#Economic Disinfranchisement

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Black-owned banks and credit unions work to close the racial wealth gap

the history and importance of the nation’s minority depositories, with Black-owned banks and credit unions navigating concerns amid recent regional bank failures.

[ausetkmt]

Power only cares about who Owns and Controls the resources.

Learn That Black People

[andthemaidenfair]

Learning that Benioff’s father was a chairman of Goldman Sachs and a director of several of George W. Bush’s economic councils/programs really made me understand a lot about how the show fails the books.

The frankly bizarre glorification and hero worship of house Lannister, the softening and legitimization of Tywin and his world view (Benioff has said that out of all the characters he’d be Tywin and has also argued that Tywin was right and valid in the Red Wedding, basically playing the “stern but fair” bullcrap), the fact that the show has always been weird about and, at the end outright repulsed by, Dany’s fight against slavery and oppression. And finally the fact that the show almost completely ignored A Feast For Crows; the book that really looks you in the eyes and tells you that the lowly poor are the real victims in all this, the book that’s all about poverty, the disinfranchised and the marginalized, the book that digs into why the down trodden of the world are drawn to radical movements, the book that really makes readers realize that this is an anti war, anti capitalism series. Hmmm I wonder why a titan of industry’s son might not be interested in that particular story.

[philaczarian-blog]

self explanatory if you just think about it . look at how steve jobs or bill gates dressed . I live in a city where everyone be wants to " look " wealthy but don't want to learn how to build business and wealth. And it's been like that for as long as i've been alive . The fact that they don't know is very understandable but not ever being curious as to how this economic disinfranchisment happened no one seems to want to investigate... that i can't grasp . this picture shows how ones perspective of wealth changes once one grasps that gold teeth and blood diamond laced chains ain't it . Or maybe i'm just out of touch with modern values .

[ausetkmt]

The Economic Legacy of Racism - Dr Darity Speaks

Why does the racial divide persist between comparatively similar segments of the workforce? If additional education is not the solution to racial inequality, what is? In this interview, Professor Sandy Darity discusses the troubling systemic and psychosocial challenges that have faced black Americans since the formation of the United States.

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The Poverty Paradox: Why Most Poverty Programs Fail And How To Fix Them

How can we eradicate poverty? That is the question that underpins a majority of development programs. But what if by asking that question, we are limiting our capacity to actually eradicate poverty and create prosperity?

In this heartfelt and passionate talk, Efosa Ojomo explains how our framing of the problem of poverty is hindering our progress. He suggests a different way to solve the global poverty problem.

 An alumnus of the prestigious Forum for Growth and Innovation Center at the Harvard Business School (HBS), Ojomo works alongside colleague and mentor Professor Clay Christensen in their shared goal to discover, develop and disseminate robust and accessible theory in the areas of disruptive innovation and general management as it relates to economic development. Ojomo’s body of work will ultimately help entrepreneurs, policy makers and development practitioners spur prosperity in their regions.

Specifically, Ojomo’s research examines how emerging markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and Asia can engender prosperity for their citizens by focusing on investments in market creating innovations, such as M-PESA, the mobile money transfer platform in Kenya. Ojomo graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University with a degree in computer engineering. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.  ...

[ausetkmt]

Racism and economic inequality have predisposed black workers to be most hurt by coronavirus pandemic | Economic Policy Institute

A new report by director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy Valerie Wilson and senior economist Elise Gould explores how racial and economic inequality have left many black workers with few good options for protecting both their health and economic well-being during the coronavirus pandemic. Persistent racial disparities in health status, access to health care, wealth, employment, wages, housing, income, and poverty all contribute to greater susceptibility to the virus—both economically and physically.

The authors explain there are three main groups of workers in the COVID-19 economy: those who have lost their jobs and face economic insecurity, those who are essential and face health insecurity, and those who are able to continue working from the safety of their homes. Black workers are least likely to be in that last group, with more economic and health security.

As of April, less than half of the adult black population was employed. The black unemployment rate, even in the tightest of labor markets, remains significantly higher than the white unemployment rate. As of the latest data, the black unemployment rate is 16.7%, compared with a white unemployment rate of 14.2%.

