When North Carolina’s jobless rate rose to a 15-month high last month, you probably, and rightfully, thought the new rate of 10.5 percent unemployment was terrible. The sadder truth is, that figure only begins to tell the story of the state’s employment crisis and its effect on income inequality.

The N.C. Justice Center has released a new report, which analyzes a lot of dismal, but unfortunately accurate, statistical information (so you and I don’t have to). The NCJC looked at figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that take into account people who have had to settle for part-time work, as well as those who are “marginally attached” to the labor force (those who have looked for work in the past year but not in the last four weeks). The short version is that 17.9 percent of North Carolinians — nearly one in five — is looking for full-time work. That, dear readers, is approaching Great Depression numbers.

Here’s a handy chart that illustrates the findings.

Another part of the NCJC report reveals that, although households with more money than most of us still lost ground from 2006 to 2010, income inequality in N.C. has worsened during the Great Recession. In fact, figures show what the report termed an “hourglass economy, where the wealthy do well, those with low incomes fare poorly, and the middle class disappears.” The chart below reveals that incomes of people in the top 20 percent dropped by 3.3 percent, while the incomes of people in the bottom 20 percent fell by 7.2 percent.

Statistics, figures and charts can seem impersonal because, well, they are. But it’s always a good idea to try to see the human stories behind the dry numbers and the twitchy-looking lines. What one can see from NCJC’s latest study is that way too many people in our state are hurting — badly — from our stagnant, slow-moving economy. As the report concludes, widening income inequality raises vital questions of societal fairness and “carries serious economic and social costs.” Rather than flogging sad, repressive social policies, handing over money to millionaires, and helping out-of-state companies that operate in N.C. avoid paying state taxes, the General Assembly’s new GOP bosses should, as this study puts it, “work towards launching all families on a path of upward mobility through efforts to create jobs that pay family-sustaining wages.”

At least two local politicians — Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James and another who requested anonymity — are saying they’ve heard Commission Chair Jennifer Roberts plans to run for State Sen. Dan Clodfelter’s seat next year. Roberts flatly denies the rumor, saying she has no definite plans for 2012, although she added, “If Senator Clodfelter were to step down, I would have to look at this opportunity.” Clodfelter could not be reached to comment on whether he plans to step down.

Roberts announced yesterday that she will leave her post on the county commission in 2012 at the end of her term. With some exceptions — mostly related to letting County King, er, Manager Harry Jones do whatever the hell he wanted — Roberts has served well as commission chair, particularly in light of how cantankerous the current batch of commissioners has been during her tenure, and especially considering that two or three of the commission’s members aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

• County Commission Chair Jennifer Roberts

• Veterans take part in Occupy Wall Street

On Friday, the country celebrated Veterans Day, honoring the men and women who are serving, or have served, in the U.S. armed forces. Veterans Day, you may remember, is the one day out of the year when politicians and TV talking heads actually mention veterans’ “issues,” wrapping their by-rote praise in nice little red-white-and-blue packages. Who could ask for more, huh? That is, who other than the tens of thousands of American military veterans who have no place to live, or whose Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is going untreated, or are being screwed by their banks. They can probably think of a few things they’d like more than a big sloppy media kiss.

This year, Veterans Day took place the same week that the 100,000 Homes Campaign (1HC) released a new, authoritative study of homeless veterans. The 1HC study reveals that military veterans make up a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s homeless population; are 50 percent more likely than other Americans to be homeless; and also stay homeless for longer periods of time. The study, as summed up by ThinkProgress, reports that “on average, veterans were homeless for 5.7 years while others reported that they were homeless for 3.9 years.” Figures from the Veterans Administration show that 75,000 veterans are homeless in America on any given night, according to the same ThinkProgress story. About 20,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were homeless in the past five years, again according to the VA.

Veterans are taking the brunt of other social ills, too. Veterans who served in the military since 9/11 face a 12.1 percent unemployment rate (the national rate is hovering around 9 percent), while one in three male veterans are jobless. Current job placement programs are insufficient and are letting too many vets fall between the cracks.

