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Pew Research:

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.

Unsurprisingly, it's a combination of Bush era policies and the recession, which caused higher rates of unemployment working in tandem with plummeting home values in Hispanic and black neighborhoods.

As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009, the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth and the typical white household had $113,149.

Moreover, about a third of black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 29% for blacks, 23% for Hispanics and 11% for whites.

It's the "why" that's concerning. Plummeting home values took a far higher toll on minorities. Jack and Jill Politics:

What the study makes clear is that the wealth of most black folks and Hispanics is in their homes, whereas the wealth of whites is much more diversified in stocks and other things. So when the value of a black or Hispanic family’s home goes through the floor, that pretty much wipes us out financially because we have nothing else to fall back on. Now add to that a bit of history, referring of course to all those vicious subprime loans that screwed so many families who wound up losing their homes to what was essentially a Wall Street invention.

Minorities are also subject to exploitive financial schemes, like payday lending and ridiculous car loans. Colorlines reports:

But that’s still more symptom than root cause. Black and Latino families are also far more likely to live in places crawling with expensive, deceptive consumer lending of all sorts, from car loans to refinance mortgages. They are more likely to turn to that lending because they make less money and because they already hold less wealth to cushion themselves in tough times. It’s an ugly cycle: inequality across the economy creates demand for predatory credit to bridge the gap, which in turn worsens inequality.

Is it any wonder Republicans are taking aim at any regulation of the financial industry, given how they've benefitted from it? It certainly casts a shiny light on their efforts to gut the CFPB.

Sidenote: TheGrio has an article with ideas for how minorities can take control of their finances and fight back on their own. And as long as I'm linking it, I'd like to give a big congratulations to my friend Joy-Ann Reid of The Reid Report for being hired as The Grio's managing editor, which will also involve appearances as an analyst on MSNBC. Congratulations!

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute "red alert" at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn't told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50

According to the latest campaign finance report, Wal-Mart has spent more than $280,000 trying to overturn one local ordinance. This makes this little local election the most expensive in Flagstaff's history. The Wal-Mart money is spent on full-page newspaper ads and mailings, both full of vicious Orwellian rhetoric implying that a zoning ordinance that limits store size is somehow the same as burning books. Yeah, go figure.

So, when H. Lee Scott Jr. says that Wal-Mart doesn't do that sort of thing anymore, he's a liar....I'm so surprised.

I'm the editor of Progressive Congress News Transit & Urban Development feed. This is the first in a weekly series of topical posts on cities and the roads & rails that connect them.

Trains are a highly-developed, widely-used, and very popular form of transportation -- a strange choice of culture war for the right. Yet hatred of trains, especially ones that run on time, is a pronounced theme of Mrs. Rand's Bible of selfish economic wisdom. After decades of gestation in Hollywood development hell, Atlas Shrugged Part I will soon star star Vice President Joe Biden as Dagny Taggart, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood as Hank Rearden, and Florida Governor Rick Scott as Wesley Mouch.

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I find urban studies fascinating, which is perhaps why it was a concentration back when I was in school. To me--perhaps because I have lived in big cities most of my life--finding ways to reform city government, bring transparency, better deliver services and improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas is a passion, because I think there are so many possibilities (especially with today's technology) for making people's lives better by rising up to meet these challenges.

This is why I am thrilled to be working with the City Forward initiative. What is City Forward? It is a tool that pulls public data from urban centers on different issues (user specified) and displays it in customizable graphs.

For example, users can create an ‘exploration’ for important environmental issues such as water usage in multiple cities, and then have it displayed in charts that will visually present the data in a way that people can understand it. These charts allow anyone to make a case or tell a story about what one city or many cities are doing to improve in an areas such as this one, and what others are neglecting.

In other words, in addition to being groundbreaking in its potential applications, its a pretty cool tool for improving government transparency and letting people access public records in a useful, understandable way.

You can go to the site and see what explorations have already been done in cities across the world, and come up with some of your own. And you can encourage your city to share data with the initiative, to fight for the kind of improvements we all need, and quite frankly, deserve.

