—Demosthenes—

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

—John W. Gardner—

“Life is an ever-shifting kaleidoscope- a slight change, and all patterns alter.”

—Sharon Salzberg—

President Obama has faced and continues to face a ton of criticism regarding his commitment and efforts to help people of color. While it is true that no president is ever going to please everyone or make all the right moves, President Obama deserves some “street cred” for another policy by his administration that could make a big difference in the African-American community: My Brother’s Keeper. It can be a great first step (although I caution that it is just the first of many steps that are desperately needed). And if a nobody from the Southside can add his two cents, I would like to make a suggestion.

Mr. President please include two things in your wonderful initiative: (1) programs to help reduce the unemployment rates for African-American young men between the ages of 16-24, and (2) broader opportunities to wipe the records of felons clean through pardons and expungements.

The labor market has never been kind to the African-American community regardless of the age group or even the level of education. It is much more daunting to young African-American men between the ages of 16-24 and young African-American men with felony convictions. It is imperative to attempt to reduce the unemployment rate of young African-American men by providing greater employment opportunities in the private sector to allow them to break the cycle of bad outcomes and cultivate an atmosphere of good outcomes.

The unemployment rate for African-American men between the ages of 16-24 has been high for years. Just recently it was at Great Depression levels of approximately 30%. The unemployment rate for African-American teens is even higher at 40%. Both unemployment rates are at least twice that of their white counterparts. High unemployment rates coupled with the fact that young African-Americans are fifteen times more likely to go to prison than their white counterparts is a recipe for a bleak future for the young generation. This must change if we are to change the reality for young African-American men and promote good outcomes. Helping young African-American men to find jobs before they get into trouble with the law is very important. It is equally as important to help young African-American men that have been convicted of a crime to find a job to prevent them from being caught up the cycle of recidivism.

That is why there need to be more programs and opportunities for them to receive meaningful job training, apprenticeships, and job placement. These programs can be something that seems as insignificant as an expansion of summer jobs for teenagers of color to opportunities for job training in a trade to allow young men of color to have access to good paying jobs even if they do not go to college to more mentoring programs for young men of color in college.

There also should be educational, job training, and job placement programs for felons even while incarcerated in order to help with their transition back into society. This need is particularly urgent since many states have eliminated or severely cut back funding for educational programs for prisoners. Felons can be helped through providing more job training programs in federal and state prison, particularly for nonviolent offenders. These programs should have a job placement component that will place offenders that have successfully completed the programs in jobs to work on a temporary basis in order to give the offender work experience.

There also needs to be set guidelines for ex-offenders to receive pardons at the federal and state levels that allow them to expunge their records. The criteria could be something as simple as a five year period for nonviolent offenders and a ten to fifteen year period for violent offenders without any new convictions and a steady employment history. If they meet the criteria then they should be allowed to file for a pardon with the express provision that their record is expungeable. This will allow them greater employment opportunities in the future, which may cut down on recidivism and lead to more stable communities. The old saying of “give a man a fish, he will eat for the day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime” is still very true. Let’s help young brothers gain the tools to eat for a lifetime!

The post My Brother’s Keeper: Let’s Tackle African-American Male Unemployment appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Over at Demos, Amy Taub lists the top 10 ways Walmart hurts U.S. manufacturing jobs. It’s a very interesting read,  and Taub lays out what I think to begood argument against shopping at Walmart:

With the great resources at its disposal, Walmart could afford to take the high road, supporting good manufacturing jobs in America by allowing for higher wages and more investment in its supply chain and paying its own employees – from retail “associates” to warehouse workers and cleaning contractors – a living wage. That would set the template for a new American economy, one in which Americans might once again “make things” and also find greater dignity and stability in selling them.

The following is an example of the ways Walmart hurts American jobs:

The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this usually means buying from low-wage factories overseas.  Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers,[iv] and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006.[v] According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation’s total job loss due to trade.[vi] But China is hardly the only source of Walmart goods: the company also imports from Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia, and a host of other countries.

