Community service can be useful to help address community needs. Federal, state, and municipal governments throughout the United States have set up various forms of community or national service, including the Peace Corps, VISTA and AmeriCorps.
But while community service ought to be encouraged, should it be coerced outside of the criminal justice system? And should community service be required of one group of Americans who receive federal aid, but not all people who receive assistance from Washington?
Congress apparently thinks so. In 1998, the year I was elected to the House of Representatives, Congress passed the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act. This bill funded a range of programs beneficial to public housing residents, but it also contained a provision requiring public housing residents, 18 to 62 years of age, who are not working or attending college full time to perform eight hours of community service per month.
Community service ought to be a matter of choice, not coercion. We should offer incentives to encourage community service, not require it of Americans just because they have the misfortune of being unemployed. Moreover, unemployed public housing residents should not be singled out, while people who receive federal housing vouchers or a variety of other federal housing subsidies are exempt from community service.
The community service requirement stigmatizes unemployed public housing residents. Many people regard compulsory community service as a form of punishment meted out by the criminal justice system and thus will assume that a public housing resident who is forced to do community service must have done something wrong. Unemployment is not a crime.
In context, the community service requirement continues the punitive concepts of public assistance that crystallized in the 1980s and intensified under the Republicans' Contract with America in the 1990s.
I grew up in public housing in East Harlem, raised by hard-working parents, and then went on to college and law school. Later I served as a county prosecutor, as an administrative judge, as a member of the State Assembly and now as a member of Congress - who proudly represents tens of thousands of public housing residents in the Sixth Congressional District. Because of this, I have some insight into how hurtful and humiliating this community service requirement is. All of us should ask, as a public housing resident recently did, "Why stop at people who live in public housing? Lots of people get federal subsidies, including corporations. Why aren't they also forced to do community service?"
I have introduced two amendments to correct some of the unfairness of the 1998 law. The first converts community service from a requirement to an incentive. It would give each adult resident in public housing who performs eight hours of community service priority for admission to education and job training programs sponsored by the public housing agency that administers the development where that adult lives.
The second would exempt from mandatory community service any public housing resident who is 60 or older; in the third trimester of pregnancy; the parent or guardian of a child under five years of age and who resides with that child; a victim of domestic violence; parent of a child under 14 years old and who also has a spouse who is employed full time; provides more than 20 hours of unpaid child care to a child for whom that resident is not the parent or guardian; or who receives food stamps.
These amendments also spare local public housing authorities from a colossal and costly administrative headache of having to process, assign and follow up on possibly hundreds of thousands of public housing residents who are to be compelled to do community service.
I hope that the debate about the community service requirement encourages Congress and the public to take a deeper, more thoughtful look at the notion of punishing, humiliating, or singling out public housing residents. The current law seems to say that those living in public housing and who are unemployed are somehow living off of society, and therefore, need to be coerced into "giving back." Like other unemployed people, unemployed public housing residents would be happy to "give something back" in the form of the payroll and income taxes that accompany full-time employment.
Gregory Meeks, a Democrat, is the U.S. representative for the Sixth Congressional District in Queens.
Few have completely forgotten the debacle in Florida during the presidential election of 2000, where thousands of voters were disenfranchised because their ballot was so confusing that they chose the wrong candidate (the so-called "butterfly ballots"), or because the ballots were so poorly designed that it wasn't clear who the voter had voted for (the "hanging chads"), or because they were simply deleted from the voting rolls. Manual recounts took months, and then it was the Supreme Court who decided the presidency.
The nation was shocked, outraged, embarrassed. The federal government vowed to do something about it.
Little has changed in New York.
When, in response to Florida, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (commonly referred to as HAVA), the plan was to provide state and local governments with millions of dollars to upgrade their voting systems. What this meant in New York was money to:
* replace our clunky 40-year-old lever voting machines
*create a state-wide voter database to prevent fraud
*institute procedures that will prevent scenarios like the East Side State Senate race in 2000, where it took more than six weeks to declare a winner.
But when the federal Election Assistance Commission recently gave out $861 million to 25 states, New York was not one of them.
That's because the only thing more dysfunctional than New York's voting system is the State Legislature in Albany. Lawmakers failed to meet the federal requirements to get the funding, and so New York did not receive its share of the payment.
There is still hope that we will eventually get the funding, but legislators must act quickly.
Money earmarked for the Empire State is sitting in Washington, but, according to a federal election staff member, Congress may use the money for other purposes if Albany does not claim it by the end of the year. And even if New York does get its share of the money, Albany's partisan bickering and failure to deal with difficult issues raise serious questions about whether the voting system can be overhauled by the deadline of 2006.
