Carolyn Kaster/AP – President Obama speaks in White House briefing room on July 19. Obama said black Americans feel pain after the Trayvon Martin verdict because of a “history that doesn’t go away.”
On August 19, 2013, Zachary A. Goldfarb writes in The Washington Post:
President Obama has only occasionally used his bully pulpit to confront racial inequality in America, even if race inherently has been a backdrop of his tenure as the first black president.
He has, however, made fighting economic inequality a central goal of his presidency, delivering forceful speeches and advocating policies aimed at shrinking the income gap and increasing social mobility.
When he speaks later this month on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Obama will be at the confluence of efforts to reduce racial and economic divisions.
“He wants to create opportunity and to make sure the level playing field is ready for everybody,” said Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s senior advisers and close friends. “If you look at poverty or unemployment, they disproportionately affect people of color. People who don’t have health insurance are disproportionately of color. There is inevitably an overlap in addressing racial equality at the same time you’re trying to create economic empowerment.”
Many of the most overt forms of racial discrimination and bias have faded, but yawning economic gaps have persisted since 1963, and there has been essentially no narrowing of the unemployment gap between blacks and whites. The financial crisis and recession scarred minorities more than any one else.
Fifty years ago, the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Today, it is 6.6 percent for whites and 12.6 percent for blacks. Over the past 30 years, the average white family has gone from having five times as much wealth as the average black family to 61 / 2 times, according to the Urban Institute.
“If you look at 50 years after the 1960s civil rights movement, the most stubborn and persistent challenge when it comes to the nation’s racial challenge remains in the areas of economics and wealth,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
President Obama has failed the American people, especially the poor and propertyless who are increasingly dependent on ever-lower-paying jobs, taxpayer-supported welfare financed through tax extraction and national debt, and charity.
President Obama has yet to declare CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of the non-human productive capital assets of American enterprise as the main culprit to the inability of the 99 percent to expand and strengthen their source of income and increasingly become “customers with money” to purchase the products and services the economy is capable of producing. Never has Obama, during his political career, used the term “ownership” of the means of production to educate the electorate of the necessity to OWN productive capital assets. And without a clear understanding of the problem and a goal projection, there can be no successful PLAN to correct the income and wealth inequality that has resulted ever since American entered the age of the Industrial Revolution, when the nation began its shift from labor intensive production to non-human physical productive capital means of production. Such assets, due to the unjust structure of the financial system, allows the ownership class to continually monopolize ALL future productive capital investment––ownership.
President Obama never has advocated that we must respect the traditional understanding of private property as a natural right, inherent in each person, albeit limited in its exercise. He has failed to declare that the reliance on past savings as the only source of financing for economic growth necessarily means that only those people who can afford to cut consumption and save significantly will receive the benefits of economic growth as investor owners instead of wage or welfare recipients.
President Obama has never once pointed out that as job destroying and labor devaluing technology advances and the scale of economic growth becomes too expensive for the resources of average people, only the rich will own the enterprises that generate the bulk of production. This is the greed or “hoggist” capitalism that is practiced in America. Everyone other than the rich who own capital is limited to wages or sub-economic microenterprises, unless the rich decide to be generous and voluntarily surrender some of their wealth so that others can own productive capital, too.
President Obama is part of the problem in that he has steped into the ranks of those who, within this past savings paradigm, see as the alternative to having a few rich people monopolize ownership to change what “ownership” means. By changing what ownership means, the State (whether the central government or the local community) decides what and how much of the fruits of ownership go to those who hold legal title, and what and how much is distributed in some fashion to others in the local community or the nation at large. This makes title a meaningless concept, abolishes private property, and is socialism, by whatever label.
President Obama needs to acknowledge that if we restrict financing of economic growth to what can be withheld from consumption out of what has been produced in the past, we are necessarily trapped into either capitalism (concentrated private ownership of productive capital) or socialism (concentrated State ownership or control of productive capital).
President Obama needs to see that there is a way out: a source of financing economic growth that does not depend on how much consumption can be reduced.
Instead of using the present value of past reductions in consumption to finance economic growth, it is possible — even preferable — to finance economic growth using the present value of future increases in production. In other words, shift from a “past savings” system, to a “future savings” system.
The focus needs to be on OWNERSHIP CREATION, not JOBS CREATION, which has been Obama’s pitch thus far. Thus the challenge is to reform the system to provide equal opportunity for ALL Americans to acquire ownership of FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets with “FUTURE SAVINGS” (earnings) generated by the investments. Thus, over time EVERY American citizen will be able to accumulate a viable, income-generating capital estate portfolio to provide a second income to their wages earned from job employment or provide a sustainable income without the need to be employed in a job or dependent on welfare or charity.
For solutions see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
This should be the message that President Obama should deliver on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,
