Scholars gathered for the African American Economic Summit at Howard University on Friday sketched an alarming picture of the financial ills afflicting the black community even as the nation recovers from the recession.
The white-black wealth disparity is more than 20 to 1. Black homeownership has declined. Black joblessness is up. Black income is down.
As the conferees gathered, the government released new figures showing the black unemployment rate at 13.8 percent, nearly double the 7.0 percent for whites. The overall jobless rate is 7.9 percent.
As bleak as the economic picture is for black Americans, the immediate prospects for improving it are worse, many participants said. They agreed that chances are remote for the kind of aggressive, targeted action needed to combat those problems and close the economic disparities that have long separated blacks and whites.
“We are basically talking about an economic system that is shot through with discrimination,” said Bernard E. Anderson, a former assistant secretary of labor.
Despite that, Anderson and others said, President Obama seems reluctant to attack economic disparities between blacks and whites head-on.
Anderson said that Obama’s second inaugural address was notable for lifting up gay rights, sounding the call for immigration reform and signaling his determination for women to receive equal pay in the workplace. “But there was not a single, blessed word on race,” he said….
Indeed, the world economic outlook is bleak. Black people simply will be among the early casualties because of historic and continuing discrimination. Every nation that has a private central bank has a bleak economic outlook. The system is designed to funnel the wealth to the banksters.
On multiple fronts there appears to have been a resumption of hostilities in the global currency wars. A subtle indication of this is the recently released report, Gold, the Renminbi and the Multi-Currency Reserve System, which I believe is highly significant for two reasons: First, it demonstrates that major global actors are now keenly aware and frightened of the possibility of a major breakdown in international monetary relations. Second, it suggests that these same actors are trying to contain the growing demand for gold as an alternative reserve asset and pre-empt an uncontrolled gold remonetization. These efforts will fail. A collapse of the current, unstable global monetary equilibrium is inevitable. Recent events indicate that the countdown has begun…
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/john-butler/countdown-collapse
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