The following is an interview of me (MDY) conducted by Cedric Muhammad (CM), who is an aide to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, the National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. An abbreviated version of the interview appears in The Final Call, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper. It is available at http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Business_amp_Money_12/article_100637.shtml.
CM: What do you feel are the dominant economic issues and challenges of the day?
MDY: This would take a book-length answer! Here, let me briefly discuss four issues and challenges. First, and here I speak just of the United States, we still confront an enormous racial divide. Black Americans, nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, still have lower incomes, wealth, and wages than do whites. Their pay is inferior to that of whites, even for the same work, and they are more likely to be poor. They are less likely to own homes, and their rental housing is more likely to be substandard. Their unemployment rates are typically double those of whites. Despite the fact that the gap between the amount of schooling of black and white men and women has narrowed dramatically, the economic rewards to this education have not narrowed proportionately. Black men and women comprise a remarkably higher share of the prison population than do whites. They face lower life expectancies and higher rates of infant mortality. That these differences continue to exist and show no signs of disappearing speaks volumes about the nature of U.S. society. This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It is unconscionable that its goals have yet to be realized.
Second, the rapid growth worldwide of inequality in wealth and income within almost every nation and between rich and poor countries has made the world a playground for the wealthy and a house of horrors for the poor. In the United States, for example, of the total gain in household incomes between 1979 and 2007, 60 percent went to the richest 1 percent of individuals, while just 8.6 percent accrued to the poorest 90 percent. Productivity in the economy has risen dramatically and people are working hard, but the gains from this have gone to a minuscule minority of super-rich individuals. This makes a sham of democracy, greatly reduces economic mobility, gives rise to hopelessness among the have-nots, increases social tensions and insecurities, and leads to a host of physical and mental illnesses. With vicious cuts in social welfare spending, probable reductions in social security and Medicare benefits, and continuing de-unionization, we can expect inequality to worsen further. The economic future of most of the people in the United States and in the world does not look bright. In addition, the gap between the world’s richest and poorest countries continues to grow, with the most powerful nations stealing, in consort with the elites in poor places, the wealth of the “wretched of the earth.”
Third, there is a crisis of employment. The fraction of the labor force in the United States either fully unemployed, working part-time involuntarily, or too discouraged to even seek work has exceeded 14 percent since 2009, which is more than twenty million people. And this excludes those in prison, the homeless, and most persons receiving disability income. Those with jobs labor for wages that have stagnated for forty years; today nearly 30 percent of all jobs pay a wage that would not support a family of four at the official poverty level of income. More than 200 million persons are unemployed worldwide, and another nearly 500 million employed persons cannot purchase basic necessities. Youth employment prospects are especially bad, with unemployment rates for those under twenty-five reaching 50 percent and more in developed countries such as Spain and Greece. In the United States, the unemployment rate for those sixteen through nineteen hovers around 25 percent, while the rate for those twenty through twenty-four is more than 13 percent.
Fourth, we are in the midst of a catastrophic environmental crisis, caused in large part by the relentless quest for profits by global corporations. The problems include global warming, soil erosion, air and water pollution, over-fishing, and species extinctions, all of which threaten our food and water supplies, as well as our habitable land mass. These will impact the poorest people the most, increasing inequality still further. Most scientists agree that we have very little time to address these issues before they become irreversible.