This is just provides another way to bring some light into the often dark corners of government, while improving our everyday lives. Not a bad thing in today's world, for sure.

Follow Cliff Schecter on Twitter: @cliffschecter

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Howard Dean made the sharpest comparison yet between what the protesters in Egypt are standing for, why they're standing for it, and why we should pay attention to similar circumstances in this country. His key point is toward the middle of the video, where he says this:

The fact of the matter is when social inequality and wage inequality gets too large, you have social instability. we are in a position now where we are in trouble in this country. I wouldn't say we could be Egypt next week, but people really are disillusioned by the government and corporations. They don't trust any institution very much, and that's why. I think the President missed a chance to say that in front of the Chamber. he would have gotten i think a lot of credit from the American people if he had.

I don't agree that saying it to the Chamber would have gotten a lot of credit from the American people. I doubt most people would even know he'd said it, and if they did, it would have been so twisted up that it would have played as a negative, given today's environment. But what Governor Dean says about inequality is right on the money.

Granted, in this country we have elections. Egypt doesn't. And in this country we have free speech and ostensibly, freedom of the press. Egypt doesn't. Finally, in this country there is still a social safety net, which Egypt does not have. In those respects, we are much different from Egypt. But when it comes to income and wealth inequality, the US surpasses Egypt, and it has indeed fostered mistrust in government and business.

Further, the Citizens United decision lends itself to further distrust, because the corporate "person's" voice will carry farther and louder than any one citizen will. Look no further than the Koch Brothers' bought-and-paid-for Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. Never in my lifetime has there been a more obvious subversion of democracy than the 2010 midterm elections. I know this isn't news to many of you reading this, but it really is important for our "side" to begin to shift the conversation away from the right-wing tropes and come around to a real discussion of what "redistribution of wealth" means, what it is, what it isn't, and why the last 30 years represent a consistent governmental redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the upper tier.

While I don't necessarily think a speech at the United States Chamber of Commerce would be the place for that, I do see that message lacking overall from what we're hearing from the White House. 99ers should be interviewed on The Last Word, to tell their side of what it's like to be "downsized" and have wealth redistributed to the corporations who "downsized" them to begin with. Prosperity and recovery shouldn't be measured by what the Dow closes at, but by whether more people can afford to put food on the table without government or charitable assistance.

Bob Herbert's editorial in today's New York Times says it far better than I:

Corporate profits and the stock markets are way up. Businesses are sitting atop mountains of cash. Put people back to work? Forget about it. Has anyone bothered to notice that much of those profits are the result of aggressive payroll-cutting — companies making do with fewer, less well-paid and harder-working employees?

For American corporations, the action is increasingly elsewhere. Their interests are not the same as those of workers, or the country as a whole. As Harold Meyerson put it in The American Prospect: “Our corporations don’t need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well.”

American workers are in a world of hurt. Anyone who thinks that politicians can improve this sorry state of affairs by hacking away at Social Security, Medicare and the public schools are great candidates for involuntary commitment.

Lawrence and Governor Dean alluded to a very important part of the President's speech yesterday, which Mike Lux wrote about in detail. The president's framing of the importance of government regulations in commerce was excellent and important. Wrapping it all up with a call to patriotism was also excellent and important. But now it's time to move past catering to these Birchers and start calling the entire country to patriotism, which means ending the meme of "me" and beginning a realistic discussion of poverty, inequality, and how best to change that.

Transcript follows (It's the MSNBC transcript that accompanies their video, so all typos, errors and other problems are entirely theirs):

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Dear Senior Citizens,

I know you think Glenn Beck is the new Jesus and the black guy in the Oval Office is a Muslim pretender, but for the love of all that's holy, turn off Fox News and pay attention.

That ad at the top of this post? They LIE. They are LYING TO YOU. Don't believe me? How about Politifact? Or if Politifact doesn't do it for you, how about your own pocketbooks?

Yes, your own pocketbooks. Because in addition to the donut hole closure, those of you who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage will see your premiums drop next year. That's right. Your premiums will go down in 2011.

