Posted on 03/26/2010 6:53:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
WASHINGTON -- The harsh economic reality for black Americans and their national leaders here is that black unemployment is worsening under the policies of the first black president.
The sadder political reality is that these leaders, frustrated that blacks have the highest jobless rate among all other Americans, are going easy on President Obama, with polls showing virtually no decline in black support for him, at least not yet.
Even more depressing, black leaders are still calling for more of the same old economic bromides to deal with black unemployment, unwilling to break with leftist Democratic policies that have made things worse for their own people.
While the national unemployment rate for all Americans is at nearly 10 percent (17 percent if you count people who have given up looking for jobs or work only part time), the black jobless rate stands at 15.8 percent and a lot higher than that in states such as Michigan, New York and California.
Jobless statistics in key sectors of the black population are off the charts for younger blacks. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than half of black males between the ages of 16 and 19 are unemployed.
If George W. Bush -- or any Republican, for that matter -- were still in the White House, black leaders would be pounding the White House for their failure to create more jobs. The nightly news programs would be running nonstop stories about inner-city unemployment and the bleak employment picture among minorities.
But as the jobless numbers worsened in black communities as well as across the country, the complaints among black leaders in Congress were few and far between or at least muted.
A recent front-page headline over a Washington Post story about black unemployment read, "Black Caucus frustrated but reluctant to say so," with the subhead that read, "Lawmakers think Obama should be doing more for African Americans, but they won't criticize him."
But as the situation grows more desperate among black Americans, who are beginning to see little or no evidence that they are benefiting from the nearly $1 trillion the president is spending on the jobs programs he has signed into law, black leaders are beginning to speak up. The first faint glimmers of political unrest are beginning to be seen and heard.
Increasingly disgruntled Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) leaders are now saying that White House officials have taken them for granted, believing that they would not publicly criticize one of their own.
Black leaders admit that they held their tongues and kept quiet in public, despite their frustrations. But as the complaints grew back home about the dismal economic environment blacks face, the feedback is becoming a bit more testy and more critical.
"We concluded they were just kind of listening to us and that then they would go back (to their offices) and conclude that we would do nothing," Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the CBC's vice chairman, told the Post's Michael Leahy. "Because they had concluded there's a black president in the White House and that, to some degree, the Black Caucus, you know, was constrained in expressing its desires. After a while, we said, 'Hey, we see what's going on and it's nothing.'"
Black leaders met privately with Obama earlier this month, but thus far they remain in line with his economic policies, more big-spending jobs bills, higher taxes to pay for them and an increased minimum wage that at $7.25 an hour has priced younger blacks out of the workforce.
And state minimum-wage laws are pushing the hourly wage higher to $8 or more in places such as California, Illinois and Massachusetts, where it is a job killer.
Raising the minimum wage was one of Obama's first economic moves and, to a large degree, is responsible for reducing the number of jobs for unskilled, unemployed blacks who are disproportionately high-school dropouts. As Democrats and Obama have pushed the minimum wage ever higher, entry-level jobs for the unskilled have fallen sharply and black unemployment has grown exponentially.
While Obama spends his time bashing the big banks and the insurance companies and business, the entry-level jobs these black Americans are desperately seeking have disappeared.
Black leaders last week were pushing for more spending on summer youth jobs, government training programs and public-works projects when they should be calling for a lower minimum wage, or a youth differential wage to make them employable again.
When black leaders came out of the White House following their one-hour meeting earlier this month, California Rep. Barbara Lee, who heads the CBC, said, "We talked about the desperation that we're feeling in our communities throughout the country."
That desperation is only going to get worse as long as Barack Obama and black leaders continue to pursue the same old tax-and-spend policies to grow government instead of policies that will grow the private economy.
It’s hopelessness that helps explain it. I once talked to a black South African during apartheid. He told me paraphrased, “Yes, I know communism is a form of oppression and that the ANC is communist. I would rather be oppressed by someone that is my race than by the whites.”
Yep, it’s a sad fact that for many years, black unemployment has been a good bit higher than overall unemployment. In good times and bad times, why is black unemployment so high? What are the real reasons, not the politically correct reasons?
No problem. Just ask Obama for a little something from his ‘stash’.
