During his address before a joint session of Congress, President Obama exhorted Congress to “pass this bill,” the American Jobs Act.
Until yesterday, no bill had been filed in the House. That changed when Republican Rep. Louis Gohmert bust a cheeky move and introduced H.R. 2911, the “American Jobs Act of 2011.”
We have heard a lot of rhetoric about job creation from President Obama over the last several days. After waiting to see what the President would actually put into legislative language, and then waiting to see if anybody would actually introduce the President’s bill in the House, today I took the initiative and introduced the “American Jobs Act of 2011.” It is a very simple bill, which will eliminate the corporate tax which serves as a tariff that our American companies pay on goods they produce here in America.
Ten days later, Obama’s message is: Show me some love and help me pass the “American Jobs Act.”
It was a long night but the results are in: Republican Bob Turner won the special election to fill the seat vacated by the disgraced Anthony Weiner.
While David Weprin’s name was on the ballot, Republicans and others, including former New York Mayor Ed Koch, cast the race as a referendum on President Obama. The New York Times reports:
As Mr. Turner declared that the election had been a referendum on the president, his buoyant supporters, gathered at a restaurant in Howard Beach, Queens, shouted “Yes, we can,” appropriating the galvanizing phrase of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign. Mr. Turner predicted that voters elsewhere would also rebuke Mr. Obama in the elections next year.
“We have lit one candle today,” he said. “It’s going to be a bonfire pretty soon.”
[…]
The unexpectedly tight race stirred anxiety among Democrats already worried about elections next year for president, the House and the Senate. The Turner campaign had eagerly courted disenchanted Democrats, and outside polling places around the district on Tuesday, multiple longtime Democrats confessed that despite concern about Mr. Turner’s eagerness to slash federal spending, they chose him hoping that his election would get lawmakers’ attention.
But make no mistake about it, the albatross around Weprin’s neck is named Obama, and Democrats who value honesty will tell you privately that the president’s 37 percent approval rating in the district is making it difficult for Weprin to win a race that in almost any other time would be a slam dunk, no matter how mediocre a campaign the Democratic nominee ran.
Polling conducted by Siena College shows that jobs and the economy are the top issues of the day, and Republican calls for voters to “send a message” to President Barack Obama clearly have worked far better than Democratic charges that Turner and his party want to eliminate Medicare and Social Security.
Israel is also a very visible issue, and popular former New York Mayor Ed Koch (D) has endorsed Turner because of the former mayor’s unhappiness with Obama’s level of support for Israel.
Rothenberg continued:
Democrats also want to avoid the public relations disaster that losing a reliably Democratic district would entail. The loss would play into the Republicans’ narrative about the president’s unpopularity, giving GOP talkers ammunition to argue that 2012 will be a nightmare for Democrats and that Medicare will not be the disaster for Republicans that Democratic strategists hope it will be.
Weprin, an Orthodox Jew, lost in a district with a heavy population of Jewish voters and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-to-1 margin.
If Weprin couldn’t make it there, can Democrats make it in Florida next year?
President Obama unveiled his $447 billion plan to put America back to work, the “American Jobs Act,” last night before a joint session of Congress. Although no legislation was introduced, Obama told Congress to pass his jobs package “right away.”
An embargoed excerpt from the speech stimulated my concern that Obama would not give voice to the racial gap in employment:
I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans – including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything. (Emphasis added)
I knew then Obama was not going to adopt the Congressional Black Caucus’ recommendation and acknowledge black Americans’ pain. In a letter to the President, CBC Chairman Emanuel Cleaver II wrote:
Acknowledge the depression-like unemployment crisis in the African American Community and articulate a targeted approach for job creation to ensure that communities with unique needs are assisted in a direct and comprehensive fashion.
Still, I tuned in. Obama did not predict how many jobs his plan would create. But if the past is prologue, infrastructure spending will put few African Americans back to work.
Consider also that African Americans represent roughly five percent of construction workers. So I question whether the proposed $80 billion in infrastructure spending will create jobs for “communities with unique needs.”
Overall, Black-owned businesses have received a proportionately lower number and dollar value of federal stimulus contracts when compared with other businesses.
President Obama will unveil his jobs plan before a joint session of Congress tonight.
There's been a lot of speculation about what will be included in his latest Big Speech. Rep. Maxine Waters questions whether the president will give voice to the jobless crisis in the African American community.
There are roughly 3 million African Americans out of work today, a number nearly equal to the entire population of Iowa. I would suggest that if the entire population of Iowa, a key state on the electoral map and a place that served as a stop on the president’s jobs bus tour were unemployed, they would be mentioned in the president’s speech and be the beneficiary of targeted public policy.
So, one question to be answered this evening is, are the unemployed in the African-American community, including almost 45 percent of its youth, as important as the people of Iowa?