South Carolina has contracted with BofA to administer the state’s unemployment benefits; the funds are deposited by S.C. into recipients’ BofA prepaid debit card accounts. It’s a system that has worked well for BofA in other states, like California and New Jersey. Those states, however, included requirements in their contracts with the bank that allow users to make a number of free transactions at other banks' ATMs. And since you can see what’s coming, I’ll get right to it:

Lots of small towns in S.C. don’t have Bank of America ATMs, and many unemployed South Carolinians are being hit with fees for using their hometown ATMs rather than driving 50 miles to a town that has a BofA machine handy. One woman told Ross that she has paid at least $350 in fees — just to access her own unemployment benefits.

When S.C. learned of the options that BofA gives people using its prepaid cards in other states, they asked for a change. Now, recipients of unemployment benefits in S.C. have unlimited free withdrawals at BofA machines, and one free withdrawal per week at other ATMs — a whole one free withdrawal per week — Wow, what generosity!

Bank of America, of course, officially says its prepaid debit cards are “a good deal for everyone . . . clients value the cost savings, and individuals appreciate the ability. . .,” blahblahblah. And as far as the government of S.C. is concerned, hey, it’s all good, since they’re saving on printing checks.
Here is a key take-away from Ross’ terrific story:

Bank of America [after their $5 per month debit card fee fiasco] has quietly continued to mine another source of fees: jobless people who depend upon the bank's prepaid debit cards to tap their benefits. Bank of America and other financial firms — including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase — have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits in 41 states . . .

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

Kind of makes you proud to be a Charlottean, doesn’t it?

Mississippians are voting today on Proposition 26, a very dangerous ballot amendment that, if passed, would define life as beginning at the very moment of fertilization. It’s part of a national campaign by a Colorado group called Personhood USA, which wants to get all 50 states to define a fertilized human egg as a person.

What’s even more dangerous is that there are people in the N.C. General Assembly who would support such a legislative atrocity. (Calling Rep. “Skip” Stam . . .) The goal of the legislation is, of course, to ban abortions, and even ban some types of birth control (not to mention that it would turn specific religious beliefs into laws, thus creating one more instance in which religious fanatics tell everyone else how to act). The latest polls show the state’s citizenry is evenly divided over Prop 26.

The New York Times describes the consequences of passing the proposition:

The amendment in Mississippi would ban virtually all abortions, including those resulting from rape or incest. It would bar some birth control methods, including IUDs and “morning-after pills,” which prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. It would also outlaw the destruction of embryos created in laboratories [thus affecting some attempts at in vitro fertilization].

The man who drafted the proposal is the infamous Les Riley, who, as TalkingPointsMemo puts it, “has a long and colorful history in the fringes of right-wing politics.” Riley, it turns out, was part of the “Christian secessionist” group Christian Exodus, which tried to get all “right-thinking” Christians (i.e., demented zealots) to move to Greenville, S.C. He is also chair of something called the Mississippi Constitution Party, which says it wants to “restore” the government’s “Biblical presuppositions.”

There are approximately 200,000 jokes one could make about Riley and his crew, and about the extreme right’s disconcerting success in even getting such claptrap onto a state’s ballot, but here’s the bottom line for me: In most civilized countries, these modernity-challenged throwbacks have been tossed onto the trash pile of history. So, for the love of God, country and family, why do we still grant any legitimacy to these sad, scared people?

Here, as a blog bonus, are more thoughts on Proposition 26, some original and some from the comments section of TalkingPointsMemo:

* It’s like saying that those eggs you ate this morning were chickens.
* Or that the pile of wood in your back yard is actually a house.
* If this passes, it will require every miscarriage to be investigated as a homicide.
* How can a clump of cells that only has a 75% chance of making it through three months before it miscarries be considered a person?
* Someone should file a writ of habeas corpus for all the frozen embryos.
* Will pregnant women be able to take a tax deduction for that dependent “person” inside them?
* So, since under U.S. law corporations are “persons,” does this mean that anytime someone starts up a small business, it is automatically a corporation?
* If an illegal immigrant couple conceive, is their fertilized egg a U.S. citizen?
* If it passes, will the drinking age be lowered by nine months?
* Does this mean we all have to change our birthdays to whenever our parents had sex to create us? Because I don't really want to know.
* How about “it's none of your business”? How about butting out of women's medical decision, unless you want them to review YOUR records for treatments they find objectionable?

