My Civil Rights Field Trip to the Capital of Inequality

[chlamor]

My Civil Rights Field Trip to the Capital of Inequality
 
by Paul Street
April 09, 2005
 
After the black corporate chemist spoke, NUL breakfast attendees heard from a white statistician with "Global Insights, Inc" - a leading financial and investment "intelligence" firm that markets itself to multinational companies as the source of "the most comprehensive economic and financial coverage of countries, regions, and industries available." The fiercely neoliberal Global Insight (GI) recently accused the popular and populist elected leaders of Argentina and Venezuela of practicing "economic terrorism" against the world's leading petroleum corporations - those noble agents and guardians of global economic and military security and democracy (seehttp://www.globalinsight.com/Perspective/PerspectiveDetail1758.htm).  For $700, your company can obtain an electronic version of GI's take on investment opportunities in "liberated Iraq" in the wake of the recent elections there. 
 

In a somewhat mysterious calculation that was financially supported by leading global investment corporation J.P. Morgan Chase, GI's number crunchers determined that Black America suffers from an "Equality Index" of 0.73.  This means that black Americans are just less three fourths the equal of whites on a scale that posits zero as absolute inequality and 1.0 as absolute equality.  This was the main statistic cited in the Urban League's SOBA report.  I never got hold of GI's analyst to ask him how his 0.73 number jibed with leading academic Thomas Shapiro's finding - reported in the first chapter of the 2005 SOBA volume - that "the 1999 net worth (all assets minus all liabilities) of typical white families is $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families."  That's 10 cents of black net worth for every dollar of white net worth.  By the recessionary year of 2002, thanks to usual racial disparities in the capitalist business cycle, black net worth had fallen (according to Shapiro) to seven cents on the white dollar. 

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Walking around Washington D.C. on some lovely April evenings, with the cherry blossoms on full display, I saw numerous desperately poor black Americans begging and otherwise trying to survive in the shadows of the regal white structures of American national and global political power.

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This was another missing topic at the NUL gathering, held exactly 38 years and 2 days after Martin Luther King. Jr came out in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Besides being an act of immoral racist imperialism in and of itself, King argued on April 4, 1967 (at the Riverside Church in New York City), that invasion was furthering social and racial inequality at home by stealing critical funding from the abortive, partial-birth "War on Poverty."  Exactly one year later, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  An earlier generation of rich and powerful public authorities and personalities cleared their schedules to get their properly mournful pictures taken next to the dead body of a fallen spiritual leader.

 It makes a certain amount of sense when you realize that Washington D.C. is the capital of the most unequal nation in the industrialized world - a country where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth. 

 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=7604