With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmart’s market power is so immense that the even the largest suppliers must comply with its demands for lower and lower prices because they cannot afford to have their goods taken off its shelves. Companies that used to manufacture products in the United States, from Levi’s jeans to lock maker Master Lock, were pressured to shut their U.S. factories and moved manufacturing abroad to meet Walmart’s demand for low prices.[vii]

Walmart was a leader in sourcing goods overseas, establishing a centralized purchasing system, technological infrastructure, and linkages to foreign factories that other companies imitated and built on.  While researchers find that Walmart still imports disproportionately more goods than other apparel retailers,[viii] its innovations accelerated the use of offshore suppliers by its competitors, speeding the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

Layoffs aren’t the only way manufacturers contrive to meet the low prices Walmart demands. Walmart’s domestic suppliers lower wages, cut benefits, aggressively fight employee efforts to unionize and bargain collectively, and skimp on worker comfort and safety. For example, Louisiana seafood processor C.J.’s Seafood, which sells an estimated 85 percent of its processed crawfish to Walmart, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly abusing employees working in the U.S. on temporary immigrant visas (known as guestworker visas).[xii] A complaint to the U.S. Department of Labor claims that the Walmart supplier “engaged in extremely coercive employment related actions, including forcing guestworkers to work up to 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay, locking guestworkers in the plant to force them to continue to work, threatening the guestworkers with beatings to make them work faster, and threatening violence against the guestworkers’ families in Mexico after workers contacted law enforcement for assistance.”[xiii]

According to the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics, Walmart spent $7.8 million on lobbying in 2011 alone.[xvi] While this money was paid to influence a range of legislation, from promoting corporate tax cuts to opposing a bill to guarantee paid sick time to working people, trade policy was among the issues Walmart lobbied on most aggressively. In fact, Walmart has lobbied to make it easier to push American jobs out of the country for years, playing a key role in in lobbying for NAFTA in the early 1990s.[xvii]

Walmart has set the template for today’s economy: one in which increased economic productivity is not shared with working people, and the vast inequality that this creates is seen as normal. Today the six members of the Walton family who inherited the Walmart fortune enjoy wealth equal to that of the least-wealthy 30 percent of Americanscombined.[xviii] These billionaires are the ultimate beneficiaries of Walmart’s push to cut costs, condemning retail employees to work in poverty and American factory workers to unemployment.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Robert Greenwald film Walmart: The High Cost Of Low Prices, but it’s worth watching. After seeing it a few years ago, I had a new outlook on bargain shopping.

The post Reality Check: At 50-Years-Old Walmart Hurts U.S. Manufacturing Jobs appeared first on Madness & Reality.

My guess is that this is nothing new:

For two years, I have been unemployed. In the beginning, I applied to more than three hundred open positions in the insurance industry—an industry that I’ve worked in for the previous ten years. Not one employer responded to my resume. So I enrolled back into college to finish my degree. After completing school this past May, I resumed my search for employment and was quite shocked that I wasn’t getting a single response. I usually applied for positions advertised on the popular website Monster.com. I’d used it in the past and have been successful in obtaining jobs through it.

Two years ago, I noticed that Monster.com had added a “diversity questionnaire” to the site. This gives an applicant the opportunity to identify their sex and race to potential employers. Monster.com guarantees that this option will not jeopardize your chances of gaining employment. You must answer this questionnaire in order to apply to a posted position—it cannot be skipped. At times, I would mark off “black female,” but then I thought, this might be hurting my chances of getting employed, so I started selecting the “decline to identify” option instead. That still had no effect on my getting a job. So I decided to try an experiment: I created a fake job applicant and called her Bianca White.

First, I created an email account and resume for Bianca. I kept the same employment history and educational background on her resume that was listed on my own. But I removed my home phone number, kept my listed cell phone number, and changed my cell phone greeting to say, “You have reached Bianca White. Please leave a message.” Then I created an online Monster.com account, listed Bianca as a white woman on the diversity questionnaire and activated the account.

That very same day, I received a phone call. The next day, my phone line and Bianca’s email address were packed with potential employers calling for an interview. I was stunned. More shocking was that some employers, mostly Caucasian-sounding women, were calling Bianca more than once, desperate to get an interview with her. All along, my real Monster.com account was open and active; but, despite having the same background as Bianca, I received no phone calls. Two jobs actually did email me and Bianca at the same time. But they were commission-only sales positions. Potential positions offering a competitive salary and benefits all went to Bianca.

At the end of my little experiment, which lasted a week, Bianca White had received nine phone calls—I received none. Bianca had received a total of seven emails, while I’d only received two, which again happen to have been the same emails Bianca received. Let me also point out that one of the emails that contacted Bianca for a job wanted her to relocate to a different state, all expenses paid, should she be willing to make that commitment. In the end, a total of twenty-four employers looked at Bianca’s resume while only ten looked at mine.