NEW YORK'S PART
Over the next few years, New York should receive an estimated $235 million in federal funding to improve its voting system. But that money is being given out in stages, with certain requirements that states must meet. (New York has already received $66 million). In order to receive this latest payment from the federal government, Albany legislators had to do three main things:
* Create a specific account to deposit the money in so that it stays separate from other state money.
* Match five percent of the federal money (about $11.8 million) with state funding.
* Agree to a procedure by which voters can complain if they feel their voting rights have been violated.
Lawmakers failed to achieve any of these requirements.
For the 20th year in a row, Albany missed its budget deadline and politicians left for the summer without passing much of the legislation that accompanies the budget. No financial account was created, and the state did not match the money even though it is only $11.8 million out of a $100 billion state budget.
At times in the last year, there were reasons to hope that Albany would produce concrete guidelines for reform.
In February, the Assembly and Senate each passed their own versions of how to implement the Help America Vote Act. Advocates and civic organizations immediately called for the creation of a conference committee, where the two sides could meet to work out their differences. Uncharacteristically, the Senate and Assembly agreed to meet.
But the lawmakers got stalled on the details.
One of the main sticking points was the issue of what kind of identification voters must show to register and to vote. The federal guidelines require that first-time registrants by mail must provide proof of identification, but leaves it up to the states to decide what constitutes "current and valid photo identification."
Only about half of New York City residents have drivers' licenses and so some lawmakers worry that the ID requirement may disenfranchise immigrant and young voters.
After much deliberation, the Assembly and Senate agreed to a list of appropriate forms of ID, but got hung up on the phrase "including, but not limited to" at the top of the bill. The State Assembly wanted more flexibility for city residents; the State Senate did not want more exceptions to the rule and wants the State Board of Elections to decide.
The two sides could not reconcile their differences and no compromise legislation was drafted.
VOTERS AT THE POLLS
Nevertheless, New York voters will still see some differences at the polls this year because of the Help America Vote Act.
One new addition is a revised version of the New York State Voter's Bill of Rights, which outlines what each voter is entitled to (things like the right to privacy in the booth, the right to vote regardless of disability, the right to an emergency ballot if the machine breaks). This Voter's Bill of Rights must be posted at every polling place.
But voters may also encounter some confusion this year.
Without an acceptable list of the types of ID that will be required, local boards of elections and some good-government groups fear that individual poll workers will decide what are and what are not acceptable forms of identification. This will likely vary from polling place to polling place and there will be no statewide uniform system.
It is also unclear exactly what voters will be able to do if they feel their rights have been violated since the legislature failed to agree on a complaint procedure. The best advice is to write down your polling site and names of poll workers and register your complaint with the Board of Elections and other government watchdog groups like the New York Public Research Interest Group.
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2006
The significant changes, -- new voting machines, a new statewide database, and better procedures in counting votes -- will not be in place until the 2006 elections.
There is still much work to be done, and since legislators are routinely stuck on small details there is little confidence that they will able to resolve difficult issues like what kinds of voting machines to purchase and how to verify electronic vote counts. Voting machines have recently undergone a large amount of scrutiny based on states that have already purchased new electronic machines. The concern for machine fraud is well-based; there are numerous problems in the states that have already bought the new machines. Issues such as machine malfunctions, unsolved security problems, and lack of voter-verified paper trails are now being settled in the courts - such as in Maryland where the Board of Elections ruled that votes would not be counted for voters who voted by paper ballots because they did not want to vote on the machines in the March primary. (See "How They Could Steal The Election This Time" in The Nation.) In Ohio, the president and CEO of Diebold Election Systems caused a stir when he promised to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush in 2004." Ohio votes on Diebold machines, along with Maryland and a few other states.
New York legislators are aware of the issues surrounding voting machines and both houses have introduced provisions in their pieces of legislation that will safeguard New York against possible problems with electronic machines, such as voter-verified paper trails and the use of an independent panel to verify machine integrity, hardware, and source code. However, New Yorkers will have to wait until the legislature decides to meet again on the issue.
The longer Albany holds off in passing Help America Vote Act legislation, the longer it will take New York to get its fair share. The longer we are forced to wait, the harder it will be to create a voting system we will be required to have by 2006.
Jillian Matundan is the Making Votes Count Project Director for Citizens Union Foundation, which also publishes Gotham Gazette. Â
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Days after September 11th, 2001, Clear Channel Communications, America's largest radio conglomerate, which owns five radios stations in New York and over 1,200 nationwide, released a memo listing 150 songs that it felt were in "bad taste" to play on the radio. The songs included everything from Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" to John Lennon's "Imagine."
