Fake Booms, or a Tide That Raises a Few Yachts

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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Big Lies, Debt, Dot.com Boom, Dot.com Bust, Economic Inequality, Fake Boobs, Fake Booms, Gospel of Prosperity, Great Recession, Housing Boom, Housing Bust, Lies, Middle Class, Net Worth, Plutocracy, Prosperity Gospel, Racial Inequality, Rising Tide, Shrinking Middle Class, Struggling Middle Class, Yachts

“Rising Tide Leaves Workers Behind” cartoon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 5, 2006. (R.J. Matson). Qualifies as fair use due to lower resolution and relevance to topic.

It’s been a week and a half since my last post, mostly because I’ve been busy with other projects. Kind of like the American aristocracy, as they continue to distract us plebes with controversies over “religious freedom” laws and undisclosed emails while continuing to hoard trillions in wealth.

Not that these controversies are just abstract distractions, but they follow a pattern of division, deception, and misdirection. Our nation’s elite impose their views of the country and the world in such a way as the truth itself becomes a lie. Apparently for them, the First Amendment to the US Constitution’s a lie, since this first of these Bill of Rights guarantees “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This Establishment Clause has NEVER been absolute, especially in cases in which religious practice violates or interferes with others’ civil and constitutional rights.

Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam via Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings (1508-1512), with America's Prosperity Gospel stuck in between, September, 2009. (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/).

Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam via Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings (1508-1512), with America’s Prosperity Gospel stuck in between, September, 2009. (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/).

But for the purposes of my post today, this truth-as-lie isn’t the biggest one the American plutocracy has pulled on us in the past forty years. Not even close. You see, the biggest lie they’ve sold us as truth is the idea that the US has been going through bust and boom cycles as normal for any wealthy capitalist democracy since the 1970s. That with every recession, or period of inflation, or deflation, or job stagnation, or changes in the economy, that a period of unbridled growth and social mobility has followed, keeping the American middle class the richest of the middle classes on Earth, indeed, in the history of the world!

Let’s start with the reality that median income has declined enough to show evidence of a shrinking American middle class. This decline isn’t a recent phenomenon. Since the end of World War II, there have been two lengthy patterns. One is a pattern of great economic growth, coinciding with America’s dominance of the global economy between 1945 and 1973. This growth of median income by a factor of six (from $2,379 in 1945 to $12,050 in 1973) was a reflection of the US economy’s glory years. The other is the current pattern of a slow, sometimes meandering but steady decline of economic dominance. All during a period of greater competition from Europe and Asia, job outsourcing, and a reduced industrial base, the last the heart of America’s economic growth before 1973.

Median Income Since 1945, Calculated in Actual/2013 Dollars

Year	Median Income	Median Income in 2013 $
1945	$2,379	$30,699
1963	$6,200	$46,826
1973	$12,050	$65,099
1983	$24,580	$57,824
1993	$31,241	$50,549
2003	$43,318	$55,060
2012	$51,017	$51,906

Sources: US Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-002, P60-043, P60-097 , P60-146, P60-188, P60-226, P60-245, Consumer Income (now Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage): 1948, 1964, 1975, 1985, 1995, 2004, 2013. (http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/ and http://www.census.gov/prod/). Calculations based on CPI Inflation Calculator via the Bureau of Labor Statistics and DollarTimes.com, using 2013 as the most recent calendar year baseline (http://data.bls.gov/ and http://www.dollartimes.com/).

Median income in 1973 was 20.1 percent higher ($65,000) than it is today ($52,000). In the intervening years, median income never grew enough to match or exceed the growth that occurred during the peak of the middle class’ development. Not in the years after the double-dip recession of the early 1980s. Not even after the Information Revolution under the business and credit-friendly Clinton years of the 1990s.

The dot.com boom-turned-bust, April 2, 2015. (http://www.sf-info.org/).

