[pocoloco]

Regarding you feeling that this is engineered, the following could be a reason why if valid:

The dual economy didn’t happen overnight, says Temin. The story started just a couple of years after the ’67 Summer of Love. Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.

America’s underlying racism has a continuing distorting impact. A majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector. Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-r...

[shams93]

That article is not accurate, if you work for a salary you're in poverty. Before 2005 it was not that bad, we saw a major transformation with the downturn. Here in LA the cost of living has swallowed up all but the very highest paid salaries. High taxes in California combined with high rents and high cost of food, education and healthcare make for a brutal combination for working people of all stripes.

[sokoloff]

> if you work for a salary you're in poverty

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I work for a salary and am most assuredly not in poverty. Could you expand a bit on what you meant by that?

[Banthum]

>the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.

So your belief is, the dominant economic-political movement in America regards "preserving the inferior status of blacks" as an end goal in and of itself? Or is this an instrumental goal that somehow serves some other purpose?

[ezrast]

The sentence previous to the one you quoted suggests the political reasoning. Those in power see diversity as a threat to the status quo, and demonizing an enemy has long been a textbook way for demagogues to raise political capital.

[coldtea]

For lots of people in the dominant economic-political elite, it's probably not exactly a goal but an enjoyment in itself. Besides if you're WASP, why you'd want to acknowledge the needs of blacks, or even more, have them as business competitors?

At best, you want their sales and votes -- but even that, not if they vote for their interests and/or more progressively.

Besides the blacks, if not predominantly now, for a lot of time, were also among the poor and working class, which is an even bigger enemy if you want to keep your privileges.

[kaycebasques]

It's phrased funny, but the gist that I got from it (and which seems plausible to me) is that the issue has been framed as involving the "other", and therefore those in power don't care.