Shocking Maldistribution Of Wealth Due To Great Recession Of 2008: Pew Research Center Report

A new Pew Research Center report demonstrates the alarming fact of the shocking maldistribution of wealth among the major racial groups in America, due to the Great Recession’s effect, and the findings should ring alarm bells among all Americans in regard to the likelihood of social turmoil and disarray that could, sadly, lead to violence, if nothing is done about the reality of the failure of the “American Dream”!

The study shows that white households are TWENTY times wealthier than African Americans, and EIGHTEEN times better off than Hispanic families.

These statistics are staggering and unprecedented, and show the stratification of American society is the worst it has ever been, and far surpasses any democratic nation in Western Europe or Japan.

The median white household in 2009 had a net worth of $113,000 as compared to an average of about $5,700 for black families and $6,300 for Hispanic households.

At the same time, poor families with zero or negative worth were found in one third of black and Hispanic families, but only 15 percent of white families.

The average median wealth of black families fell by 66 percent between 2006-2009, 53 percent for Hispanic households, and only 16 percent for white families.

The housing and unemployment crises and declining income during the Great Recession also harmed black and Hispanic families much more than white households.

The real danger is that even lower income whites have been identifying with the Republican Party, while minority voters continue to connect to the Democratic Party, so the racial conflict that seems to be developing is endangering the country, and seems similar to the old North-South split on slavery in the 19th century and the civil rights movement in the 20th century, but now based on race nationally, instead of in geographical regions.

It has to make one fear for the future civil peace of the nation, if this manifestation is allowed to continue unabated!

5 comments on “Shocking Maldistribution Of Wealth Due To Great Recession Of 2008: Pew Research Center Report

  1. daniel halverson July 27, 2011 6:31 am

    I would argue that the one constituency of the Republican Party that has never changed, from its inception in the 1850s to today, is the business and professional communities, and that every other issue championed by the Republican party is secondary to that. The businessmen and upper income professionals who form this constituency essentially don’t care about social issues, but they are so inferior, numerically, to the number outside their block that they are forced to seek alliances with people who, similarly, care about their issues but are more or less indifferent to economic issues.

    These businessmen and upper income professionals are using now, as they did the 1850s, the huge clamor surrounding social issues to pursue an economic policy that will tend towards the impoverishment of their own constituencies. These wal-mart republicans, whose only motivation at the ballot box is prejudice against arabs, blacks, gays, etc., are casting their votes to impoverish themselves. It’s really remarkable, and I think it calls into quesiton the basic principle of democratic government – that the people are reasonable and can be trusted. I mean when I look around, I don’t see a community of reasonable, responsible people. I see people who are largely ignorant, and almost wholely motivated by prejudices of one kind or another, who for the most part can’t even manage their own lives, let alone the political life of the country. We need to get as many of those people out of the political discussion as possible, I mean deliberately disenfranchise people who are too ignorant to use their voting powers responsibly, or else I don’t see how we can have orderly government. But that’s another discussion I guess. Point is, businessmen and upper income professionals are manipulating lower income, social conservative voters into voting against their own interests, so I agree with what you were saying towards the end of your piece.

  2. Ronald July 27, 2011 8:49 am

    Daniel, you have really done a great job in pointing out the reality of the Republican Party, and the ignorance of these poor whites who vote Republican out of prejudice and fear is very troubling for the future of the nation.

    Unless and until the people of this nation understand that we are all in this together, and that race and religion and sexual orientation should not separate us, but instead unite us against the corporations, the banks, the Koch brothers and their ilk, we are doomed in the long run to have bloodshed and civil war in the name of the profit motive fueled by an alliance with religious bigots who claim to speak for Jesus Christ, when it is clear that were he here today, he would NOT be a conservative, a Republican, or a capitalist, but rather a progressive or liberal speaking up for social justice!

  3. daniel halverson July 27, 2011 10:23 am

    Thanks…. It drives me nuts when conservatives say that the two books that have influenced them both are Atlas Shrugged and the Bible. I’ve read both of those books, and they present diametrically opposed views of the world. I mean you just can’t have both, they’re totally incompatible philosophies. Jesus never said anything about free markets or the importance of the profit motive, small government or the need for deregulation…. when he spoke of wealth at all it wasn’t in terms of praise, but of condemnation. The whole thesis of Atlas Shrugged is that christianity leads to commuunism and social collapse, so again it’s not very complimentary. I think it goes to show how far the marriage between social conservatives and business conservatives have gone… I mean these two groups, by all rights, should be fighting each other, but both social and business conservatives are in the minority, so they have to band together for effective political action…. the whole thing is just really bizarre.

    Anyway yeah, you can see the class warfare playing out on your TV whenever you turn it on, now….. I’m not very sympathetic to the wealthy on this one. Boehner is always calling them job creators… well, taxes are historically low, and unemployment is through the roof. So…errrrrr… where are the jobs? But its really a kind of religious faith with them at this point. The Tea Party’s platform doesn’t really go any further than: “No rich person will ever pay taxes, no corporation will ever submit to government oversight, and this will somehow create prosperity for everyone.” It just couldn’t be any more obvious that this isn’t about creating jobs at all…. but about protecting wealthy people from taxation and letting them do whatever they want to the rest of us, to the environment, etc. Class warfare has the potential to be hugely politically destabilizing, and I’m really worried we’re headed into an era like the 1870s-1900s, where we had terrible domestic instability, alot of violence between rich and poor, riots and strikes, corrupt courts and a federal government that was basically just a poodle for the corporations. I really hope, for everyone’s sake, that the Republicans can find a way to kick the radicals out of their party and return to sane, centrist politics…. because, while they dont have enough power to run the government, they apparently do have enough power to shut it down. Maybe even the will to do so, who knows…

  4. Ronald July 27, 2011 10:34 am

    And that is exactly my point of why I am a progressive or liberal, as I believe in social justice, economic regulation of big business in the public interest, and political democracy–all the points of the Progressives of the early 20th century, including Robert La Follette Sr, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis, all the Muckrakers, etc–and followed up by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s and Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson et al with the New Frontier-Great Society programs of the 1960s. We need a restoration of these goals and visions if we are to stop what has become worse now, in many respects, than the Gilded Age period (1870-1900) that you refer to.

  5. daniel halverson July 27, 2011 10:35 pm

    Yeah I agree. But I guess there’s some hope… since after the gilded age came… the progressive age. I especially like reading about TR Roosevelt. You probably know better than I do, though, why American politics has taken such a hard turn to the right since… 1968, I guess. It seems like every president after Nixon, Democrat or Republican, has been right of LBJ, probably Nixon too.

    But yeah I really hope these guys get it together. I haven’t checked in on the news yet but I don’t expect they’ve solved anything…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.