Waters added:
This evening, as the President speaks to the nation about his plan to create jobs, he must acknowledge the economic disaster in the African American community, whose unemployment rate hovers at roughly 16.7 percent, almost double that of the general population and equal to depression-era levels. He must then articulate how the plan he puts forth will target the communities with the highest rates of unemployment, including the African American community.
While Obama may not say our name, Gallup has given us a new name, “outlier.” CBS News reports:
Now, with Hispanic approval ratings getting closer and closer to the national average, Gallup notes that “blacks have become an extreme outlier -- the only major racial group showing well-above-average approval.”
Still, black Americans' unwavering support may not be enough to get Obama to acknowledge black pain. As Waters observed:
There are those, who believe that the President, because he is black, cannot talk specifically about issues directly impacting the black community, like high unemployment. They suggest that doing so would endanger the President’s chances of being re-elected. I share the desire to reelect the first black President.
But, I would offer a slightly different analysis. If the unemployment rates in the African American Community continue to climb, like they did in August by almost a full percentage point, those African American voters who came out to the polls for the first time in 2008 but who have since lost their home and/or their job, may not return to the polls. Therefore, targeting public policy to a community who accounted for 13 percent of the electorate in ‘08, and who is now experiencing the culmination of a decade of economic crisis, is not just good policy, but good politics.
In the Labor Department's August jobs report, released Friday, overall unemployment was unchanged at a dismal 9.1 percent and the economy created no net new jobs -- but black unemployment soared to catastrophic 16.7 percent. For black men the rate jumped a whole percentage point to 18 percent, and for black youth the rate rose from 39.2 percent to 45.5 percent. Blacks now comprise 12 percent of the labor market, but 22 percent of the unemployed.
[…]
President Obama has famously avoided emphasizing race. One can fairly debate how much of the higher black joblessness today is the result of persistent racial discrimination, and how much reflects gaps in education and the fact that blacks tend to be concentrated in vulnerable sectors of the economy.
But either way, it is calamitous for the black community and what matters is that Obama has let all this fester.
We do need to acknowledge that it is more difficult for this president because of the historical nature of his presidency to have the kind of conversation that many in our community would like to have focused solely on African-American people.
But I hope that that’s a political trap the president won’t walk into.
If the president were to start speaking directly to African-Americans about what he’s doing for them, what he has done for them, as the first African-American president, that during a general election campaign, that could have very adverse results. And I believe that black people understand that.
In 1955, jazz icon Louis Armstrong recorded “Black and Blue” whose lyrics capture the dilemma facing black Americans:
My only sin is in my skin. What did I do to be so black and blue?
What did black folks do? In 2008, they turned out in record numbers and gave 96 percent of their vote to Candidate Barack Obama. But President Obama cannot target policies to assist them because as we are told ad nauseum, he is “not the president of black America.”
It’s a new month, but it’s the same old misery. The Labor Department reports the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in August. The economy added 0 new jobs.
With zero job growth, 14 million Americans remain unemployed. The number of “involuntary part-time workers,” those who seek but are unable to find a full-time job, climbed from 8.4 million to 8.8 million.
For black Americans, the unemployment rate rose from 15.9 percent to 16.7 percent.
The jobless rate for black men climbed to 18.0 percent, from 17.0 percent. By contrast, white male unemployment fell from 8.1 percent to 8.0 percent.
For black women, the unemployment rate is unchanged at 13.4 percent. Still, it’s nearly twice that of white women (7.7 percent).
The black youth jobless rate is 46.5 percent, more than twice white youth unemployment (23.0 percent).
A new Gallup poll found only 11 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country. Their top concerns are the state of the economy and “unemployment/jobs.”
There is no demographic breakdown but with black unemployment at depression levels, it’s safe to assume that black folks are not content with the situation.
Still, African Americans are reluctant to voice their discontent. But the code of silence is cracking. Social activist Marcia Dyson recently wrote:
The suggestion that such criticism is “hating” is ridiculous; surely we can make distinctions between bitter attacks and enlightened analysis. And the argument that publicly criticizing our first black president is an act of racial disloyalty is immature. We must be grown enough to know that politics at its best is about engaged citizenship, not tribal worship. You can love black people and do what’s best for the race without agreeing with everything the president does or says. If we don’t use our public platforms to encourage, solicit and push the president to do what we think is right, we’ve surrendered both our civic duty and our racial responsibility.
Former CBC Chair Elijah Cummings told CNN’s Candy Crowley the president needs to “fight harder” for African Americans:
Almost every African American I have talked to said they want him to fight and fight harder… Their attitude is that if the Republicans are not going to work with us, we’re just going to have to go it alone and stand up to them. Don’t back down, period.