While black workers make up about one in nine workers overall, they make up about one in six of all front-line industry workers. They are disproportionately represented in employment in grocery, convenience, and drug stores, public transit, trucking, warehouse, and postal service, health care, and child care and social services. While, in the near-term, this protects them from job loss, it exposes them to greater likelihood of contracting COVID-19 while performing their jobs. Fewer than one in five black workers in the pre-pandemic economy were able to work from home.

“As workers across the country lose their jobs in record numbers, the devastation of those job losses is magnified for black workers and their families,” said Gould. “Furthermore, black workers are more likely to be found on the front lines. They are doing essential work every day, while being at risk of being exposed to the virus. They deserve to be paid adequately, provided personal protective equipment, paid sick days, and health care, a safe workplace, and a union to advocate for them.”

The report explains that black workers are less able to weather such a storm because a long history of racial exclusion, discrimination, and inequality have resulted in fewer earners in their families, lower incomes, and lower liquid wealth than white workers. Overall, white families hold, on average more than five times as much liquid assets as black families do ($49,529 vs. $8,762.) In 2018, median household income for white households was 70% higher than for black households ($70,642 vs. $41,692).

Black Americans’ share of those who have died from COVID-19 nationally is nearly double their share of the U.S. population. They also experience preexisting health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and diabetes, which are associated with greater risk of death from the coronavirus at higher rates than white Americans. Black workers are also 60% more likely to be uninsured than white workers. This is likely an additional contributing factor to the disparity in chronic illnesses, and it also might result in uninsured workers waiting longer to seek care for suspected coronavirus symptoms.

“The global impact of COVID-19, both in lives lost and economic devastation, is likely to leave a lasting mark for years to come,” said Wilson. “The best path forward requires that the painful lessons learned during this crisis better prepare us for the next one. If we are to avoid the needlessly heavy burden born by African Americans during the next economic or public health crisis, preparation must include plans to address long-standing underlying racial disparities in economic and health outcomes.”

[jelliclefastfoodorders]

The only reason this was dropped was because nationwide and even global news picked up the story and citizens retaliated. This was expected to fly under the radar, as a *no second thought* form of persecution and oppression on another black womyn. I'm relieved Marshae was saved from the disgraceful fate the state tried to put on her but at the same time I cannot get the taste out my mouth. I can't stop thinking about the other víctims of the racist, sexist prision industrial complex who slip through the media cracks. Whose stories that we ain't hearing, or not as loud, or not til too late, whose cases provide/d a foundation for the *no second thought * additude in Marshae's case. The prison industrial complex isn't even attempting to prey from the shadows. That's how emblazoned they are. And I'm so tired of politicians trying to woo us without digging forreal into the Plantation Prisons that they're afraid to dismantle cuz they keep our country's pOison fuckin systems thriving. Race, Economic, Class and Gender hierarchies and statistics are all strictly maintained vía disinfranchisement through imprisonment. The majority private $$$Prison Industrial Complex$$ has grown so untouchable that wtf can we expect to happen but it to become more and more predatory, less and less (even pretend) fair or balanced. Prison Abolition and Reformation sure look like the only way forward for the people. For any hope of some kind of "balanced playing field" in this country.

Are they going to charge the shooter with murder???????

[ausetkmt]

[ausetkmt]

U.S. suffered $16 trillion loss due to racism, new Citigroup study finds- Marketplace

It’s a colossal number: $16 trillion. That’s the economic loss suffered over 20 years due to racism in America, according to a new study by the big bank Citigroup.

The study offers policies to add $5 trillion in extra economic activity over the next five years. Marketplace’s Nova Safo looked into the study. The following is an excerpt of his conversation with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio.

David Brancaccio: How’d Citigroup get $16 trillion?

Nova Safo: The study divides this into several areas where it points out pervasive discrimination against Black Americans, such as homeownership and lower wages compared to white workers.

But the biggest factor is entrepreneurship: $13 trillion lost to the economy because Black people are not getting the same access to business loans, big banks are too often turning them down or Black entrepreneurs get less capital to work with.

And I spoke this morning with one of the study’s authors, Catherine Mann, who’s the global chief economist at Citi.

Catherine Mann: Many Black entrepreneurs end up going into businesses that don’t generate as many jobs, don’t generate as much wealth, because they don’t have the access to capital to start the businesses that will generate more wealth, more jobs and more income for more people, not only themselves.

