Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The economics of American racism (9 charts, 1960 to 2014)

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, August 29, 2014

The economics of American racism (9 charts, 1960 to 2014)

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog.

It appears to me that the US ruling class (aka the One Percent), like most ruling classes, likes to foment division among its potential adversaries (the Ninety-Nine Percent). These nine graphs attest to their success in doing this via racial discrimination in favor of European-Americans in spite of occasional rhetoric to the contrary, laws prohibiting such discrimination, and the election of a president who is widely seen as an African-American in racist-ridden US society in spite of the fact that he was mostly raised by a white grandmother who was a banker and educated at elite schools (see my commentary here).