Keep in mind, too, that the 400 wealthiest households in the wealthiest nation of all time hold a net worth that exceeds the net worth of the bottom fifty percent of all US households. It’s simple math, really — 400 > ~100,000,000 households or roughly 155 million people with kids and other relatives. Or, $1.5 trillion for 400 > $1.4 trillion for 155,000,000.

The best measure the US currently has for different socioeconomic classes that isn’t from a complex university study or an ideological think-tank is the experimental Supplemental Poverty Measure, developed jointly by the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The AP and dozens of other news outlets first reported the use of the SPM after the two agencies developed a report on Americans in poverty and with low-income with it in November 2011. Taking into account tax credits, non-cash benefits (e.g., SNAP or food stamps), out-of-pocket medical expenses, and other in-kind contributions, the Census and BLS constructed a Ratio of Income/Resource to Poverty matrix that accounted for both the official calculations of poverty (which the federal government originally developed in 1964) and calculations done with the SPM. The news media headlined the December 2011 results with “1 in 2 People Are Poor or Low-Income.”

As sobering as this is, it’s not the whole story, not for those Americans working under the assumption that they are middle class. According to the Census’ latest report using the SPM (November 2013), 16 percent of Americans (49.7 million) live at or below the poverty threshold of $23,000 in income/resources per year, while another 31.2 percent (97.1 million) have at most $46,000 a year in income/resources, fitting the SPM definition of low-income. Another 107.6 million Americans have incomes/resources that are between two and four times the national poverty threshold (or between $46,000 and $92,000 in total resources per year), while the top 56.6 million of Americans (18.2 percent) have annual incomes/resources above $92,000.

Large saline and silicone breast implants — could easily be, housing boom (1999-2008), dot.com boom (1994-2001), credit boom (1973-?), April 2, 2015. (http://medcitynews.com).

There are two really simple reasons why most Americans don’t see the plutocratic lie of “prosperity for everyone” despite all evidence of the truth. One is because they believe in that dangled carrot of somehow becoming rich, through hard work, prayer, giving out of need, or sheer luck, despite the debt it takes to remain even somewhat middle class. Two is because most believe they’re prospering whenever the Dow Jones’ Industrial Average breaks 10,000 or 15,000, or because the media faithfully reports monthly declines in unemployment, or because the average White family has a net worth that’s eight times that of Black and Latino families.

And those beliefs are reinforced by the societal taboo of rarely, if ever, talking about our income, our net worth or lack thereof, by acting as if the poverty or prosperity conversation violates the US Constitution. Without this serious conversation, how can we really claim that any tide of economic prosperity has lifted any boats other than those of the yacht-owning set since 1973?

A Weak Legacy: The Acts of the Civil Rights Apostles at 50

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"The Way It Is" (1986), AERA, American Educational Research Association, Brown Lecture, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Bruce Hornsby and The Range, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Class Inequality, Color Bar, Derrick Bell, Inequality, Jesse B. Semple, Legacy, Mother-Son Relationship, Poverty, Racial Inequality, Racism, Symbols, The Acts of the Apostles, Voter Disenfranchisement, Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Acts of the Apostles (book cover), 1999. (http://books.google.com).

Yesterday evening, I attended the eleventh annual Brown lecture hosted by the American Educational Research Association at the Ronald Reagan Building here in DC. The great scholar James Anderson talked for about an hour about the connections between voter disenfranchisement and state policies that created systems of educational inequality for Blacks as part of the Jim Crow era. Anderson wondered aloud that with the recent efforts to restrict voting and with the Supreme striking down Section 4(b) (and essentially Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 if this meant a return of gross educational inequality on the basis of race and class in 2014. As if the trends of inequality only rise and fall with well protected or unprotected voting rights. Voting rights enforcement is a good barometer, but hardly the only one. The last twenty years of high-stakes testing and corporate education reform provide evidence of a trend of educational inequality that has occurred despite and (in many cases) precisely because of voter participation across all racial lines.

