Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: America's Growing Racial Wealth Divide Endangers Nation's Future Economic Health

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

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America's Growing Racial Wealth Divide Endangers Nation's Future Economic Health

Posted July 26, 2017

Interview with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, director of the Corporation for Enterprise Development’s Racial Wealth Divide Initiative, conducted by Scott Harris

[This interview was originally broadcast on Aug. 24, 2016.] With a succession of sometimes shocking smart phone videos revealing widespread police violence targeting people of color across America and the parallel rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, U.S. corporate media has focused new attention on the issue of America's racial divide in policing and criminal justice. But rarely do journalists or politicians address the critical and related issue of racial wealth inequality.

Now a new study has been published putting into sharp focus the growing divide between the wealth of white, African American and Latino families, titled, “The Ever-Growing Gap: Without Change, African American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries,” The report, jointly published by the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Institute for Policy Studies, “examines the growing racial wealth divide for black and Latinos households and the ways that accelerating concentrations of wealth at the top compound and exacerbate this divide. The authors also “consider the impact public policy has had in contributing to the racial wealth divide and how new policies can close this gap.”

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with one of the reports' four authors, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, director of Corporation for Enterprise Development's Racial Wealth Divide Initiative. Here, Asante Muhammad discusses the major findings of the report and the ways in which wealth disparity along racial lines affects the social fabric of America and its people. [Rush transcript.]

DEDRICK ASANTE-MUHAMMAD: Well, the overall point of the report – and I'll give you the kind of numbers that everybody used – is just that oftentimes when people think about race and racial inequality, they say well, "Look, America's made a lot of progress and it's true that things have changed from 50 or 100 years ago, and that thoes things may not be moving as fast as people would like on a path getting toward racial equality." And what this report is showing is that as it relates to racial economic inequality, that is not true. We are on a path to ever-growing racial economic inequality.

One of the numbers that is most often cited from the report is that if white wealth were to freeze, not grow at all, it would take over 200 years for African Americans to reach the average wealth of white Americans. It would take Latinos over 80 years to reach the wealth of whites, if wealth were frozen today for whites and kept growing at the rate that black-Latino wealth has been growing for the last 30 years. In 2013, African Americans and Latinos had wealth that was about $500,000 less than white wealth. And in 2043, 30 years from 2013, African Americans and Latinos will have about oa million dollars less in wealth, if they continue as they have been for the last 30 years. So we are on a path of great racial economic inequality.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Review for our audience, if you would, the causes of institutional inequality for African Americans and Latinos that includes a harsh look at mortgage lending policies, government benefits, pay discrimination and the like.

DEDRICK ASANTE-MUHAMMAD: What many people fail to realize is that the United States as a middle-class economy is not something that has been true since the founding of the country. It's really something that started post-Great Depression with the New Deal and World War II, and that America became a middle-class economy. It really was white America that became a middle-class economy with massive government investment that, again, you saw in the New Deal and in programs related to World War II, like the GI Bill, which greatly helped cover the costs of higher education. Connected in the GI Bill, too, is massive home ownership opportunities and what happened of course obviously at that time – you had great legal racial segregation. African Americans weren't able to take advantage of that in the same way – Native Americans, a smaller number of Latinos in the country also weren't able to take advantage of those opportunities.

And so, we had a fairly progressive economy where those who were at the bottom were growing at rates equal to, if not growing faster, than higher-income America. But then after the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement, and African Americans and people of color as a whole had fought to become more inclusive of government policy, we saw a lot of these government investments no longer existing or being cut back. And you saw an overall regressive economy.

So, there hasn't been an opportunity. America has never invested in the middle-class economy that was inclusive to all and that is one of the main reasons you see the great disparity that still exists today. We also see that for the last 30 years, America has been an economy where the rich get richer and the middle-class and lower-income are losing ground. And that's been affecting everyone and that has helped to solidify and strengthen racial economic inequality.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Tell us a bit about the policy prescriptions that your report recommends for reversing the growing inequality and specifically, racial inequality across the U.S.

DEDRICK ASANTE-MUHAMMAD: Let me first state that oftentimes people hear about these problems, and they think, well we don't have a whole bunch of money to help deal with this issue so there's really no way that we're going to have a policy prescription. But one thing that this report highlights is that America already invests over $600 billion a year in wealth and asset development. The problem is they invest that over half a trillion dollars a year in mostly wealthy people. So actually, America is spending over $600 billion a year in concentrating wealth among the richest. If we could take these different types of tax subsidies for homeownership, for even pensions and make sure that they actually go to much more so low- and moderate-wealth families, then we'd have a system where we're actually investing in those that need wealth development in helping to bridge wealth inequality overall and then have a very strong impact, particularly in the African American and Latino communities.

So we need to stop investing in greater inequality and make those investments go to great equality for all Americans, including African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans who are low wealth.

See the "The Ever-Growing Gap" report and Racial Wealth Divide Resources at cfed.org. Update on July 28, 2017: CFED has been renamed Prosperity Now, found at prosperitynow.org