The discussion started before Michael B. Kennedy was born. By last year, his patience had wore thin.
“I serve on a lot of committees, and I felt like I kept having the same conversation. It took hours and hours of repeating the same thing. And every time, I felt like I had to start all over again,” said the architect and president of KAI Design and Build.
Founded by his father, Michael E. Kennedy, 32 years ago, KAI is recognized as one of the leading minority-owned architectural firms in the country. The senior Kennedy serves as chairman and chief executive.
To the younger Kennedy, 34, the exchanges with contractors, government officials, trade unions, developers and fellow designers inevitably returned to the shortage of minority contractors and trade participation on local construction projects.
The problem has vexed St. Louis, publicly at least, since the afternoon of July 14, 1964, when Percy Green and another activist climbed a leg of the yet-to-be-completed Gateway Arch to protest the lack of African Americans working on the landmark.
Nor has the situation shown much sign of improvement. A March study by the Associated General Contractors of St. Louis that pegged the number of minority workers on local construction jobs at approximately seven percent.
African Americans account for 49 percent of St. Louis City residents and 23 percent of those in St. Louis County.
Kennedy didn’t need census data to drive the point home.
He found proof in the overwhelming number of white faces encountered on visits to area construction sites, particularly those outside the city.
The time had come, he concluded, to move the conversation from board rooms and business meetings to a broader audience.
“I thought if I could capture everything that is being said in these meetings on video, and then get that video in (the right) hands, then maybe we can finally move onto some viable solutions,” Kennedy said.
“Building a Better St. Louis” was initially envisioned as a “ten-minute clip.”
But once Kennedy and the production company, headed by Bobby Edwards Media Group, began the interviews, they learned just how much local business and community leaders, both black and white, had to say about minority hiring.
Thirty hours worth to be exact.
Edited to 41 minutes, the film takes unsparing shots at the insularity of white-dominated local trade unions, the shortcomings of public education in St. Louis and the chronic racial divide.
“Anyone who says St. Louis is not a segregated community is someone who has had his head stuck up his you-know-what for too many years,” volunteers Terry Nelson, the outspoken head of the Carpenters’ District Council of Greater St. Louis.
St. Louis City License Collector Mike McMillan offered a more measured analysis: “What we’ve found at every level of business or corporations or government is that if (change) is not pushed from top and implemented all the way down, then women and minorities, who have always been left out of the picture, will continue to be left out of the picture.”
In an interview this week, Kennedy cited additional factors he believes shift the odds against minority contractors and workers. High on the list are the social and economic forces separating the city and outlying suburbs.
He praises adherence to the ordinance stipulating that minorities perform 25 percent of the work on projects within the city. But frets at how the threshold is rarely met on construction sites in the surrounding counties free credit score online.
Kennedy says a fair share of the blame goes to minority contractors and laborers themselves.
Construction, like all businesses, is about relationships.
African American contractors and laborers, Kennedy charges, don’t forge the necessary connections while working side-by-side with non-minorities on city projects.
The upshot, he says, is that construction companies choose to do business with white subcontractors when jobs materialize in St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson and Lincoln counties.
“Building a Better St. Louis” points out that minorities compete for just one percent of the opportunities to participate on area construction jobs.
“It’s not a black and white issue, it’s a cultural issue,” Kennedy says, singling out the “where’d you go to high school?” question. “It’s about the St. Louis cliques. St. Louis is not friendly to outsiders, white or black.”
“Building a Better St. Louis” makes a stab at answering the overarching question of how, or if, minority contractors can ever achieve equity.
It’s a tall order.
Kennedy believes it will occur organically.
He points out that the white males that have dominated the construction trades are retiring. With many of their children exhibiting little interest in continuing the family tradition, the door will swing open for African Americans.
The key, Kennedy says, is getting young minorities interested and prepared to step into the breach.
He sees “Building a Better St. Louis” as prompting a dialogue to move the black community in that direction.
The video was screened this week for a group of contractors and Kennedy ultimately hopes to bring it to a wider audience of government officials, civic groups and – his big goal – an airing on a public broadcasting station.
“This industry lags farther behind any other industry that I’ve seen,” Kennedy says in the video. “The more I talked to people the more I decided other people needed to hear what I was hearing. And that was to listen to the voices of reason.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“… workforce professionals we interviewed said that some employers are reluctant to hire older workers. Because of legal prohibitions against age discrimination, employers are unlikely to explicitly express a lack of interest in hiring older workers; however, one workforce professional told us that local employers had asked her to screen out all applicants over the age of 40.” - U.S. Government Accountability Office on plight of older Americans suffering bouts of long-term unemployment.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
BY THE NUMBERS
7.3 percent - Missouri’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in April, the lowest in 40 months.