Is this a conspiracy or what? I’m almost convinced that white Americans aren’t suffering from the same disparaging unemployment rates as their black counterparts because all the jobs are being saved for other white people.

Yes Yolanda, that conspiracy is called racism; yep, it’s something we as people of color know about all too well. C’mon sister, you, me, and the slew of black folks reading this have either all been down that road; or, we have all at least suspected that stuff like this happens. Like all racism and racist acts, some folks may not want to admit to its existence or occurrence in our lives.

Yes, for some, what Yolanda chronicled is yet another one of those convenient excuses for her circumstances. That is, Yolanda is simply making up this story, and is truthfully unemployed because she isn’t qualified for whatever positions she may have applied for. Yep, never mind the fact that she is educated; nope, never mind the fact that she has years of experience in her field. To some, none of that matters because society has taught them that all black folks are lazy, uneducated moochers , and complainers.

So why are you complaining, Yolanda?

My little experiment certainly proved a few things. First, I learned that answering the diversity questionnaire on job sites such as Monster.com’s may work against minorities, as employers are judging whom they hire based on it. Second, I learned to suspect that resumes with ethnic names may go into the wastebasket and never see the light of day.

Other than being chronically out of work, I embarked on this little experiment because of a young woman I met while I was in school. She was a 22-year-old Caucasian woman who, like myself, was about to graduate. She was so excited about a job she had just gotten with a well-known sporting franchise. She had no prior work experience and had applied for a clerical position, but was offered a higher post as an executive manager making close to six figures. I was curious to know how she’d been able to land such a position. She was candid in telling me that the human resource person who’d hired her just “liked” her and told her that she deserved to be in a higher position. The HR person was also Caucasian.

Another reason that pushed me to do this experiment is because of the media. There’s not a day that goes by in which I fail to see a news program about how tough the job market is. Recently, while I was watching a report on underemployed and underpaid Americans, I saw a middle-aged white man complaining that he was making only $80,000 which was $30,000 less than what he was making before. I thought to myself that in this economy, many would feel they’d hit the jackpot if they made 80K a year.

In conclusion, I would like to once again quote the late, great Booker T. Washington when he said, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

The more America continues to hold back great candidates based on race, the more our economy is going to stay in a rut. We all need each other to prosper, flourish, and to move ahead.

I hear you, Yolanda; yep, I’m with you when you right. And you know what? You are so right on point that it’s not even funny. That said, I won’t be surprised if one or two of the unconverted non-choir members among us will have something to say about your complaining after reading.

You know how it is, girl. Yep, they’re not racist because they have black friends; and, their color blindness doesn’t allow them tor hear their “friends” when they tell these type of stories. But then again, all black folks aren’t the same; yep, some of us complain about racial conspiracy theories a lot less than others, Uh huh, after all, who wants to be known as the against-the-grain shit-starting black person in the bunch, right? Yep, pointing out racism, is in fact, the new racism in America.

Check out Yolanda’s interview below:

The post Post-Racial Update: Black Woman Pretends to be White, Gets Job Offers appeared first on Madness & Reality.

He also noted that the majority of his employees were Latino, and that “elections have consequences” and that “at the end of the day, I need to survive.” No word on whether the employees fired were overwhelmingly Latino. However, citing an increase in the cost of doing business as a result of regulations brought on by Obamacare, he said his employees were forewarned. Below is a bit from the interview as well as audio of the exchange.

“I’ve done my share of educating my employees. I never tell them which way to vote. I believe in the free system we have, I believe in the right to choose who they want to be president, but I did explain as a business owner that I have always put my employees first. I always made sure that when I went without a paycheck that [I] made sure they were paid. And I explained that I always put them first and unfortunately I’m at a point where I’m being forced to have to worry about me and my family now and a business that I built from just me to 114 employees.

[…] I explained to them a month ago that if Obama gets in office that the regulations for Obamacare are gonna hurt our business, and I’m gonna have to make provisions to make sure I have enough money to cover the payroll taxes, the additional health care I’m gonna have to do, and I explained that to them and I said you do what you feel like in your heart you need to do, but I’m just letting you know as a warning this is things I have to think of as a business owner.”

Check out the audio below:

Stay tuned!

The post Las Vegas Employer: “Obama Won, So I Fired 22 Employees” appeared first on Madness & Reality.

