Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Rhitu Chatterjee at NPR reports: How The Pandemic Is Widening The Racial Wealth Gap:
[...] Sixty percent of Black households are facing serious financial problems since the pandemic began, according to a national poll released this week by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That includes 41% who say they've used up most or all their savings, while an additional 10% had no savings before the outbreak.
Latinos and Native Americans are also disproportionately affected by the pandemic's economic impact. Seventy-two percent of Latino and 55% of Native American respondents say their households are facing serious financial problems, compared with 36% of whites. [...]
Even during the economic recovery of recent years, minority groups were lagging behind, says [Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy] Economic Policy Institute. "There were significant racial disparities in wages, significant racial disparities in unemployment, significant racial disparities in the kinds of jobs people held."
Black, Latino and Native American workers were more likely to have jobs that were lost during the pandemic, Wilson says. A Harvard University analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau's Pulse Survey, released in July, found that 58% of Latino and 53% of Black households experienced loss in earnings early in the pandemic. Wilson's own research has shown that Latino workers have been particularly affected by job losses during the pandemic.
TOP COMMENTS • COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
QUOTATION
“We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence - and even start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.” ~~Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem (2011)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Getting ahead of the issue on Iraq:
Elected Democrats have been rightly knocked around for having no leadership instincts, and that's nowhere more visible than on the issue of Iraq. While Democrats in DC and in races around the country want to pretend that Iraq can be trumped by health care and social security, there's just no way that's going to happen. Iraq will be issues number one, two and three on voters' minds.
Now here's the problem. Most DC Democrats I've spoken to are very much against the war, but they're afraid to say so. Afraid to look weak. Afraid that they'll be tarred as peaceniks.
Yet, despite any high-profile opposition to the war, more and more people are turning on Bush's War. And now that polling is showing the American people increasingly disenchanted with the war and agitating for a pullout, more Democrats will feel compelled to take "courageous" stances on the war, now that only 32 percent of the American people approve of it.