Source: Missouri Department of Economic Development
FINAL WORD
“There has been a lack of progress on this issue, and too many families are struggling right at the time when they should be celebrating the birth of a new family member. Working parents should have the benefit of these programs.” Vicki Shabo, director of work and family programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families on study that found only 11 percent of privately-owned companies provide paid family leave for new parents.
Source: The Chicago Tribune
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The United States and Europe are urging Iran to use upcoming talks with world powers to ease international worry that it may be aiming to develop nuclear arms.
But Tehran says such concerns are based on “fake evidence” concocted to cause it political and economic harm.
Envoys for the U.S., the EU and Iran spoke Monday at a 189-nation meeting looking for ways to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty low interest rate personal loans.
The divide over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities threatens the success of both the talks and a meeting between Iran and the U.N. agency trying to probe its atomic secrets.
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United Technologies Corp. says net income from continuing operations rose more than 19 percent during the first quarter, factoring out the businesses that the manufacturer put up for sale.
That would equate to earnings of $1.26 billion, or $1.31 per share, compared with earnings from those same operations last year of $1.05 billion, or $1.06 per share.
That tops the $1.21 expected on Wall Street, according to a poll by FactSet.
The parent company of jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney, Otis elevator, Carrier heating and cooling and other aerospace and building systems companies said Tuesday that revenue was $12 payday loan.42 billion in the January-March quarter, down 2 percent from the same period last year.
Including the discontinued operations, net income fell to $330 million, compared with $1.01 billion last year.
Here are two words to guide you financially through the rest of 2012
The Consumer Confidence Index is released each month by the Conference Board, a private research group. It is based on a survey of five questions that haven’t changed since the index started in 1967.
The Conference Board surveys about 500 people during the first two weeks of the month, and then comes up with a preliminary number. That number is revised in the following month’s report to reflect a total of about 3,000 people. The revision isn’t statistically significant, says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. For example, September’s preliminary figure, announced last month was revised to 46.4 from 45.4.
Each question counts for 20 percent of the index. The responses are used in figuring out the index’s two main components:
_ PRESENT SITUATION: Assesses how people feel about the economy now fast cash now. It’s made up of two questions, one that asks if the person thinks business conditions are “good,” “bad” or “normal,” and one that asks whether jobs are “plentiful,” “not so plentiful” or “hard to get.”
_ EXPECTATIONS: Assesses respondents’ outlook for the next six months. It asks similar questions to the Present Situation about business conditions and job outlook. It also adds a third question on whether the person thinks his or her income will increase, decrease or stay the same.
The index hit its all-time high of 144.7 in 2000. Its record low was 25.3 in February 2009.
U.S. stock futures are up ahead of another round of economic data that should shed further light on whether the recovery in the world’s largest economy is still picking up steam.
Dow Jones industrial futures rose 23 points to 13,195. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 futures are up 2 points to 1,398. Nasdaq 100 futures are up 4 points to 2,716.
The market has rallied on upbeat U.S. economic data and easing worries about European debt, despite some concern over the rise in oil prices. On Thursday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed above 1,400 for the first time since June 2008.
Later Friday, the focus will be on consumer inflation and industrial production figures as well as the closely watched University of Michigan consumer confidence survey.
Former New York Times CEO Janet Robinson retired from the newspaper publisher late last year with a severance package valued at about $23 million.
The publishing company that owns The New York Times disclosed the details of Robinson’s compensation in a Friday regulatory filing.
Robinson, 61, retired on December 31, after a 28-year career with the company. She served as CEO for the last seven years.
Since her departure, the company’s chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., has been serving as interim CEO.
Robinson received $11.4 million in retirement benefits, $5.4 million in awards based on her performance, restricted stock valued at nearly $1.07 million and stock options valued at nearly $700,000.
As part of her severance, she is also being paid a previously disclosed $4.5 million consulting fee this year.
Most of the payments were part of Robinson’s original severance package. The consulting payment and one year of health coverage were added after her retirement was announced in December, according to the filing.
Like most newspaper publishers, the Times Co., which also owns The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, has cut jobs and expenses in recent years to cope with a steep drop in print advertising _ a key source of revenue.
Under Robinson’s leadership, the Times Co. built one of the newspaper industry’s most successful digital operations. But the company’s gains in online advertising haven’t been nearly enough to offset the decline in print ad revenue. In Robinson’s final year on the job, the Times Co. posted a $39.7 million loss, as its revenue slipped 3 percent from the previous year to $2.3 billion.
