right or maybe that's wrong. But I don't know why he doesn't release his records. Why doesn't he release his Occidental records?
Trump and others have accused Obama of not authoring his memoir, while many Obama detractors continue to argue he is secretly Muslim. Both Jackson and Peniel noted that never before has a sitting president's nationality been questioned.
Meanwhile, an eye-opening recent study from the University of Delaware appears to confirm that race-minded detractors of Obama view him as "less American"--as Dan Vergano writes for USA Today.
The study, which surveyed blacks and whites on their opinions of Obama compared to Vice President Joe Biden, found that whites classified as "higher prejudice-predicted Whites" viewed Obama as "less American"--a view that, in turn, resulted in lower evaluations of the president's performance.
"Finally, many in the media have speculated that current criticisms of Obama are a result of his race, rather than his agenda. We believe that the current results are an empirical demonstration that this is sadly the case," the study concluded in its analysis. "As the United States approaches important decisions regarding issues such as economic reform, health care, and overseas military interventions, the intrusion of racial attitudes in the evaluation of political leaders' performance is ironically inconsistent with what many believe to be 'American.' "
Two separate national polls conducted this spring found that about half of Republicans don't believe Obama was born in the United States.
But Democrats and Republicans alike say that "birther" talk will be a political liability for whoever propagates the discussion.
"I don't think it's an issue that moves voters," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told reporters Tuesday. "It's an issue in my opinion that I don't personally get too excited about, because I think the more important question is what's going on in this country in regards to jobs, to debt, and the deficit and spending. Those are the things that people are worried about. People aren't worried about these other issues."

Monday

As Netflix profit soars, CEO, CFO warn of higher costs, slower growth

SILICON VALLEY - Netflix (NFLX) reports growth in profit, revenue and subscribers, but warns of increased costs. Plus: Yahoo (YHOO), Nintendo, Facebook. And: New-home sales, Silicon Valley tech stocks.

Netflix earnings

Netflix -- the Los Gatos online DVD rental pioneer turned Internet viewing destination -- this afternoon reported a $60 million profit for its most recent quarter, up 88 percent from a year earlier. Revenue jumped 46 percent to $719 million.

During the quarter, Netflix added nearly 3.6 million subscribers.

"We are delighted to report another strong quarter of growth in subscribers, now at 23.6 million globally, revenue and earnings," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells wrote in a letter to shareholders posted on the company's site. "This growth underscores the value of our increased spending on an ever-broader selection of TV shows and movies, our constantly improving personalization technology, and the Netflix brand."

Netflix's earnings came in at $1.11 a share -- beating Wall Street forecasts, according to Thomson.

However, the company warned that future subscriber growth may slow as the costs of securing programming for its online viewing service increases. It expects 24 million to 24.8 million customers at the end of the current quarter. It also expects profit of $50 million to $62 million -- or 93 cents to $1.15 a share -- on revenue of $762 million to $778 million. By contrast, analysts on average had been expecting earnings of $1.19 a share on $763 million in revenue.

Netflix released results just after the stock markets closed this afternoon. Earlier, the shares finished regular trading at $251.67, down 55 cents, or 0.2 percent, from last week's closing price. The stock was dropping sharply in after-hours trading.


Source: Silicon Valley Mercury News

Friday

ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team

NEW YORK – Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.
Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.
The Iraq war taught him that "deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators," ElBaradei writes in "The Age of Deception," being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.
The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of "tedious, wrenching" nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.
"All parties must come to the negotiating table," writes ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the IAEA in 2005. He repeatedly chides Washington for reluctant or hardline approaches to negotiations with Tehran and Pyongyang.
He is harshest in addressing the Bush administration's 2002-2003 drive for war with Iraq, when ElBaradei and Hans Blix led teams of U.N. inspectors looking for signs Saddam Hussein's government had revived nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs.
He tells of an October 2002 meeting he and Blix had with Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others, at which the Americans sought to convert the U.N. mission into a "cover for what would be, in essence, a United States-directed inspection process."
The U.N. officials resisted, and their teams went on to conduct some 700 inspections of scores of potential weapons sites in Iraq, finding no evidence to support the U.S. claims of weapons of mass destruction.
In his own memoir, published last November, Bush still insisted it was right to invade to remove a "homicidal dictator pursuing WMD." But the ex-president also wrote of a "sickening feeling" when no arms turned up after the invasion, and blamed an "intelligence failure" for the baseless claim, a reference to a 2002 U.S. intelligence assessment contending WMD were being built.
But that assessment itself offered no concrete evidence, and Bush and his aides have never explained why the U.S. position was not changed as on-the-ground U.N. findings came in before the invasion.
ElBaradei cites examples, including the conclusion by his inspectors inside Iraq that certain aluminum tubes were designed for artillery rockets, not for uranium enrichment equipment to build nuclear bombs, as Washington asserted.
The IAEA chief reported this conclusion to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27, 2003, and yet on the next day Bush — in a "remarkable" response — delivered a State of the Union address in which he repeated the unfounded claim about aluminum tubes, ElBaradei notes.
Similar contradictions of expert findings occurred with the claim, based on a forgery, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger, and an Iraqi exile's fabrication that "mobile labs" were producing biological weapons.
"I was aghast at what I was witnessing," ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls "aggression where there was no imminent threat," a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.
In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, "should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a `war crime' and determine who is accountable?"
Formidable political and legal barriers would seem to rule out such an investigation. But ElBaradei, citing the war-crimes prosecution of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, sees double standards that should end.
"Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?" he asks.

Source: AP News