• Hi, my name is Bill — buy me an Ipod now!

In 2010, Duke Energy reported an annual profit of more than $2 billion. Considering that the statutory federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, you’d probably think Duke Energy should have owed the IRS around $750 million. Well, guess what? According to a major new report by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice, Duke actually had a tax liability of minus $2 million. Progress Energy, with which Duke wants to merge, made $1.4 billion in profit, yet wound up with a tax liability of minus $46 million.

Duke and Progress are not even close to being the worst corporate tax dodgers. In 2009, Wells Fargo had $28.1 billion in profit. Tax liability? Minus $4 billion. General Electric reported $10.5 billion in profit in 2010 but wound up with $4.7 billion worth of negative taxes.

At a time when many lawmakers want to lower corporate taxes because the 35-percent rate supposedly hurts job creation, this blockbuster report, “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10,” shows just how few taxes many of the largest corporations in America actually pay.

Read the press releases about the report here. Then you’ll be able to click through to a pdf of the entire report. Next, remember the report the next time you hear some huge corporation poor-mouthing, in search of more government breaks.

• Reddy Kilowatt says, "Paying taxes is for losers!"

House Speaker Thom Tillis and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney have something in common besides party affiliation: they both deny reality in a way that’s positively Orwellian.

Let me explain, starting with Tillis, the Pride of Cornelius. He held another in his series of town hall meetings two days ago, this one in Hickory. Before the meeting, he got together with folks at the Hickory Record newspaper, where, once again, Tillis denied that cuts to the education budget enacted by the General Assembly have nothing to do with 1,853 public school teachers and teacher assistants being laid off, nor with the 4,000-plus teacher and TA positions that were eliminated.

Now, Tillis wants to — get this — hold hearings to determine why school superintendents cut teaching jobs. Hmm, Tom, was it maybe because you took a big slice out of their budgets? But here’s the kicker: according to the Hickory Record editors, Tillis indicated the problem could be that politics were involved in why teachers were canned, presumably in order to make the GOP look bad.

Huh?! It’s bad enough to not admit that cuts you directed in the legislature have cost thousands of teachers their jobs. But to come up with some cock-and-bull story about school superintendents laying off teachers to make you look bad is just, well, incredible — in every sense of the word, from “impossible to believe” and “far-fetched” to “astonishing” and “mind-boggling.”

Tillis’ hogwash about teacher layoffs is bad, but it pales before the “I’ll say absolutely anything to get elected” strategies of GOP presidential candidate Romney. The Robotic One has claimed that his tax plan would protect the middle class, but yesterday he took it even further on a Tampa TV news show, saying (with a straight face), “The policies I’ve put forward are tax cuts for the middle class. I’m proposing no tax cuts for the rich.”

To cut right to the chase, that's a flat-out lie. As Think Progress points out, Romney’s tax plan “consists of $6.6 trillion in tax cuts, the vast majority going to the wealthy and corporations.” And those middle class tax cuts? You’ll only get them if you pile up capital gains, which most middle-class families do not have.

It’s one thing for a politician to stretch the truth, but it’s quite another for him to simply lie through his teeth and deny the reality that everyone around him can see. In Romney’s case, the more I see him, the more he seems like someone to whom his own words don’t even mean much, especially considering the conglomeration of flip-flops, misdirections and outright lies he’s been throwing around. Just thought you'd like to know.

• Thom Tillis: What, me cut teachers' jobs?

Conservative fantasies die hard, if they ever die at all. Most of us already knew that, but it's been reaffirmed by online comments and e-mails from readers about this week’s Boomer With Attitude column re: Bank of America. I love it when conservatives try to put the blame for the 2008 financial crisis and America’s foreclosure tsunami on anyone — anyone — but the banks. The standard Fox-driven fairy tale is that Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and federal housing policy are the ones responsible for that big, fat mess. That, er, version of reality has been repeatedly debunked by such inconvenient things as actual facts and studies, but that simply doesn’t matter to the right’s true believers.