Medicare officials said they had held down premiums and co-payments by negotiating with insurers, which sponsor the Medicare Advantage plans.

The law, signed by Mr. Obama in March, gave officials new power to negotiate and to reject bids, as they did in a few cases.

“We negotiated more aggressively than in the past,” said Jonathan D. Blum, deputy administrator of the Medicare agency. “As a result, some plans changed their bids to produce more value for beneficiaries.”

“On average,” Mr. Blum said, “Medicare Advantage premiums will be 1 percent lower in 2011 than today. Medicare Advantage plans project that enrollment will increase by 5 percent in 2011.”

Yes, you senior citizens claiming your Medicare is being "cut" need to quit listening to your heroes at Fox News and pay attention to facts. While the rest of us suck up big increases because we don't have the benefit of the federal government negotiating on our behalf, YOU and YOU ALONE will see your premiums go down.

I'd better not see you with a sign saying for government to keep their hands off your Medicare after this. That will make it very difficult for me to respect my elders.

Also, a question for the "repeal and replace" crowd. Who will explain why you want to take premium reductions away from seniors?

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This bus was stranded in Brooklyn long enough to become the target of graffiti artists.

One of my New York-native friends said her relatives were calling the post-blizzard city a "zombie apocalypse."

It's bad enough that NYC has laid off 500 sanitation workers in the last two years (you know, instead of taxing Wall Street) or that there were plows sitting idle because they didn't have enough people to drive them, or that people died because the EMTs couldn't get down their streets.

But that the mayor didn't even bother to call a snow emergency? That's plain crazy.

Make fun of Philly all you want, but by canceling Sunday night's Eagles game, we kept 60,000 cars off the streets at the height of the blizzard that didn't need to be there. Looking at the pictures of New York with abandoned cars and buses everywhere is just surreal. (Of course, Mayor Mike Bloomberg's street was nicely plowed.)

Not to mention, NYC residents couldn't go back to work. Manhattan was cleared, but people couldn't get in to work from the outer boroughs. Wonder how much taxable revenue was lost this week?

This is why it's such a bad idea to run government like a business. This isn't a business, it's a government. It has to provide basic services, no matter what.

It's probably no secret that Wall Street has the same attitude toward New York City that they have toward the rest of the country: "You're lucky to have us." That's why, instead of taxing them, Bloomberg bends over backwards to make them happy. After all, they might move to New Jersey!

So Bloomberg keeps cutting. He laid off 500 sanitation workers and privatized much of the snow plow operations. Guess what? Plows sat idle because employees of the private contractors were on vacation during the holiday.

Harry Nespoli, head of the sanitation workers union, warned of potential problems back in October:

Better hope for a warm winter because the number of city sanitation workers has dipped so low that they might not be able to handle a big snowstorm, union officials say.

"The city is rolling the dice," said Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association. "We're noted as the best snow-fighters throughout the world."

The city has hired only 200 sanitation workers since 2008, but hundreds more have retired, Nespoli said.

There are fewer than 5,800 sanitation workers on the job, compared with 6,216 one year ago and 6,473 in 2008. And there are no immediate plans to hire new sanitation workers before the winter.

"We're going to do the best that we can with what we have, but it might take longer to dig out the city," the union chief said.

"We cover more than 6,300 miles during a major storm. That's like going to California and back twice."

Yes, the city not only laid off hundreds of sanitation workers, they put the supervisors back on the street and made them take a $5000 pay cut. (Not great for morale, since landlords don't offer a rent cut.)

District Council 37 came up with its own list of ideas, saying the city could generate more than $500 million a year by cracking down on uncollected taxes and reducing the number of city contracts.

"Layoffs of any city worker will end up costing the city money," said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

"Layoffs in the city's Department of Finance are particularly self-defeating. These are revenue-generating positions. The millions in tax revenue that goes uncollected because the Department of Finance is understaffed amount to tax breaks for the wealthy," Roberts said.

Hmm. Bug -- or feature?