You see, Boehner’s brand of leadership is just what America needs right now.

Let’s be honest: without him and the House Republicans, where would we be today?

So, I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to Speaker Boehner — a man who not only asked, “Where are the jobs?” But a man who actually went out and created them. And for that, we owe him a wealth of gratitude for his effective leadership, and commitment to America, and the millions of jobless workers oppressed from the moment Obama took the oath of office back in January, 2009.

But of course, left-wing haters are trying to make Republican patriots look bad:

The economy added 114,000 jobs in September and unemployment declined to 7.8 percent. Not great numbers, but paired with major upward revisions to previous monthly reports and taken in the context of a slowly recovering economy, the report was viewed as good news for America.

Unless, of course, you were hoping for bad news. And apparently quite a few of President Obama’s critics were — so much so that they suggested the Bureau of Labor Statistics was part of a vast conspiracy.

The leader of the “job truther” movement: former GE CEO Jack Welch.

“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers,” he said on Twitter.

He had some friends in Congress too. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) tweeted “I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here.” He added on Facebook that the jobs report was “Orwellian to say the least and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics from the book ‘Rules for Radicals.’” FOX News’ Stuart Varney apparently sensed where his audience was going. Within minutes of their release he told viewers that “there is widespread mistrust of this report and these numbers.” “How convenient the rate drops below 8% [for the] first time in 43 months, five weeks before the election,” he added later.

As you could expect, Obama’s pro-socialist minions were easily swayed (as always) by the lamestream media as they slapped high-fives to celebrate America’s do-nothing lazy president. Like all Obama Kool Aid drinkers, they were quick to defend his obvious attempt to smear Jack Welch on Twitter rather than congratulate Boehner as I have. I mean, isn’t it pretty obvious that Obama has hacked into Welch’s Twitter account, and Allen West’s Facebook account for political expediency? I mean, that’s what a desperate man who was recently embarrassed in a debate on national television would do, right?Exactly! He’d rig things to make himself not look like an abject failure that he is.

But, don’t tell that to the Obamabots:

The post Unemployment Drops to 7.8%, and Right-Wing Goes Batshit appeared first on Madness & Reality.

According to the report, jobs paying between $13.83 and $21.13 per hour, made up about 60 percent of the jobs lost during the recession. Those jobs have been slow to return during the recovery as mid-wage jobs have made up just 27 percent of the jobs gained. Yep, the bad news is that low-paying jobs have constituted roughly 58 percent of the jobs gained since 2010. At a glance it would seem that we’re worse off now than four years ago. However, the fact that manufacturing has grown in three years under Obama than eight years of the Bush administration bodes well.

Check this out:

The BGOV Barometer shows U.S. factory positions have grown since early 2010, arresting a slide that began toward the end of the 1990s. It’s the best showing since the era of Bill Clinton …

“This is the first sustained increase we’ve seen in a long time,” Macpherson said. … The progress so far also contrasts with the job losses seen during the recovery from the 2001 recession, when George W. Bush was president, he said. More jobs at factories are mainly an outcome of longer-term trends including rising productivity and innovation, a weaker dollar and free trade agreements, he said.

So while budget cuts to state and local government have taken away a major source of mid- and higher-wage jobs as noted by the NELP report. The fact that manufacturing is finally growing (despite last August being the third consecutive month of contraction) is a welcome sign to the millions of people currently employed in pow-wage jobs within the service industry.

“The Republicans in Washington claimed to draw their ideas from a website called ‘America Speaking Out.’ It turns out that one of the ideas that’s drawn the most interest on their website is ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Funny thing is, when we recently closed one of the most egregious loopholes for companies creating jobs overseas, Republicans in Congress were almost unanimously opposed. The Republican leader John Boehner attacked us for it, and stood up for outsourcing, instead of American workers.” – President Barack Obama

Of course there’s no way we can expect every single manufacturing job to return. However, with China’s slowing economy, and the recent boost in home construction and the real estate market. It’s easy to see that we’re on the right track, and we’re obviously better off than we were four years ago. No thanks to George W. Bush’s stimulus package that included those massive tax cuts of course.

Yeah, how did that “stimulus” work out for you?

The post US Manufacturing Growth Faster Under Barack Obama Than George W. Bush appeared first on Madness & Reality.

