Yet Another Vicious Republican Woman Beater

Rich white kid attacks woman with Claw Hammer…

What happens?

It all goes away and he becomes a Republican Party Official.

You got money, and are white…

Stuff that would wind up locking a poor(er) kid away for 20 years to life…Just magically goes away, and you a free to join the white wing criminal cartel.

As a teen, he savagely beat a classmate. The attack was forgotten, until he went into politics

The Republicans of Broward County, Fla., knew little about Rupert Tarsey when he ran for an open slot on the local party’s executive committee. But the young man had some decent political cred.

Before the 2016 presidential election, he told them, he knocked on thousands of doors and got 50 Republicans in the liberal enclave to register to vote to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He worshiped at the same church as the committee’s vice chair and headed a local chapter of the Catholic fraternal group Knights of Columbus. He came from a wealthy California family and followed four generations into a real estate career.

Within months of joining the local party, the 28-year-old was elected secretary in May, defeating two challengers who’d been around longer.

But something felt off about Tarsey for Bob Sutton, chairman of the committee. After a few months, Tarsey went after Sutton’s position, members said, by working to persuade the committee to unseat him. That’s when Sutton started getting phone calls warning him that Tarsey was not quite who he seemed.

“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he said one caller told him.

It wasn’t long before the story of Tarsey’s past unfolded.

It began a decade ago, some 2,700 miles away at the exclusive Harvard-Westlake High School, a private college preparatory academy where tuition this year is $37,100 and which is a magnet for the children of Los Angeles’ elite.

Rupert Ditsworth, a 17-year-old from Beverly Hills, was a senior. One day in May, he finished an Advanced Placement exam and was waiting for a friend when he saw another schoolmate, Elizabeth Barcay. He invited her to lunch in his Jaguar.

They’d known each other for two years and eaten together before. She accepted.

They took the Jaguar to a Jamba Juice and sipped smoothies. After lunch, Ditsworth asked Barcay if she would go with him to mail something on the way back to school. She agreed.

Soon after, according to court records, he drove past a mailbox and detoured to a quiet residential street, parking at a dead-end with the passenger door up against a wall. There, he told Barcay he had thoughts of suicide. She suggested he drive back to school and see a counselor.

Instead, according to court records, he reached inside his backpack, pulled out a claw hammer and started swinging. Ditsworth delivered dozens of crushing blows, smashing Barcay’s nose and leg, splitting her scalp and giving her two black eyes, the records say. Her family said they counted at least 40 visible wounds.

During a struggle, the weapon broke. So Ditsworth grabbed Barcay’s throat and tried to strangle her, she testified during a preliminary hearing.

Barcay said she bit down on his finger to stop the attack. He let go.

“I’m done,” he screamed.

Bloody and wounded, Barcay managed to escape from the car before collapsing in front of a nearby home.

She survived the attack, emerging with fierce resolve. Five days later, she went to prom — in a wheelchair — and was crowned queen, the high school’s student newspaper reported at the time. Barcay could not be reached for comment for this article.

Prosecutors filed three felony charges against her attacker: one count of attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. If convicted of those charges, Ditsworth was facing the rest of his life behind bars.

But he never spent a day in jail.

What followed instead was a series of moves that gave the teenager a near-clean criminal slate, allowing him to reinvent himself in Florida.

“When you have a lot of money, you can kind of get away with stuff,” said Celeste Ellich, vice chair of the Broward County Republican Party, who had supported Tarsey’s secretary bid before she knew about his past. “They thought they had it buried.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ed Nison, who prosecuted the case in California, told The Times that because Ditsworth was relatively young, had no prior record and suffered from psychiatric issues, putting him in jail “would not serve the purpose that it’s supposed to serve.”

“The goal was to avoid a reoccurrence of this kind of behavior,” Nison said. “And simply locking him up wouldn’t have done anything to prevent future behavior under these circumstances.”

But at the time, others saw the situation differently.