Brancaccio: And policies to add back $5 trillion — what does the report propose?

Safo: It’s a long list, but on the entrepreneurship front, Mann says big banks like hers do have a role to play.

Mann: Financial institutions making a commitment to purchase from those Black-owned businesses, and financial institutions making a commitment to ensuring that Black entrepreneurs get access to the capital they need to succeed.

Safo: To that end, this morning Citi announced it’ll spend a billion dollars over the next three years on various initiatives to reduce the wealth gap. But you look at this 100-page study, and it’s clear that’s just a start.

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MarketWatch: Would reparations cause unwise spending? Studies on cash windfalls suggest not.

The perception that people often succumb to misfortune and bad decision-making after suddenly receiving large amounts of cash isn’t based in fact, researchers said in a report published Thursday by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank.

That means potential reparations payouts to Black Americans are unlikely to result in reckless spending, financial ruin and reduced labor productivity, the report’s authors wrote after undertaking a review of prior research concerning consumer behavior after lottery windfalls and inheritances, as well as more minor cash transfers through tax refunds and guaranteed-income programs. 

“There’s what we really describe as kind of an urban myth … that people who receive lottery winnings squander the money very quickly,” reparations scholar William “Sandy” Darity, a Duke University professor of public policy and economist who co-authored the report, said in an interview. “The best available evidence indicates that that’s not the case.”

Whether Black residents and descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. are owed reparative payments has been debated for centuries. But as the country has grown more economically unequal while a stubborn racial wealth gap persists, the reparations movement has picked up traction.

In California, a first-of-its-kind state task force on reparations approved a slate of recommendations for lawmakers this month that, if implemented through legislation, would potentially provide hundreds of billions of dollars in reparative monetary payments to Black Californians to address harms caused by factors including racial health disparities, housing discrimination and mass incarceration. San Francisco, which has its own reparations task force, is also considering one-time reparative payments of $5 million for eligible people.

Read more: California task force approves sweeping reparations potentially worth billions of dollars

Still, detractors say that granting reparations to Black Americans — as was done for Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II and, on a state level, for survivors who owned property in the town of Rosewood, Fla., before a race massacre destroyed it — is unwise.

Some argue that giving people reparative payments without requiring certain parameters or personal-finance courses could result in irresponsible spending behavior, or that reparations proposals are themselves racist in suggesting that Black people need “handouts.”

“‘One of the important things that lottery winners do with the money is that they frequently set up trust accounts or the equivalent for their children or their grandchildren.’”

— William ‘Sandy’ Darity, a leading reparations scholar

The authors of the Roosevelt Institute report, for their part, said the assumption that Black Americans would be unable to handle sudden windfalls is rooted in racism — noting the racial wealth gap wasn’t created through “defective” spending habits but through policies that pumped money into white households, including unequal land distribution and subsidies for homebuyers.

“Widely held, inaccurate, and racist beliefs about dysfunctional financial behavior of Black Americans as the foundation for racial economic inequality leads to a conclusion that monetary reparations will be ineffective in eliminating the gap,” they wrote. “According to this perspective, if eligible Black Americans do not change their financial mindset and behavior after receiving financial reparations, the act of restitution will be empty.”

How people spend lottery winnings and inheritances

Even so, there’s not really “any carefully drawn-out study of what has happened to folks who have received reparations payments,” Darity said. It’s “impossible to understand” the impacts of such programs, because there haven’t historically been “systems in place that give money directly to individuals” — allowing “anecdotal cynicism and urban mythology” to drive the narrative, the report’s authors wrote.

“The best that we could do is try to think about other types of instances in which people have received windfalls where there has been some follow-up on what the consequences have been,” Darity said.

To see how people really react when they’re granted new amounts of money, the authors examined outcomes both from people who had received “major” windfalls — ones that immediately and majorly change a person’s wealth status, like winning the lottery — and “minor” windfalls, or those that affect a person’s income but don’t meaningfully shift their wealth status, like the stimulus checks doled out earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Darity, who directs Duke University’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, worked alongside the report’s lead author, Katherine Rodgers, a former research assistant at the Cook Center who currently works as a senior associate at the consulting firm Kroll, as well as Sydney A. Grissom, an analyst for BlackRock. Lucas Hubbard, an associate in research at the Cook Center, was also an author of the report. 