The following, though, is my full response, to Anderson, AERA and all of those in legacy-celebration mode with the Brown decision and the Acts in 2014 and 2015. What was true in 1964 and 1965 remains true fifty years later. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been much more lightbulbs on a symbol of real progress — the Civil Rights Movement — than it has been an actual marker of progress. At least for those poor, Black and of color. For Whites, though, the Acts have been the sign of a post-racial America without having to work at it or talk about it. But for the adults I grew up around in Mount Vernon, New York in the 1970’s, there was a lingering hopefulness about race relations and racial equality in America that is absent these days. I don’t know if I felt it because of Archie Bunker and All In The Family or because of all those reproductions I saw of the late Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy together in the same painting over so many living-room mantles when I was six years old. Yet no matter how down or how out, so many poorer Blacks I knew back then had hope for a brighter present and future.

Jesse Jackson, an Obama election sign, and the American flag — three symbols in one picture, July 2008. (http://plus.google.com).

It wasn’t as if they contemplated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act at the disco house parties my mother would take me and my older brother to, playing with other kids while the adults danced away their troubles. No, it was the idea that finally, Blacks who looked like us could pry open a door and get an opportunity to succeed in America. Or, to quote The Jeffersons‘ theme song, to “gettin’ our turn at bat.” It didn’t matter to them that the Civil Rights Act, even with all its enforcement teeth, would benefit White women and those lucky enough to be part of Black middle class more than us poor Black folk. Or if the Voting Rights Act could be thwarted by gerrymandering and state decisions to make voting harder for us. The Acts crystallized hope, symbolized a chance, however small, for a better education, a better job, and a better life, for themselves and their families.

The adults in my life were putting on a good face, though, as I came to realize when I was a preteen. My mother had once held the hope that me and my older brother would “make it” by going to college and finding “good-paying jobs.” But by the start of the Reagan Revolution, she no longer spoke in such lofty terms. My mother was hardly alone. By 1979, Blacks like Florence Grier in Bob Blauner’s oral history book Black Lives, White Lives (1989) were saying, to “tell you the truth, I’m not hopeful that we’re going to progress in the eighties as fast as we progressed from the sixties to the seventies.”

Polling back then also reflected this sense of frustration about race and over racial discrimination among Blacks, in contrast to the White sentiment that America had move beyond its racist past. In March 1981, ABC News and The Washington Post conducted their first combined poll on the state of race relations in the US. While 73 percent of Blacks in the poll saw “deep rooted continuing racial problems and blame them on discrimination…only 46 percent of the Whites agreed.”

First page of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (bent and warped), July 8, 1964. (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/document_data/pdf/doc_097.pdf). In public domain.

The hopes and aspirations that the Civil Rights Act symbolized have eroded with the Act itself, and are all but absent for younger generations of Americans. An MTV and David Binder Research poll from early 2014 found that 48 percent of White millennials believe anti-White discrimination is as significant as discrimination against people of color, while 65 percent of the people of color they polled believe that Whites have more opportunities for success. Even my own eleven-year-old son reflects this trend. “People were more stupid back then,” my son said to me recently while we talked about the Civil Rights Movement and White resistance to integration, as if racial inequality ended with the movement.Thanks in no small part to the success of the neoconservative movement in declaring the death of racism in the 1980s and 1990s, the generation born after 1981 does not see the federal government as the catalyst for a better life or as a leveler of any playing field.

Bruce Hornsby and The Range’s lyrics from their hit “The Way It Is” summed up the weaknesses of the Civil Rights Act and its legacy well, for us in 1986 as well as today:

Well, they passed a law in ’64

To give those who ain’t got a little more

But it only goes so far

Cause the law don’t change another’s mind…

Nor, apparently, does it create a lasting legacy of racial equality and social mobility.

What Can Brown Do For You (Now)?: 60 Years Come & Gone

16 Friday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Colorblind Racism, Coma, Desegregation, Diversity, DNR, Higher Education, Integration, K-16 Education, Life Support, Public Education, Racial Diversity, Racial Inequality, Racism, Re-segregation, Resegregation, Schuette v. Coalition (2014), Supreme Court, Supreme Court decisions, Whiteness

What can brown do for you?, Brown Squadron, Relay for Life, 2007. (http://www.behance.net/).