“You should have gone to prison,” David Barcay, the victim’s father, told Ditsworth at a dramatic court hearing in 2010. “Instead, you’re going to school and making friends and enjoying the outdoors and posing for pictures with your fraternity brothers with paintball guns in army fatigues …. You have moved to Florida and created a life that has allowed you to forget.”… The Rest Here…

 

Black Financial Literacy

This Rev is right in terms of teaching FInancial Literacy and responsibility. What he misses is that The New Jim Crow is designed specifically to prevent the ability of Minorities to gain, and/or hang on to wealth.

So, in order for greater financial accumulation to work, it has to be a two part struggle, One to teach and educate folks about handling personal finances, and educating them on the ways to save, budget, and two a sustained effort to destruct individual pieces of th The New Jim Crow – using that financial wealth.

Why are you still banking at that Wells Fargo/Giant Bank which is redlining you, consigning you to high priced loans, and has outrageous fees? It is a lot more than just “budgeting”.

The Rev’s numbers are low on the Financial contribution of African Americans to the US economy…It is actually closer to $2 trillion.

WATCH: African-American pastor preaches financial literacy as gospel: “What are we doing with the money that we have?”

Rev. DeForest B. Soaries promotes financial planning as a way out of poverty

The Rev. DeForest B. Soaries is more than the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. He shares a personal financial curriculumwith black churches nationwide, believing that a way to solve poverty in black communities involves taking into account personal values.

“The culture really has induced this idea that you can spend more,” Soaries said during a recent episode of “Salon Talks. “I lived that way for years; for 13 years I was paying last month’s bills with next week’s check. For 13 years I was getting calls from bill collectors.”

Added Soaries: “Then I realized that I had to start tracking my spending; I had to live within means. I had to have a budget. I couldn’t live as if I made $30,000 just because I had a $25,000 job and a $5,000 credit limit on my credit card.”

Soaries shared his “catalytic moment,” a realization he had after his grandmother, a sixth-grade graduate who had raised six children and served as a caregiver to her invalid husband, passed away:

“The first house I owned, I inherited from my grandmother, and at her grave I said . . .  if she could accrue enough wealth to leave three houses debt free and leave one to me, shame on me with all of my civil rights and my college degrees and my big church if all I have to leave when I die is credit card bills,” Soaries said.

Black Enterprise contributor John Burnett added, “We have to change the mindset of the people now and also create a sort of like a ecosystem for our youth so that way we can really shape future outcomes.”

Encouraging people to make wise financial choices, Soaries asked: “What are we doing with the money that we have?” He said, “The check-cashing joints are there but they don’t force us to use them,” adding that many “black people either have no bank account  . . . which means we still use payday loans.”

Declared Soaries: “African Americans who will spend $1.2 trillion this year — we have within our hands the means to do better.”

Catch more of our conversation about how to raise financial outcomes in the black community on Salon.

 

 

Obama Crushes Republican Economic Myth

I have a feeling President Obama is going to cut loose after the Democratic Convention…

 

Restating the Obvious – Why the 1% Are White

In case anyone missed the class…

 

400 Richest Americans Have More Wealth than black or Hispanic people

Extreme income inequality…

America’s 100 Richest People Control More Wealth Than the Entire Black Population

It’s well known that America’s wealthiest have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class. But the trend looks even starker when you look at the racial aspects. According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the combined wealth of those on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest dwarfs that of the nation’s entire black or Latino populations.

The report found that the 100 richest US citizens control about as much wealth as all of the nation’s 42 million African Americans. The total wealth of the nation’s 55 million Latinos stacks up to that of the 186 richest Americans.

 

The Housing Bust and the Destruction of Black Wealth

The 2005 Housing bust destroyed more black wealth than any event in American HIstory since slavery.

 

Black Americans Would Have Been Better Off Renting Than Buying

The first several years of the 21st century were relatively good ones for the housing market—at least on the surface. Homeownership climbed to around 70 percent, and all that demand meant lots of new construction and increasing home equity for existing owners. If someone was lucky enough to buy and sell before the market went bust, or if their home wasn’t in an area with catastrophic value loss, they probably increased their net worth just by keeping a roof overhead. Unless they were black.