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Another bus stranded in Bushwick.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is now taking the blame. (For someone who loves to grade the public schools and attack teachers, he's curiously reluctant to criticize his streets commissioner -- who, I'm told, had his own street plowed all the way to the blacktop as soon as the storm stopped.)

Daily Kos poster HamdenRice says Bloomberg's probably just committed political suicide:

What's so shocking is that we are experiencing the complete collapse of city government. There is no Sanitation Department, which is usually fantastically reliable during snow storms. EMS is paralyzed in responding to most streets. There's no Access A Ride, and the police have disappeared. There is no mass transit out here in a city that depends on it more than any city in America.

This isn't a minor failure. The collapse of city infrastructure in my part of the outerboroughs -- and from what I've read on line in parts of Brooklyn -- is comparable to what happened in New Orleans during Katrina. I don't want at all to equate what's happening to the people here to what happened there -- but I do want to compare the bizarre collapse or withdrawal of services due to incompetence.

What's worse, is that none of this was necessary. All Bloomberg had to do was let the system run the way it always runs. Declare a snow emergency and let the Sanitation Department do its thing. For inexplicable reasons he's been trying to defend, he didn't declare a snow emergency. Apparently, rumor is that another aspect of Bloomberg's spectacular incompetence was that he redeployed plows that would usually be out here and in Brooklyn, into Manhattan so they could be plowed even more frequently than normal.

Oh, and by the way? Compare and contrast. Here's the mayor's street in Manhattan, Monday afternoon, and a street in Rego Park, Queens:

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Mayor Bloomberg's street.

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Waiting for the plowman. Rego Park, Queens.

People’s Blog for the Constitution: Don't be distracted by body scanners: Government spying and the Fourth Amendment

his vorpal sword: A Nation of Koch Suckers?

Angry Bear: Thoughts on Detroit

Brilliant at Breakfast: I don't want to hear ANY Republicans invoking 9/11 EVER AGAIN

INSTAPUTZ:: American Government 101

DownWithTyranny!: Thurber Tonight: The series to date

I've written many times that movement Conservatism as it has evolved since the 'New Right' began during Goldwater's days and morphed into the Abramoff/Norquist/Reed triad of Conservatism implemented with the College Republicans of the 80's has destroyed the American political system that we are now witnessing under President Obama. Digby linked up this great post via Balkinization that describes how the GOP has become an ideologically purified party that lives off of obstructionism and in doing so, America in the end is suffering at their hands and instead of being vilified for their behavior, is being rewarded. I tried to explain this to a board member of the LA Press Club last month, but wasn't as succinct as JB is here. My colleague wondered if the Left was behaving just like Conservatives and I explained how we were not. The media is to blame for large portions of even journalists not to understand what has happened under Obama so quickly.

Digby writes:

One thing is clear, unless the Democrats recognize that things have changed, we might as well just order up some tri-corner hats and join the Tea party because they will be the only game in town:

Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System

Many commentators have noted and bemoaned the obstructionist tactics of the Republicans during Obama's first two years in office, and the likely gridlock that will emerge once the Republican Party takes control of the House of Representatives. To be sure, in today's Washington Post, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell state that they are ready and even eager to work with the Democrats. Despite these assertions of good fellowship, however, it seems clear by now that the Republicans are willing to work with the Democrats only if the Democrats put aside all of their preferred policy goals and more or less adopt the policy goals of the Republican Party. President Obama's recent decision to unilaterally freeze the salaries of federal workers is unlikely to soften the hearts of the Republican faithful and get them to accept a second stimulus package or anything else on the Democrats' wish list. Quite the contrary, this unbargained for concession is likely to make the Republican leadership increase the pressure on President Obama to negotiate with himself.

I want to put concerns about obstruction and gridlock in a larger perspective. What we are facing today is likely to be importantly different from previous periods of divided government before the George W. Bush Administration. The reason is that at the national level, contemporary American politics suffers from a pathological and debilitating condition: the emergence of parliamentary parties in a presidential system.

[...]

