WASHINGTON — THE Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and federally funded activities like education, would not have passed without the support of House and Senate Republicans who were competing for black votes. And Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would not have advocated for the bill without being pressured to do so by a multiracial grass-roots movement. Continue reading As the #CivilRights Act Turns 50, Creating Cross-Racial Alliances | NYTimes→
AN insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?
One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II — a period of rapidly falling inequality — as an aberration.
This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects. Continue reading Joseph E. Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable | NYTimes→
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, Mississippi education remains separate and unequal
Myrtle School, Union County, 1956 (courtesy of Bill and Rita Bender)
Fifty years ago this month, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation in all public facilities. The Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools was already a decade old. Nevertheless, nearly all of Mississippi’s schools still operated under the pretense of “separate but equal.”
It was obvious to anyone who cared to look that Mississippi was more interested in separation than equality. White schools had the appearance of modernity, even if they often lacked the quality of more affluent states. Black schools, meanwhile, were often rustic and ramshackle. One-room schoolhouses had not yet gone extinct in some areas. The state spent 50 percent more on white education than black education, while districts supplemented white school funding with an average of four dollars for every dollar spent on black schools. Disparities in some districts reached 80 to one. Continue reading Fifty years after Freedom Summer, Mississippi education remains separate and unequal | Rethink Mississippi→
For some time now, Republicans in Congress have given up the pretense of doing anything to improve the lot of most Americans. Raising the minimum wage? They won’t even allow a vote to happen. Cleaner air for all? They may partially shut down the government in a coming fight on behalf of major polluters. Add to that the continuing obstruction of student loan relief efforts, and numerous attempts to defund health care, and you have a party actively working to make life miserable for millions.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published new data on the role that American fathers play in parenting their children. Most of the CDC’s previous research on family life — which the agency explores as an important contributor to public health and child development — has focused exclusively on mothers. But the latest data finds that the stereotypical gender imbalance in this area doesn’t hold true, and dads are just as hands-on when it comes to raising their kids.
In fact, in its coverage of the study, the Los Angeles Times noted that the results “defy stereotypes about black fatherhood” because the CDC found that black dads are more involved with their kids on a daily basis than dads from other racial groups: Continue reading .@ThinkProgress: The #Myth Of The Absent #BlackFather→
Want an over-the-top summer place of your very own? These luxury homes are in some of the hottest beach destinations in the U.S. — and the deals on these places can’t be beat. More
The numbers seem to back it up. Americans’ average wealth tops $301,000 per adult, enough to rank us fourth on the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth report.
Who is to blame for the dramatic rise in inequality in recent years? The bankers, many people say. According to this view, the financial sector is guilty of triggering the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and still affects millions of middle-class families in Europe and the United States, who’ve seen their purchasing power diminish and job prospects wither. The outrage is amplified by the fact that not only have the bankers and financial speculators escaped punishment for their blunders, but many are now even richer than they were before the crash. Others blame growing inequality on wages in countries like China and India, where low salaries depress incomes of workers in the rest of the world. Asia’s cheap labor compounds the problem because it creates unemployment in countries where companies close factories and “export” jobs to cheaper markets overseas. Still others see technology as the culprit. Robots, computers, the Internet, and greater use of machines in factories, they say, are replacing workers and thus boosting inequality.
The true explanation is a lot more complicated, says Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century has turned into a global sensation. In many countries, Piketty argues, capital (which he equates with wealth in the form of real estate, financial assets, etc.) is growing at a faster rate than the economy. The income produced by capital tends to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, whereas income from labor is dispersed throughout the entire population. Therefore, when capital earnings increase faster than wages, inequality grows because those who own capital accumulate a higher proportion of income. And given that growth in wages is directly dependent on the growth of the economy as a whole, economic inequality is bound to get worse if the economy expands at a slower clip than capital earnings.
Piketty summarizes this complicated theory with the formula “r > g” where “r” is the rate of return on capital and “g” is the rate of growth in the economy. The future is dire, he concludes, because he expects the economies of the countries he surveyed to grow at a rate of 1 to 1.5 percent per year, while the average return on capital increases at a rate of 4 to 5 percent per year. Inequality, in other words, is bound to rise. To avoid this, Piketty calls for a progressive tax on wealth in large countries—an idea that even he concludes is utopian. He acknowledges the enormous political hurdles that his proposal would face and the huge practical difficulties that would accompany its implementation. Last week, the Financial Times claimed that it had found grave defects in Piketty’s work, provoking an ongoing debate about his analysis. Nonetheless, most impartial observers believe that the issues with Piketty’s data are not serious enough to completely discredit his overall conclusions.
[. . .]
In order for this discussion to be valuable, however, the problem requires a more complete diagnosis. It is not accurate to assert that in countries like Russia, Nigeria, Brazil, and China, the main driver of economic inequality is a rate of return on capital that is larger than the rate of economic growth. A more holistic explanation would need to include the massive fortunes regularly created by corruption and all kinds of illicit activities. In many countries, wealth grows more as a result of thievery and malfeasance than as a consequence of the returns on capital invested by elites (a factor that is surely at work too).
In this preview, Joseph E. Stiglitz says corporate abuse of our tax system has helped make America unequal and undemocratic. But the Nobel Prize-winning economist has a plan to change that.
In America right now inequality is too great, unemployment too high, public investments too meager, corporations too greedy and the tax code too biased toward the very rich.
But the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says it doesn’t have to be this way. He has a new plan for overhauling America’s current tax system, which he says contributes to making America the most unequal society of the advanced countries.
A while back I published an article titled “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts,” in which I described politically motivated efforts to deny the obvious — the sharp rise in U.S. inequality, especially at the very top of the income scale. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I found a lot of statistical malpractice in high places.
Nor will it surprise you to learn that nothing much has changed. Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.
The Giles piece, in many ways, is worse than the Reinhardt and Rogoff “error.” There is no error here; only an attempt to tarnish and discredit, all a part of the right’s mission to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. That’s right. I am saying it. The right wing conspiracy is an international one.
It’s really sad that the Financial Times is complicit in the lie. It’s sad that so many of the trusted institutions that make up the media are divided between right and left, truth and lies, facts and fiction – engaging in propaganda.
That Piketty’s book contained errors is normal for such a huge book. US data, the lion’s share of capital, was not in question. The errors change nothing.
Who is to blame for the dramatic rise in inequality in recent years? The bankers, many people say. According to this view, the financial sector is guilty of triggering the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and still affects millions of middle-class families in Europe and the United States, who’ve seen their purchasing power diminish and job prospects wither. The outrage is amplified by the fact that not only have the bankers and financial speculators escaped punishment for their blunders, but many are now even richer than they were before the crash. Others blame growing inequality on wages in countries like China and India, where low salaries depress incomes of workers in the rest of the world. Asia’s cheap labor compounds the problem because it creates unemployment in countries where companies close factories and “export” jobs to cheaper markets overseas. Still others see technology as the culprit. Robots, computers, the Internet, and greater use of machines in factories, they say, are replacing workers and thus boosting inequality.
The Giles piece, in many ways, is worse than the Reinhardt and Rogoff “error.” There is no error here; only an attempt to tarnish and discredit, all a part of the right’s mission to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. That’s right. I am saying it. The right wing conspiracy is an international one.