“Becoming a homeowner was not a fruitful asset accumulation strategy for low- and moderate-income black families in the 2000 decade, in either the short- or medium-term,” write Sandra J. Newman and C. Scott Holupka, authors of a new study from Johns Hopkins University.

To come to that conclusion they looked at data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a representative survey of 5,000 American families. They find that white Americans with low net worth who bought during the boom years made out much better than black Americans who had the same timing and similar financial circumstances. Black families who bought in 2005 lost almost $20,000 of net worth by 2007, according to the paper. By 2011 those losses were more like $30,000. White homeowners didn’t have quite the same problem. Those who purchased in 2007 saw their net worth grow by $18,000 in two years, and then those gains eroded, leaving them with an increase of $13,000 by 2011. All told, the black families lost, on average, 43 percent of their wealth.

That news is perhaps to be expected given the inequities that exists in the housing market, including the quality of financing people have access to and the prospects of the neighborhoods they are buying into. The researchers note that neighborhood location, predatory loan practices, and how long families were able to hold on to homes all likely played a role in how white and black families fared during the early aughts.

Newman and Holupka also investigated how black families would have fared if they had chosen to rent instead of buy. In order to do that, they took a look at the net worth (that is all assets minus all liabilities) for families that did have a mortgage and families who didn’t. Generally, net worth for renters increases marginally each year—as workers get raises, or families pay down debt. For first-time homebuyers, those increases can be much faster, thanks to both the acquisition of a large asset and home value appreciation. But they found that in general black families would have been better off if they hadn’t bought homes at all.

According to the data white families who rented would have ultimately gained $6,600 between 2005 and 2011—less than they earned as homeowners, but still a nice gain. But for black families the choice to rent instead of buy could have moved them from negative to positive net worth. In two years, between 2005 and 2007, wealth would have increased to $1,300, and it would have hit $2,700 by 2011.

Those gains, to be certain, aren’t astronomical, but they are also certainly more promising than the tens of thousands in disproportionate losses that black homeowners experienced and are still trying to overcome. For black homeowners, there were never enough financial gains to offset the massive losses they sustained. But sadly, renting may not be much of a solution. In most places, rent just keeps on rising, which means fewer options for families already struggling to build wealth.

 

Bill Maher – Who is More Successful – Obama or Romney?

Interesting viewpoint…

 

 

 

1 in 7 Americans Now on Food Stamps

No jobs…no food. The wealth gap moves into dangerous territory in the US.

1 in 7 Americans rely on food stamps

The use of food stamps has increased dramatically in the U.S., as the federal government ramps up basic assistance to meet the demands of an increasingly desperate population.

The number of food stamp recipients increased 16% over last year. This means that 14% of the population is now living on food stamps. That’s about 43 million people, or about one out of every seven Americans.

In some states, like Tennessee, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oregon, one in five people are receiving food stamps. Washington, D.C. leads the nation, with 21.5% of the population on food stamps.

“The high unemployment rate caused the high participation rate,” said Dottie Rosenbaum from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.

But it’s not just the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.8%that’s driving the increase in food stamp use. Some states are expanding their definitions of poverty to include more people.

At the same time, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act boosted annual funding to the nationwide food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, by $10 billion.

The average recipient receives $133 in food stamps per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That amount varies from state to state; in Hawaii the average is $216, while it’s $116 in Wisconsin.

But the Recovery Act funding increased the maximum food stamp benefit by 13.6%, which translates to about $20-24 dollars per person per month.

The U.S. government considers food stamps to be effective stimulus for the economy, because the recipients usually spend them right away.

Idaho saw the biggest increase in its food stamp program, with a spike of 39% compared to last year, followed by Nevada, at 29%, and New Jersey, at 27%.

 

 

 

That Post-Racial America

The demographics of the United States are changing rapidly, making a number of assumptions and stereotypes utterly wrong.  Among them –

You will never see this on Faux news but – More poor now live in the suburbs than in urban environments.