Yup, 40 years and they still haven't finished high school. I guess you could call that a sloooow learner.
illegals deported,
and minimum wage laws repealed.
No employer is going to pay $7 for a $5 job.
But thanks to the siren song of the racial grievance industry their kids sure will.
But for Whites being jobless is a hoot!
Was there an article last year touting the benefits of being unemployed?
This is one of the great tragedies of Obama.
While it is true that these policies will bring down the rich, the Black community ain’t going anywhere.
Green (which is the complimentary color of red) jobs...
not black jobs.
Keep on doing the same thing you have been doing and you will keep on getting the same thing you have gotten. It is shear stupidity and insanity to think anything else.
“For Blacks, Jobless Rate Brings Desperation”
Desperation to sit on their azzes
OK, to be serious, for both blacks and young whites, they think the ‘work’ ends when the find a ‘job’.
Bottom line, start looking for ‘work’ not a ‘job’.
People will pay anyone to work, and there is plenty of work out there. The paycheck for showing up jobs are gone.
Speaking of STUPID, saw a bit of stupidpak crying about mean ol Pubbies on “tingle up my leg” spitmaker matthews last night.
chicagotribune.com
Research reveals devastating consequences of layoffs, recession
Greg Burns
March 25, 2010
For millions of Americans laid off in the devastating recession, the job search just isn’t clicking.
And here’s the really bad news: Almost no one will be able to recover the financial ground they’ve lost.
That’s the inescapable conclusion from years of academic research into the last big recession, in the early 1980s, and job shocks thereafter.
The findings have trickled out in scholarly papers, gloomy facts buried in technocratic detail.......
www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/ct-biz-0325-burns—20100325,0,2813355.column
A few years ago, a black television actor allegedly made a comment to a gay actor on set (Gray's Anatomy IIRC). The black actor was made to apologize publicly and then he was still fired. A comment I read on FR was that gay people were now more politically protected than black people.
Now we see that liberal thinkers are also more politically protected than black people. If amnesty is passed, Latinos will be more politically protected than black people.
If the black community does not catch on to this soon, they will vote themselves into political irrelevance.
Sorry, but your comparison to hispanics is off base. It is the common claim of the open borders/amnesty caucus that hispanics are great hardworking people with wonderful family values.
There is nothing to back up that claim.
Hispanics in America are duplicating the steps to decline that blacks did. 50% of hispanic children in the US, mostly to illegals, are born outside the family structure. It is getting worse. The gang culture has been pretty much taken over by hispanic youth nationwide. The prison population in areas of illegal alien concentration is disproportionately made up of hispanic criminals. The welfare rolls are increasingly populated by hispanics.
Now before someone accuses me of being a racist in putting forth these facts, I point them out not as a slander on hispanics, many of whom are solid law-abiding Americans, but as a warning that if hispanics follow like lemmings the siren call of the democrat party that blacks have done, they too will be a permanent underclass with total fealty to the democrat party that put them there and keeps them there with “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and the “stash” of cash that keeps them in servitude to the democrat welfare state.
We are importing poverty to the tune of 1.2 million legal immigrants a year. The vast majority of them are poor and uneducated and 87% are minorities as defined by the USG. We don't need any more unskilled and uneducated workers.
The latest data show 22.1 million immigrants holding jobs in the U.S. with an estimated 7 million being illegal aliens. By increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent. Among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent. The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status.
Hispanics have a 50% out of wedlock birthrate and more than 50% are high school dropouts. The proportion of immigrant-headed households using at least one major welfare program is 33 percent, compared to 19 percent for native households. The poverty rate for immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) is 17 percent, nearly 50 percent higher than the rate for natives and their children. Massive low-skill immigration works to counteract government anti-poverty efforts. While government works to reduce the number of poor persons, low-skill immigration pushes the poverty numbers up. In addition, low-skill immigration siphons off government anti-poverty funding and makes government efforts to shrink poverty less effective. Milton Friedman said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”
We are creating another permanent underclass.
These employers could find a way to give the poor people a job at a loss and still make money just not as MUCH money as they want there racist.
Illegals just doing the jobs blacks don’t want to do.
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