I mean, I didn’t hear him tell the Israeli’s to stop complaining last week. But no, as usual, there’s different standard when it comes to addressing Black folks by America’s first Black president. I mean, didn’t we see this as to expected since his “Father’s Day” speech while standing in a Black church of all places? I mean hell, it’s not like we have a powerhouse like AIPAC backing us up or funnelling campaign funds, right? All we got is the CBC, and NAACP with their tired feet.

Sorry, but that’s slave catcher behavior to me.. But hey, at least it’s good to finally get to know that the societal ills – such as chronic unemployment – of the Black community can be solved by simply removing those bedroom slippers. I mean the president does have a point; some of you Negroes have gotten a lil’ bit too comfortable in our 3-year-old post-racial society. Some of you also egregiously underestimate the severity of our economic condition of Black America.

This from Dr. Wilmer Leon via The Root:

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy recently penned an opinion piece for CNN entitled“Why Obama’s Black Critics Are Wrong.” He contends that President Obama’s African-American critics have focused on his “racial bona fides” and that “throughout President Barack Obama’s political career, he has been dogged by … accusations that he is not ‘black enough.’ ” I respect Kennedy and appreciate his contributions to scholarship, but in this instance his analysis is unsupported by the data.

There is a very troubling pattern developing within certain segments of the African-American community, a concerted effort to silence those who are offering honest, valid and well-thought-out criticism of the Obama administration. Kennedy has joined a growing number of African Americans, such as radio hosts Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey andprofessor Melissa Harris-Perry, who are more focused on personal sentiment than policy.

African Americans can ill afford to base their analysis of President Obama on the politics of sentiment. Like every other political constituency, we must stay focused on policy outcomes that work to further the best interests of the African-American community. We should not have permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.

I wouldn’t dare suggest that president Obama is unaware of this fact – I’m sure he knows the statistics and reads this site everyday. However, in the last few days I’ve seen our collective divided on this recent fracas. Which isn’t really surprising since the polarized effect of the Obama presidency has played itself out but in no uncertain terms like Kwame’s polka-dots. Here in Black America, everyone is suddenly concerned or interested in the thoughts of Black folks on the performance of president Obama. Clearly it’s against protocol to have an opposing view, right?

This i why there is so much media scrutiny of his recent admonishment of Black folks where he commanded them to “stop complaining,” as any other-worldy revered and celebrated deity would. Yes, it’s plain and simple, and Barack has spoken.  Never mind that there is a double standard applied to Black folks in America who have always been viewed as an anti-American bunch of whiners. Truth is, America is tired of the noise; and Massa Barack has spoken.

Yes, and it’s time for you people to get in line; yes, drink the Kool-Aid. After all, don’t y’all see that even with holes in his shoes our president is doing as much as he can?  Don’t you understand, that like Black folks, he’s limited because of his skin color? Hell, I thought that was obvious.

For the record, I agree with Tavis Smiley in the following; however, I realize that Black folk speaking truth to power has become somewhat like a treasonous act these days. I mean once upon a time Black folks were killed by “certain people” for engaging in this courageous act. Today however, one could be assassinated by his or her own for doing the same while “certain people” sit back and laugh. But I suppose this is yet another one of those post-racial teachable moment. A moment for which I am truly appreciative. Let’s face it: knowing where one stands is important, no?

Finally,  a now very famous and beloved American president said the following, at a time when things weren’t so great economically for Black folks:

“It doesn’t do good to open doors for someone who doesn’t have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts” – Ronald Reagan

I can’t help but to wonder: should the GOP suceed in winning the presidency and a majority in both houses of government, does the “stop complaining” rule still apply? More importantly, are we going to be hypocritical with our critiques then? No joke, y’all; I’m gonna need someone to tell me how long to act. After all, I’d hate to upset the apple cart by refusing to be one of these safe Negroes.

The post The Audacity of Tired Feet: Barack Obama, the CBC, & Bedroom Slippers appeared first on Madness & Reality.

The post Where Have All The Jobs Gone? appeared first on Madness & Reality.

And I’m not going to front, the Hill is a white man’s upper echelon world, and is a hard place for people of color and women, especially women of color to gain footing. So being hard and hardened is a very nasty and unwelcoming part of the job.

I applaud the congresswoman’s backbone for being over 70 and still raising hell, or sending people to it. But Maxine, you better watch out, your granny panties are soaked in premium petro.

