Yes, one could blame it all on cluelessness and disconnection as we did with Poppy who, in 1988, obligingly proved how out of it he was by being unable to recognize a supermarket scanner when he saw one and actually had to be shown how it worked. But one can't really do that any more since one now knows without question that it isn't a matter of elitist political arrogance as it may have been with Bush I but a mere matter of political puppets hearing and obeying their Master's Voice. (As the picture shows, the Master doesn't even have to be present to get his orders across to his adoring pet.)
So it should perhaps not surprise us that nobody seems terribly interested in the parlous state of the middle class, let alone the perilous state of the underclasses.
This week, a Brandies University study proved Jealous right, finding that years of deregulation and an increase in high-cost loans quadrupled the wealth gap between white and black Americans.
A disturbing new study shows African American families have fewer economic resources to fall back on during this economic crisis than do white families, mainly due to discrimination and tax policies that favor the rich.
The study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University reveals that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation from $20,000 to $95,000. The researchers studied the same set of families over 23 years (1984-2007) and found that white families were able to build assets-what you own minus what you owe, excluding home equity-while blacks essentially lost assets. In fact, a typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class.
That means blacks had little or no money to start businesses, send children to college or ensure a secure retirement, the authors say. In fact, because many low-wealth families are forced to turn to high-interest rate credit for emergencies, about 25 percent of all African Americans owe more than they own. Read the entire study here.
Many minority families end up turning to predatory lenders because they have no other option, the study says. Also African Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes, the study says.
The reason is directly related to 30+ years of conservative policymaking.
The big question, of course, is why? Shapiro concludes that the main fault lies in discrimination and the economic policies of the last quarter century. Here is a look at some of the forces that contributed to the wealth disparity.
* Predatory lending. We already know those sub-prime mortgages created a problem for the credit markets and the entire economy when it all came crashing down in 2008. But those loans were disproportionately pushed on African-American families - even those who could qualify for and afford better mortgages with lower interest rates.
* Wealth-begets-wealth policies. Families that start with more money have access to better financial products, including tax-favored savings vehicles and less expensive credit. Furthermore, they have more opportunities to make money on their money. White families that started with more assets could afford to save more, invest more, and earn more.
* Bank deregulation. The study's authors say bank deregulation led to more payday lenders, check cashing stores and other expensive ways to access credit, and fewer consumer-protection controls. African-American families, starting with fewer emergency assets, were more driven to high cost loans in times of emergency. That problem is even worse now, the study's authors suggest, concluding that more consumer protections are needed. Coincidentally, isn't the Senate debating that financial reform bill this week? Just sayin'.
In fact, the study's author says that even the highest-income African Americans have suffered deline
Of course if it was just the various underclasses who were affected we'd understand the reluctance of the political class which believes it owes its existence to the investor class to do anything the investor class believes, rightly or wrongly, would jeopardize its stranglehold on the economy and the national wealth. Unfortunately, as Dave Johnson shows quite conclusively, it ain't just us.
On the one side there are millions of people needing jobs and millions more "underemployed," the economy is still mired in a very, very slow recovery that is a recovery only in the technical sense, an increasing wave of foreclosures that has reached into the "prime" loans and 1 out of every 7 mortgages has at least missed a payment and has at worst stopped paying.
Foreclosures continue to rise.
Businesses are not hiring. People need jobs that only government programs can provide. The reason only government can is because of the spending gap created by the economic crisis.
So as bad as things are - and they're likely, it seems, to get a good deal worse - and despite the growing anger and despair on both the Left and the Right of the population in general, there seems to be little or no motivation to correct any problem not affecting the super-rich or the investor class. Why? Tony Wikrent at real economics thinks the answer is an old one. (Tip o' le chapeau to Mark G)
Financial reform has passed, but it is a botched job. Health care reform has been signed into law, but it is also a botched job that does nothing for actual health care and which actually makes health care insurance an even riskier proposition for the middle class. Despite hopes for fundamental change, the Obama administration is quietly continuing to defend much of the executive overreach of the Bush regime. How can this be? Why is it so difficult to actually get the public interest served by public servants? Why is there no sense of urgency about unemployment, especially unemployment among the lowest income brackets, which are being ravaged by combined unemployment and underemployment rates of over fifty percent? Why is there no interest in the types massive infrastructure program that would create millions of new jobs while propelling the United States into a sustainable future? Why are political, media, and business elites mystified and terrified about the growing voters' revolt against political incumbents?
In his important 2008 book, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton professor emeritus of politics Sheldon S. Wolin has identified and dissected the emergence of a new type of authoritarian political system in the United States.
The new constitution conceives politics and governance as a strategy based upon the powers that technology and science (including psychology and the social sciences) have made possible. Exploitation of those powers enables their owners to redefine the citizenry as respondents rather than actors, as objects of manipulation rather than as autonomous.
This new political type has arisen as the revolving door between government and the private sector as spun faster and faster, infusing the government with the morals and social customs of the American managerial class, while suffocating the older, more noble idea of civic virtue. In short, American politics has been "managerialized."
Actually this is sort of an old model that is related to the way military "morals and social customs" infiltrated Roman culture, leading to the Empire. Adolf Hitler pulled much the same hocus-pocus on a deranged post-WWI German culture. It is simply a version of Autocrats-R-Us, in this case corporate autocrats who worship the sanctity of hierarchies they control and preach obedience to the orthodoxy of greed.
Ordinary people are not likely to get much attention from such a system or the robots who run it. So maybe their blase attitude toward the suffering of the non-super-rich shouldn't be such a surprise after all.
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