You know that investing can be tough. Andrew Lo says it’s even tougher than you think.
Lo, an economist and finance professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, challenges a core idea of financial theory: that markets are "efficient," meaning there’s no point in trying to time your moves in and out of stocks, since everything you could know about them is already baked into the price.
Plenty of smart people think that Lo knows what he’s talking about. In addition to teaching, he has advised the government on ways to limit the damage from future financial crises. He also runs a money-management firm that seeks to put his ideas to work.
Lo argues that the buy-and-hold method of investing (long considered gospel by index fund managers and this magazine) doesn’t effectively limit the risks of today’s markets. He explained his theories to contributor Charles P. Wallace; the conversation has been edited.
You reject the theory of efficient markets in favor of what you call adaptive markets. Meaning?
I don’t entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating. The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.
So what does that mean for investors?
In a normal market, you get the independent valuations of millions of buyers and sellers trying to evaluate a given security.
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During periods of extreme fear or greed, you don’t have the proper balance between those two to generate market efficiency and you get extremes in behavior.
When there’s a strong trend upward, for example, the kind of skepticism that produces reasonable and accurate valuations of securities is not at work, and a bubble develops. It’s very exciting when you’re in the midst of it, but at some point the valuations aren’t justifiable.
It seems as if big market shifts are becoming more common.
Yes. If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we’re in a different, riskier market now.
What’s going on?
A combination of a lot of smart guys and technology. People have the ability to enact a trade instantaneously. And they have a lot of complex new tools, such as hedge funds and derivatives, at their disposal.
Technological innovations often have unintended consequences. My analogy is someone clearing some brush using a handsaw. You can clear a lot more brush using a chainsaw, but you might lose a finger, or suffer other attendant consequences. We now have everybody with chainsaws going after all sorts of opportunities, and that’s really where the potential for crises can emerge.
Until we’ve learned how to develop better technologies, I think we’re going to keep seeing more crises. There’s a good chance we’ll see a pretty important shock wave coming out of Europe if they don’t get their act together with regard to European sovereign debt payday advance low fees.
But doesn’t a simple buy-and-hold strategy address a lot of these issues of risk?
Buy-and-hold doesn’t work anymore. The volatility is too significant. Almost any asset can suddenly become much more risky. Buying into a mutual fund and holding it for 10 years is no longer going to deliver the same kind of expected return that we saw over the course of the last seven decades, simply because of the nature of financial markets and how complex it’s gotten.
Okay, but even during the so-called lost decade (2000 to 2010) someone who regularly put money into a 60% stock/40% bond portfolio would have had about a 4% return. Why isn’t that good enough?
Think about how that person earned 4%. He lost 30%, saw a big bounce-back, and so on, and the compound rate of return over the period was 4%. But most investors did not wait for the dust to settle. After the first 25% loss, they probably reduced their holdings, and only got part way back in after the market somewhat recovered.
It’s human behavior. Ask actual individual investors what their net rate of return was over the last three years, and see if it’s the same rate returned by the market. I bet you it’s not.
So what choice do I have instead?
We’re in an awkward period of our industry where we haven’t developed good alternatives. Your best bet is to hold a variety of mutual funds that have relatively low fees and try to manage the volatility within a reasonable range. You should be diversified not just with stocks and bonds but across the entire spectrum of investment opportunities: stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and domestically and internationally.
Most of us didn’t sign up for the kind of volatility we’re seeing right now. So keep in mind that if you’re holding equities, you are probably taking more risk than you thought.
Does the government have a role in preventing these crises?
It’s not possible to prevent financial crises. But we can better understand what they are caused by, when they are likely to occur, and how we can prepare for them when they do happen.
The bailout that bruised capitalism
In the same way you cannot legislate away hurricanes, but you can do a lot to prepare for the worst of their effects. I believe we should have an independent agency to study crises, the way the National Transportation Safety Board looks at airline crashes.
Some 2,000 pages of regulations came out of the last crisis.
The Dodd-Frank Bill [which significantly strengthened financial regulations] was like a "Fire, ready, aim." It was a reaction. Now, some of that reaction was quite useful. But the laws that have been proposed, like the Volcker Rule [which would prevent banks from making some speculative investments], have hosts of unintended consequences that we won’t really understand for years until after those laws are actually implemented.
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Wall Street dealers made it tougher for hedge funds to finance trading of securities and derivatives in the three months through November, a Federal Reserve survey showed today.
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