I’ve heard the argument over and over: Congress forced Freddie and Fannie to make a ton of crappy loans in order to increase the number of poor people who owned homes. A piece by ThinkProgress reports that even New York's Mayor Bloomberg got into the act the other day, defending banks against charges of having caused the economic meltdown, and placing the blame on — yep — Congress, Fannie and Freddie.
Now, Fannie and Freddie were to blame for some foreclosure messes, for sure, and I'm in no way defending their sorry work, but the vast bulk of the subprime loans that caused a huge bubble which eventually blew up in America’s face were made by private mortgage brokers. As ThinkProgress points out, a simple look at Federal Reserve data makes it clear. Note to Fox viewers and bank idolators: the following are what’s known as “facts.” We apologize for confusing you. The fact is that in a representative year of the housing bubble, 2006, more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages were issued by private lending institutions. In addition, private firms made almost 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers in the same year.

ThinkProgress also notes that a huge majority of the high-cost loans were not covered at all by government laws that encourage home ownership, and “in fact, 94 percent of high-cost loans were totally unconnected from government homeownership laws.” Economists have repeatedly pointed out the fact — there’s that word again — Fannie and Freddie had “faded from the scene” during the zenith of the housing bubble. There are no illusions here that something as flimsy as real facts can unconstipate conservatives' thinking, i.e. parroting, on this issue, but hey, we gave it a shot.

• Fox viewer thinking hard about the mortgage crisis

Mayor Anthony Foxx has a commanding, apparently insurmountable lead over Republican Scott Stone, his opponent in the mayoral race. That’s according to the only “official” poll (as far as we know) on the Charlotte mayoral race, the results of which were announced today. Public Policy Polling, the nationally respected Raleigh-based polling outfit, asked participating Charlotteans who they would vote for if the election was held today. Foxx was favored by 58 percent, compared to 32 percent for Stone; 10 percent were not sure. Broken down by gender, the poll results show that women prefer Foxx 67 to 24 percent, while men also favor Foxx, but by a smaller margin, 48-41 percent. Broken down by ethnicity, whites prefer Foxx 46-42 percent, African-Americans pick Foxx 81-14 percent, while “Others” went for Foxx 60-27 percent.

PPP quizzed 957 Charlotte voters on Oct. 29-31 regarding a variety of current issues, including specific legislative issues, redistricting, House Speaker Thom Tillis’s controversial “divide and conquer” comments, and attitudes toward Occupy Wall Street. You can read all the results of the Charlotte poll here.

• Sittin' pretty: Mayor Anthony Foxx enjoys a wide lead over challenger Scott Stone

Being old enough to remember the pre-Civil Rights era doesn’t make me wiser. It brings muscle aches, to be sure, but usually wisdom isn't served up with that. Having been around the Carolinas before the George Wallaces of the South were smacked down, does mean, however, that I know racism when I see it.

Which brings us to Ann Coulter, the giant blonde praying mantis that occasionally mouths off on FoxNews. Coulter and her intellectual near-equal, Sean Hannity, were discussing Herman Cain yesterday, when the Vacuous Beanpole compared African Americans who join the GOP with those who opt for the Democrats.

“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” Coulter said. She went on to give reasons for her expert opinion, but those words were drowned out by the giant whoosh of millions of jaws dropping. Yes, once and for all, Coulter laid it all out: Blacks are commodities to be owned, even if only metaphorically. They’re certainly not regular, normal people like white folks, who we would never refer to in such a demeaning way.

Coulter, as we know, has a gift for saying stupid things. She once declared that she thinks Bill Clinton is gay (to which Jon Stewart said, ‘He’s not gay just because he hasn’t hit on your bony ass”). But “our blacks are so much better than their blacks”? Could you be any more of a clueless country clubber, Ann?

• Ann Coulter