One should not assume that Congressional Republicans are acting this way because of bad faith or some set of personal failings. Rather, given the evolution of the Republican Party into an ideologically coherent parliamentary-style party in a presidential system, the Republicans are acting rationally. The Democrats, conversely, need to understand that they must work hard to break the Republicans' united front. They will not be able to do this simply by being nice to Republicans, or by attempting to meet the Republicans half-way, for if the Republicans are smart, they will not be assuaged by compromise. Their best strategy is to make Americans thoroughly disgusted with government in general, so that they will throw Barack Obama out of office in 2012. If the Democrats want to achieve anything legislatively in the next few years, they must create strategic problems for individual Republicans, causing them to break ranks despite the best efforts of the Republican leadership. The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party so.

The next time the Democrats become the minority party, they will have abundant incentives to do precisely what the Republicans are doing now, precisely because the Republicans have shown these strategies to be effective in a climate of ideological polarization. The Republicans fully developed many of their current tactics before the Democrats for three reasons. First, the failure of the Bush presidency and the tarnishing of the Republican brand made the development of these oppositional strategies more urgent for the Republicans following Obama's 2008 victory, when the Democrats controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress. Second, the Republicans became a more ideologically coherent party more quickly than the Democrats did because they continue to be driven by a powerful conservative social movement. Third, the Republicans have learned how to use campaign finance to discipline their members more effectively than the Democrats have. (In fact, the Democrats, eager to regain power, had recruited a more ideologically diverse group of candidates in 2006 and 2008). But there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power.

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don't want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing --- the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate. Read the whole piece, it's not long and it explains how we got here and why it's a problem for a presidential system. (For instance, you can't call for elections when gridlock makes it impossible to govern.) And although he doesn't mention it, it's also why silly centrist notions like this are destined to do nothing but split the same party that's already outmatched by the hardcore Republicans, thus ensuring that the lunatic fringe of the GOP will continue to have the upper hand.

Unfortunately for the working class of this country, by the time they realize what has happened they may lose bedrock programs like Social Security and Medicare or see significant cuts to all the benefits they thought were guaranteed. JB didn't include the rise of right wing media machines like FOX News and Rush Limbaugh because without an incredible messaging system, the formation of the Tea Party movement which has insured party purification of the right would never have happened in such a short period of time.

With the media imbalance in place, if the Democratic Party acted in the same way if for instance the GOP takes over the White House in 2012, then you probably would see angry mobs with torches and pitch forks descending upon Democrats for not allowing the GOP to enact every anti-New Deal practice they demand.

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HuffPo's Investigative Fund has come up with a sharp story on the ever-expanding tax lien investment market, which you'll be surprised to know is just another way for Wall Street to gouge American taxpayers. Here are the relevant parts:

Nearly a dozen major banks and hedge funds, anticipating quick profits from homeowners who fall behind on property taxes, are quietly plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses that collect the debts, tack on escalating fees and threaten to foreclose on the homes of those who fail to pay.

The Wall Street investors, which include Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., have purchased from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on several hundred thousand properties, many in distressed housing markets, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found. [...]

Some states allow the investors to tack on as much as 18 percent interest and a passel of legal fees and other charges. When property owners fail to make full payment, the investors can sue to foreclose - in some states within as little as six months. [...]

Years ago, the big banks left the buying of tax liens largely to local real estate specialists and small-time investors. These days, banks and hedge funds, stung by the failure of many speculative investments, see tax liens as a relatively safe option that can yield returns of around 7 percent.

Some banks also are packaging tax liens as securities - in a similar way to how unpaid home loans are securitized - and selling them to investors.

So broke local governments, instead of taking the time to collect taxes properly, are essentially forking over people behind on their taxes to Wall Street, where they'll have the lovely choice of paying off their taxes at usurious interest rates or losing their house to the banks that bought their tax liens. This is a great investment for banks since, even in this horrible real estate market, they can make a significant profit from selling someone's home for the relatively low price of paying off one year's worth of property taxes to the government. Either way, it's KA-CHING, KA-CHING, KA-CHING!

For those interested in learning more about how to become a financial vulture, I found this swell how-to video posted by the National Association of Tax Lien Investors. Note the sociopathic disregard for human suffering throughout it:

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