Indicators of America’s domination by the wealthy:
• America’s Economic Power Elite constitute a plutocracy — government by the extremely wealthy – that wields unprecedented power and manipulates elected and appointed officials. Stripped of the “camouflage dressing” of their sub-groupings — e.g., political, governmental, religious, social – the class looks like a monarchy. Their kin and kind remain in the upper echelon and their lower echelon counterparts remain at the bottom.
• Historically, monarchies have not fostered higher levels of education for the masses because they understood that people without education are easily exploited. In America, for example, America’s poor transfer huge amounts of personal and tax-payers’ money into the coffers of the middle and upper classes –e.g., through welfare payments, special/alternative education programs, low-wage jobs, and the criminal justice system. During one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression, the Koch brothers gained $33 billion in three years.
• Schools, communities, institutions, states, and the nation continue to fail in educating poor children, especially poor Black children; nevertheless, people with good intentions still attack Truth, thus protecting ineffective systems, outdated concepts and mal-intentioned, incompetent, self-serving leaders.
In a true democracy, people receive what they deserve, justly benefiting from outcome fairness. Efforts to gain outcome fairness relevant to America’s assertions that our government was instituted among the people to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must consider past iniquities practiced and tolerated by our national, state and local governments. When obstacles caused by past injustices are removed, opportunities to acquire adequate resources for decent living will apply across all population groups and extend into coming generations. However, past crimes against descendants of America’s Slave Class have not been remediated.
Resources necessary for decent living can be distributed/acquired through Merit, Power, Equality, Need, and Effort. Merit, when secured only through societal status, and Power, what one can wrest, used to conflict with American’s ideals on Equality, Need and Effort. Today, Merit and Power have driven Need and Equality to insignificance in policy-making.
Merit is a positive concept in real democracies; but America has become negatively meritocratic for certain clearly defined sub-groups. The fact that more minorities are among the elite has led to the “wrong-headed” conclusion that everyone now has an equal opportunity to compete for the wherewithal to rise above mean at-birth circumstances.
Initiatives that attempt to force legitimate equality of opportunity through such programs as Affirmative Action are considered by many to be giving people more than they deserve or could earn through their own effort and, therefore, are un-American.
Economic stratification, the opposite to classlessness, is now accepted. Educational attainment, always important, has become the overriding — for many, the exclusive — predictor of citizens’ upward mobility. Access to high-quality/high-quality education; success in such an education; and the resultant upward movement are tied to family income. At more than 50%, African-Americans constitute the nation’s highest proportion in poverty.
The Black-white wealth gap is 30% to 40% larger today than it was 30 years ago and is now nearly twice as large as the more heavily touted educational achievement gap based on race.
The gap between wealthy Blacks and poor Blacks is also exceedingly wide.
The disparities in standardized test scores and college completion rates between affluent and low-income students have nearly doubled since the 1960s.
College completion is the single most important predictor of economic success. In 1979, the average college graduate earned 38% more than the average high school graduate. The comparable figure today is nearly 80%.
In 2012, 45% of dependent 18- to 24-year-olds from the lowest income quartile enrolled in college as compared with 81% of those with family incomes over $108,000.
In 2013, 77% of adults from families in the top income quartile had earned at least bachelor’s degrees by the time they turned 24, as compared with only 9% of people from the lowest income bracket. Nearly 100% percent of students from top-earning families complete their degrees.
The decline in opportunities for upward mobility is not universally fatal. Although achieving significant rises in overall group averages, i.e., all African Americans aggregated – often called the Black Community, is not going to happen, individual diligence and perseverance applied in the acquisition of societally valued assets will change success rates even for descendants of America’s worst historic injustice — slavery and racism. The highest levels of respect, honor, and earnings have always gone and will continue to go to individuals who acquire society’s most highly-valued resources – neurosurgeons over street-sweepers.
Wishing, hoping, and even praying it were different will not make it so; only the individual can accomplish that feat through a change in behavior. This adage pertains to the leaders of the downtrodden and to the downtrodden themselves: If you keep on doing what you have always done you will keep on getting what you have always gotten.