Low-density suburbs

 

The United States is no longer the “Land of Opportunity” – economic upward mobility between generations is lower in the United States than in Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, and France. British kids born to fathers in the bottom fifth of U.K. national earnings have less than a 30 percent chance of ending up in that earning group themselves, while U.S. kids have more than a 40 percent likelihood of remaining stuck at the bottom.

Worse – By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

However – in this here “post racial” America, where we are in vast majority doing worse than our parents…

Segregation Drops to Lowest Level in a Century

America’s neighborhoods became more integrated last year than during any time in at least a century as a rising black middle class moved into fast-growing white areas in the South and West.

Still, ethnic segregation in many parts of the U.S. persisted, particularly for Hispanics.

Segregation among blacks and whites fell in roughly three-quarters of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas as the two racial groups spread more evenly between inner cities and suburbs, according to recent census data.

The findings are expected to be reinforced with fresh census data being released Tuesday on race, migration and economics. The new information is among the Census Bureau’s most detailed releases yet for neighborhoods.

“It’s taken a Civil Rights movement and several generations to yield noticeable segregation declines for blacks,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who reviewed the census data. “But the still-high levels of black segregation in some areas, coupled with uneven clustering patterns for Hispanics, suggest that the idea of a post-racial America has a way to go.”

The race trends also hint at the upcoming political and legal wrangling over the 2010 census figures, to be published in the spring. The data will be used to reallocate congressional districts, drawing new political boundaries. New Hispanic-dominated districts could emerge, particularly for elected positions at the state and local level. States are required under the Voting Rights Act to respect the interests of minority voting blocs, which tend to support Democratic candidates.

Milwaukee, Detroit and Syracuse, N.Y., were among the most segregated, all part of areas in the Northeast and Midwest known by some demographers as the “ghetto belt.” On the other end of the scale, cities that were least likely to be segregated included Fort Myers, Fla., Honolulu, Atlanta and Miami…

 

 

 

White Wealth – Black Debt 1984-2007

This comes from a combination of factors, both within and outside of the control of black wage earners. Income stability is a huge issue in the black community, with unemployment, and long term underemployment being both chronic and 2-3 times the rate experienced by whites. A second factor contributing to this is generational wealth. A third, is simply ignorance about financial investment and handling money. Lastly, is the existence of predatory and racially biased lending, forcing black people to pay considerably more for major loan based purchases such as autos and homes.

The one thing each of us can control is financial literacy.

White Wealth and Black Debt Shot Up in “Growth” Years

The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites has grown by fourfold over the course of Generation X’s lifetime, exploding to $95,000, a study released today found. And the debt burden among African American families has nearly doubled.

The study comes from Brandeis University’s Tom Shapiro, who’s among the pioneers in measuring economic equality by considering overall household wealth—your assets minus your debts—rather than just income. Shapiro’s research team looked at data from a decades-long, national survey of family economics and discovered that, between 1984 and 2007, the wealth gap saw unprecedented growth, as assets among high-income White households shot up while debt among all Black households did the same.

The visuals show it best. This first chart shows median assets by race (charts are from the report):

But a second chart breaks it down by income levels:

So rich White people got really rich at the close of the 21st century. It puts the neo-liberal growth years into a new light–all that growth went into very few pockets. Meanwhile, Black folks’ debt shot up, too, as the lending market got less regulated and more perilous for working families. As Shapiro and his coauthors write:

Among those with no financial assets, credit is often an emergency resource. Summing all assets and debt, one in ten African‐Americans owe at least $3,600, while their debt burden was about half of this in real terms in 1984 ($2000). In sum, many African Americans hold more debt than assets. [Emphasis added]

The problem of debt growth can’t be overstated. Yes, all Americans have drowned in the fees and trap doors federal regulators never thought twice about until this year. But Shapiro’s research points to why financial regulation is about a lot more still: Black neighborhoods in particular are awash in predatory financial products, ranging from subprime home loans to check cashing joints, and that has helped propel a lopsided and unsustainable economic trajectory.