They found that while a person’s behavior can vary based on the windfall amount and how it’s framed to the recipient, as well as their previous economic status, their reactions tend to buck stereotypes. 

For example, only 11% of lottery winners quit their job in the findings of one 1987 study that examined 576 lottery winners across 12 states — and none of the people who got less than $50,000 left work, according to the Roosevelt Institute report. However, people were more likely to quit their jobs if they won a sum worth $1 million, had less education, were making under $100,000 a year, and hadn’t been in their job for more than four years.

Studies of lottery winners in other countries have found similarly muted labor responses, the report said. A separate U.S. study from 1993 of the labor effects on people who had received inheritances ranging from $25,000 to $150,000 or more also found that only a “small but statistically significant percentage of heirs left their jobs after receiving their inheritance,” with workers most likely to leave their jobs if they got a big payout. 

But it’s still “less than what the stereotype would say,” Hubbard said in an interview: 4.6% of individuals quit their jobs after receiving a small inheritance of less than $25,000, compared to 18.2% of workers who got an inheritance of more than $150,000, he noted.

Instead, studies have shown that people who get windfalls may be more likely to become self-employed, participate in financial markets, save, and spend money on necessary goods like housing and transportation, the report’s authors wrote. 

“One of the important things that lottery winners do with the money,” Darity said, “is that they frequently set up trust accounts or the equivalent for their children or their grandchildren.”

Small windfalls, including those offered through monthly checks from guaranteed-income pilot programs, have also been shown to be used for essentials like food and utilities without negative effects on employment. The framing of the money received can also have an effect on how it’s spent, the authors said: People who get a payout from bequests or life insurance tend to have more negative emotions about the money and will use it for more “utilitarian” purposes, according to one 2009 study. 

From the archives (March 2021): Employment rose among those in California universal-income experiment, study finds

Reparations wouldn’t unleash ‘flagrant spending,’ researchers say

Despite their findings, “windfalls are not magical panaceas for all financial woes,” the authors emphasized.

For example, a 2011 study cited in the report found that among people who were already in precarious financial positions, lottery winnings delayed, rather than prevented, an eventual bankruptcy filing. Another report from 2006 found that “large inheritances led to disproportionately less saving,” the researchers noted in the Roosevelt Institute report.

“Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that their bounties are not limitless, and, crucially, that informed stewardship of received assets is still necessary (albeit, not always sufficient) to achieve and maximize long-term financial success,” the authors wrote.

But they added that reparations, particularly if “framed not as handouts but rather as reparative payments” to Black Americans, would not unleash “flagrant spending on nonessential goods” based on studies on windfalls, and could instead improve recipients’ emotional well-being and financial stability. 

“Of course, the merits of making such payments should not be assessed solely on the basis of the anticipated economic effects,” the authors said. “Moreover, using the absence of evidence of this type as a justification for delaying reparative payments, such as those to Black descendants of American slavery, is inconsistent with the fact that other groups previously have received similar payments in the wake of atrocities and tragedies.”

From the archives (January 2023): How to pay for reparations in California? ‘Swollen’ wealth could replace ‘stolen’ wealth through taxes.

[ausetkmt]

1976 SPECIAL REPORT: "HELL UPON DETROIT"

Redlining and how it destroyed on of the most prosperous Black communities in america intentionally - this was Urban Renewal and it Destroyed Black Neighborhoods which were thriving.  This was the real death of Detroits’ economic boom from the Great Migration and led to disinfranchisement which still has a stronghold on Detroit in 2023

[ausetkmt]

Poverty, Politics and Profit (full documentary) | FRONTLINE - YouTube

Many people have no idea why there is such a huge wealth gap in america. This gives us a brief peek into the reality of classism and financial disinfranchisement.

This is not a game, and we as people who are victimized by this scheme have asked until we are blue in the face. Now we get a look behind the financial curtain. We are not locked out - we are PLANNED OUT

Today we help you understand why the dollar is worth less in the hands of POC. There is a lot of money circulating but it's not being directed to your circles; Find out Why by Watching this

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Inequality – how wealth becomes power (1/3) | DW Documentary - YouTube

Please don't sleep on this because all the tricks are laid out so you understand why the dollar is worth less in the hands of POC. There is a lot of money circulating but it's not being directed to your circles; Find out Why by Watching this