It has been widely debated whether the memo was official guideline for all stations, but many believe that the Texas-based management - which has ties to the Republican Party - wanted to censor the airwaves.
The concentrated ownership of the media makes this possible. And even though New Yorkers are in a better situation than most other places of the country – we have, for instance, eight local daily newspapers in Spanish and English owned by six different companies – media consolidation gives a small group of people huge influence over what we see and hear.
In July, Clear Channel again used its clout in an attempt to stop New Yorkers from getting certain messages, when it tried to block an antiwar group from renting advertising space in Times Square during the Republican National Convention.
But Clear Channel is not the only monster conglomerate that is changing the choices for the public. Since 1983, the fifty corporations that dominated the American media market have become ten corporations, the consolidation reaching a kind of apogee when AOL and Time Warner joined together in the largest media merger in history, a corporation valued at $350 billion.
These mergers occurred thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which Congress passed in the belief that the radio industry would thrive with less regulation. The new law increased how many American media outlets any one company could own or operate, while retaining certain limits.
But in the first five years after the bill's passage, 9,000 out of 10,000 existing radio stations nationwide were sold at least once, according to research by Common Cause (where we work). The result? An array of voices and choices in large markets across the nation were soon silenced or curtailed.
"In New York City, the top four companies control 80 percent of the [radio] market," says Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition. The top ten rated FM stations in New York City are owned by four companies: Clear Channel Communications, Emmis Communications, Spanish Broadcasting System, and Viacom. Radio station WEVD, was sold in 2001 to the Walt Disney Company media conglomerate, and the local, independent, multi-lingual station was reformatted into just another outlet for the sports network ESPN Radio.
In June of 2003, the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that regulates all sources of American communications, issued new regulations that loosened many of the ownership caps established in the Telecommunications Act. Under the new regulations, a single corporation could own television stations reaching up to 45 percent of American households nationwide; cross-ownership rules were changed so that a company could own newspapers, radio and television stations in the same market.
The rule changes were opposed from all ends of the political spectrum. Groups from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women saw the control of media by just a few voice as a fundamental threat to the diversity and localism of viewpoints necessary for democracy. The Federal Communications Commission was flooded with over 2 million communications from concerned Americans – more than they had received for any other issue.
Despite the outcry, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell stood by the decision. The matter was taken up in Congress and the courts, and continues to be fought today.
The growth of media conglomerates has created a highly competitive and cut-throat industry where business economics plays an increasingly large role in production and even editorial decisions. Companies, searching to cut costs and meet revenue goals, have been using standard corporate business models to alter the behind the scenes production of their press, while trying to find ways to appeal to the broadest possible audiences. Journalists' jobs and responsibilities have been rapidly changing in what is a drastically different industry than the locally owned and operated business structure of broadcasts past.
"In the last twenty years, rigorous issues-oriented journalism has been under continued attack by large commercial interests seeking to streamline operations, tighten payroll, control more outlets, deregulate the industry and, ultimately, fatten their bottom line," said Timothy Karr, executive director of MediaChannel.org. "The net negative result is a news industry that avoids politically sensitive topics in favor of cheaply available entertainment, trivia and â€lifestyle' reporting."
Indeed, a recent poll found that some two-thirds of working journalists believe that "bottom line pressure is â€seriously hurting' the quality of news coverage." A majority of their bosses disagreed that the changes were undermining quality. It is difficult to conclude otherwise, though, when given examples such as New York's Channel 9, which Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp. purchased in 2002. The newsroom for the station was combined with that of another Murdoch property, Fox Channel 5, both stations' newscasts now overseen by a single news director -- and 65 jobs eliminated.
Opponents of further media consolidation see hope in educating the public about the fact that the American people, and not corporate conglomerates, actually own the airwaves. The broadcast airwaves are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to companies for free, in exchange for their promise to provide programming and content that serves the public's best interest.
In 2001, it was estimated that if the airwaves used by the broadcasters were actually sold at auction to corporations – which has been a common practice with other technologies – it would have brought in $367 billion to the public treasury.
"Broadcasters cannot have it one way -- receive special treatment from the government -- but give nothing in return," said Karr. "With the outcry in 2003, the public sent Big Media and the FCC a loud message. The media industry can no longer put profits before its duty to serve citizens in a democracy. The media reform movement is now well mobilized to ensure that the FCC weighs the public's best interests before handing out more to media corporations."
Joanna Erenberg works on issues of media consolidation in New York as special projects coordinator for Common Cause/NY, where Ian Manheim is an intern.