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the great Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954), a Monday that lived in infamy among White supremacists in the South for decades, as the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional basis for Jim Crow segregation by a 9-0 vote. But six decades later, the Brown decision is in a coma and on life support, with a DNR order hanging over it, waiting for a close relative to sign. This after the Supreme Court ruled in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) last month that states like Michigan can amend their constitutions via majority vote to ban affirmative action. With this 6-2 decision, the Roberts court effectively ended any serious efforts at racial inclusion and diversity in public institutions, especially public K-16 education.

While deliberate exclusion of people of color, women and other minorities from America’s public institutions remains unconstitutional (and illegal, by the way — see the Civil Rights Act of 1964), this last court decision has now made it possible for public institutions to refrain from making any effort to include anyone other than White males in admissions and hiring policies. Yet there has been a long road to travel for us to reach this point, as it has taken lobbyists, law makers and lawyers roughly forty years to wound, disable and incapacitate Brown.

Bill Schuette, (Michigan’s attorney general), with Jennifer Gratz (of Gratz v. Bollinger decision [2003] and the XIV Foundation), outside Supreme Court, Washington, DC October 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP via New York Times).

If one were old enough to remember the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision (1971) — the one where the Supreme Court upheld widespread busing as a methodology for public school integration — it would have seemed that the matter was settled, at least legally. After all, in the seventeen years between Brown and Swann, the court had consistently ruled in favor of policies that made racial integration the centerpiece of a strategy to bring equal opportunity to America’s public institutions. And especially during President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration and with Congress, between the Civil Rights Act (now weeks away from turning fifty), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) and the Higher Education Act (1965), it seemed that segregation was itself about to be dead and buried.

Well, segregation — and the structural and institutional racism that supports it — is alive, as much as the evil undead can be alive and unwell. And the forces and people who never wanted desegregation — or worse, integration — in the first place have worked my entire lifetime for this moment. They simply took the NAACP’s legal strategy to end Plessy with Brown, just so they could strangle it while sleeping, right through the Supreme Court. Including the:

– Milliken v. Bradley decision (1974). Limited desegregation efforts in Detroit to its city limits, making it possible for suburban areas to refuse to partake in school desegregation efforts across the country.

– Bakke v. University of California at Davis decision (1978). Racial quotas for seats at colleges via admission policies found unconstitutional – race can be accounted for as part of admissions decisions, but no actual numbers should be involved.

– Missouri v. Jenkins decision (1995). Forcing the Kansas City school district to spend $200 million per year since 1990 (after 13 years of court battles) for magnet schools and busing was too much (beyond court’s remedial authority) — and forced the lower court to accept a less expensive (and less effective) desegregation plan.

– Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger decisions (2003). The split decisions upheld race as one of a plethora of criteria public higher education institutions like the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan (undergraduate division) could use in their admission process, as racial diversity and equity remained a laudable goal. But the court ruled that ranking race and other factors with a numbers system was the equivalent of a quota system, making this formula — but not the policy — unconstitutional.

Flatlining EKG, March 2010. (http://potashinvestingnews.com/).

Now Brown is truly hanging by a thread, and with it, the ideal of racial equality and equality of opportunity for visible minorities. I don’t want to hear about the Texas state system’s socioeconomic admissions policies or Richard Kahlenberg’s tired argument about getting at racial diversity through the economic. Most poor students can’t afford even public institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, and Kahlenberg’s center-right argument disguises the issue of racial and economic inequality in K-12 public education.

Let’s face it while we’re still fighting — and yes, we need to keep fighting on this front. On this issue, the folks on the side of colorblind racism and segregation have all but won. Brown may well remain the most important Supreme Court decision in the history of the US. With the Schuette decision, though, we might as well find a priest to administer last rites.