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Obama breaks vow with jobless blacks…

April 26, 2011 by  
Filed under News, Opinion, Politics, Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) This is not an easy column for me to write. It’s never easy to tell someone you like that he’s a disappointment. I like Barack Obama. I liked him the first time we met back in 2006 when I took a small group of journalism students to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the then-freshly minted U.S. senator.

I liked Obama even more when an aide to his presidential campaign invited me to a July 2007 speech he gave laying out his commitment to improve life  for people in urban America — which for most politicians is a euphemism for black America.

“Today’s economy has made it easier to fall into poverty. … Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that’s why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as president will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay,” Obama said that day to his mostly black audience.

At that time, the nation’s overall unemployment rate was 4.7%. Whites had a jobless rate of 4.2% while the black unemployment rate stood at 8.1%. Today, the black rate is 15.5%, nearly double that of white job-seekers.

I don’t blame Obama for the economic conditions that are responsible for so many blacks being out of work. The seeds of this problem were planted long before he moved into the Oval Office. But I do fault him for not doing more to fix this problem.

The poor in urban America, he said in that 2007 speech, “suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the most money, and influence, and power.” And then he asked rhetorically, “How can a country like this allow it?” To which he answered, “We can’t.”

But so far, under his leadership, he has allowed it.

Finding work for the jobless is the best anti-poverty program this nation can mount. But while the Obama administration spends $608 million  during the first 17 days of its involvement in Libya’s civil war — it can muster neither the money nor the will to combat black unemployment.

The president’s failure to fight this problem as vigorously as he wages war abroad gets a pass from black leaders, many of whom complain to me privately but remain silent in public. They’re reluctant to challenge Obama the way Martin Luther King Jr. did Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

America “would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor” so long as it was involved in the Vietnam war, King said in a speech in which he called for an end to that bloody conflict.

Last month, as the Obama administration applauded the creation of 216,000 new jobs and a slight dip in the overall unemployment rate, the gap between whites and blacks without work widened as the black unemployment rate inched up.

In December 2009, when the black unemployment rate was just 5.5 percentage points higher than the national rate, Obama told USA TODAY that he didn’t think he needed to do anything special to close this gap. Now that it is nearly 7 percentage points higher, black leaders should demand that the president devote as much attention on this problem as he has on ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and in pushing for immigration reform.

They should demand an end to the wasteful spending on wars that can’t be won and insist that the resulting peace dividend be used to finance that revitalized urban policy — the one Obama not so long ago promised would be the focus of his economic agenda.

Written By Dewayne Wickham

Via; http://usat.ly/hEI3


Comments

4 Responses to “Obama breaks vow with jobless blacks…”
  1. Nicholas says:

    To much time and energy is spent placeing blame on somebody else for our circumstances. We need to understand that the president does not sign the checks the government writes, that is the duty of the House of Representitives. There is little any president can do with the cooporation of the Congress. Money talks and Congress controls the money not Obama. Us Black folk have the money in the 1 trillion dollars we spend every year and we also have a sizable voting block in the 45 million of our population. If we manage our money and voting power sratigically we can do very well for us all.

  2. Lonnie Radcliffe says:

    Added insult to injury is Obama’s and The Democratic Party’s betrayal on the extension of unemployment insurance benefits relative to the passage of payroll tax cut extension. The extension of unemployment insurance benefits was reduced from 99 weeks to 73 weeks.
    Further, nobody on Team Obama looks like us. The nine people who make up Team Obama are white, like Axelrod who cares nothing about people who look like me. The black electorate overwhelmingly supported Obama with 96% of its vote. He has chosen to disrespect us and not give blacks a voice in his reelection strategy. This means that if he is reelected, he will once again do nothing for his most loyal base-black folks.

    And lets not forget how he allowed Troy Davis to be executed without so much as having someone from the White House to make a phone call on the young man’s behalf.

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  1. […] them…because he says he does. Unfortunately, all his sophomoric policies start harming them. So, the black men who were expecting jobs that President Obama promised feel betrayed when the very policies that President Obama put in place to help, actually […]

  2. […] them…because he says he does. Unfortunately, all his sophomoric policies start harming them. So, the black men who were expecting jobs that President Obama promised feel betrayed when the very policies that President Obama put in place to help, actually […]



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