America's 100 Richest People Control More Wealth Than the Entire Black Population

[demmiblue]

Source: Mother Jones

It's well known that America's wealthiest have been getting even richer at the expense of the middle class. But the trend looks even starker when you look at the racial aspects. According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the combined wealth of those on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest dwarfs that of the nation's entire black or Latino population.



The report found that the 100 richest US citizens control about as much wealth as all of the nation's 42 million African Americans. The total wealth of the nation's 55 million Latinos stacks up to that of the 186 richest Americans.
The average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with just $11,000 for black families.

This can be explained in part by the rapid erosion of the black and Latino middle classes. African Americans' net worth relative to whites has fallen by more than half since 2000: The average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with just $11,000 for black families—about the same paltry sum as back in 1985. Latinos have seen similar declines in net worth relative to whites.

There are many reasons for this slide: Black and Latino families were disproportionately exposed to risky subprime mortgages, had smaller amounts of inherited wealth, and were more susceptible to job and wage cuts during the Great Recession. And because these families are less likely than whites to own homes and stocks, they haven't benefited as much from the subsequent recovery.

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/12/report-100-people-more-wealth-african-american-population

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. "The average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with just $11,000 for black

Families."

That is a damming statistic.

[zalinda]

3. But, many of those white families

only have a house as an asset, it doesn't mean that they have that much in the bank. And, too many of those houses have a mortgage for more than the house is worth. I know in my case that Zillow says my house is worth $106,000, but in reality it's only worth about 1/3 of that price, as it needs a lot of repairs.

Z

[Agnosticsherbet]

4. But it shows the enormous disparity related direclty to the effect of race.

140 years after the Civil war, and 41 years after the Equal Rights act of 1964, minority blacks continue to live in deep poverty.

Racism is ugly, and it's not just the use of racial epithets.

People of Color and whites do not occupy the same economic tier. Affirmative Action, which in theory was supposed to address this huge disparity, failed. Though it survived at assault in the Supreme Court in 2013, it has failed.

[moondust]

5. Thanks Reagan.

Financialization is a term sometimes used in discussions of the financial capitalism that has developed over the decades between 1980 and 2010, in which financial leverage tended to override capital (equity), and financial markets tended to dominate over the traditional industrial economy and agricultural economics.

Financialization serves investors at the expense of workers. Who were the investors between 1980 and 2010? Almost exclusively white people. And who were the workers? Everybody else, including many white people but nearly all minorities.

I don't know if financialization was deliberately racist or incidentally racist, but Reagan did nothing to stop or limit it back in the early days when it could have been stopped or limited to protect millions of good-paying jobs for working people. If anything he helped it along with his sinister trickle-down hoax.

[ismnotwasm]

6. An excellent reason why reparations should be a real policy