Her recent “Go straight to hell,” comment to the Tea Party in an Inglewood, Calif. forum, interestingly comes after her feet have been placed in the fire for ethics violations, like several other black congressional officials. Simultaneously, her black middle class constituents are anxious as their pseudo-comfy lifestyles are bottoming out, and now they are questioning “What the fuck has she really done for our community in the last 15 years?”

You see, Maxine is like every other congressional official who has garnered tenure from a loyal, politically complacent voting bloc due to a couple of political tricks, some federal chump change, and about a dozen church appearances a year to show she is still connected to the voters.

But that is like most voting blocs on all partisan sides, parties tend to vote for their party.

However, as a congressional official who represents a population that is still under-resourced, there is much more work to do other than have a forum with Wyclef while wearing stunna shades at the annual CBC convention.

In fact, Waters has been quite the unapproachable asshole on the Hill, and as a former constituent she has always been unreachable for every concern.

But if I were a party of interest, someone with a fancy, big name or even bigger cash, she would definitely have the time.

Minions like me who wanted to help during the Haitian relief efforts back in 2004, but our local campaign wasn’t shit to her global agenda as she plane-hopped to Africa while exclusively speaking to that Amy chick from Democracy Now rather than show up to at least one local event that wasn’t highly publicized.

Minions like me tried understand why she gave the copious information gathered about the CIA funneling crack into black and brown Los Angeles communities to Bill Clinton as a bartering chip to save his presidency rather than file it as genocide in the United Nations like she had promised.

Minions like me wondered how her district has been going through serious gentrification and suffering horribly from severe job loss, failed black businesses, and a Cali housing implosion leaving many homes foreclosed for years while she lives well in a house in Hancock Park, not anywhere near the congressional district she serves.

Oops, sorry, I think I’m sounding a little too much like Cornel West.

But Maxine Waters who has claimed she is for the people, now wants to rally black folk after she has habitually forsaken our interests due to wagging her tongue and tail to be in the Obama circle like it was a Basketball Wife shindig.

And Obama, in pure snake fashion, kept her and the Congressional Negro Caucus at a cordial distant—close enough to get them to vote how he wanted, but far enough to not have to entertain their long list of honeydo’s and back scratching.

You see Maxine, you or we haven’t arrived, and it seems that you have been reminded as such.

Quid Pro Quo doesn’t apply to Negroes at the back of the bus, even if you are Congressional senior ranking members.

But I do get the ugly politics on the Hill. The well-tenured black congressional officials mostly have high rankings in their committees, and needed to be quashed or dethroned, so to speak, to move a certain agenda forward. And as they were plucked like feathers of a chicken head, none but God came to their aid. And that wasn’t Obama. He kind of politely said the same thing that Waters conveyed in his actions of no-reply-isms, “Go to hell.”

As is all the Congressional Negro Caucus, who are turning in their drawers full of loose bowels due to them being rejected and ignored by the POTUS, who halfheartedly entertains the permed-haired opportunist known as Sharpton.

You see an unelected somewhat political joke still wearing a conk is easier to tame and control than the elite CBC with their asses on their shoulders and Tom Joyner social club to appease. All Sharpton needs is an MSNBC show and a lifetime supply of Dark N’ Lovely.

So Maxine, now you know how it feels to be unheard. Welcome to our hell. Massa sick and he don’t give a fuck about you.

But I am still not convinced that the traveling circus patched together by you and your cronies in the last 3 seconds of the game is the play that is needed. The rules changed boo, and not to your favor. This shit needs more than a Hail Mary pass to Rep. John Lewis, the veteran with bad knees and a pacemaker. I don’t think his prayers and constant reminders that he walked with King will save us this time.

Folk need real jobs, credit opportunities, and this racial shit that got e’erbody from hillybilly honkies to ride-or-die Chicanos ready to blaze this bitch needs to be put down.

DISCLAIMER: This blog entry does not in any way support Herman “Coon” Cain or Allen “Step-It Fectchit” West in anyway. They are bona fide house niggers that are using serious issues of leadership and economic/political concerns in the black community to further white privilege.

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Just take a look at the picture above of the thousands of folks lined up in the southern heat attempting to find employment at the CBC’s job fair in Atlanta. Once upon a time Atlanta was the place to be for upwardly mobile African Americans; but today, not so much now, is it? Plainly speaking: things are bad now, but the long-term unemployment faced by communities of color will have a very negative effect in the near future once this recovery is over.

Think of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The city has never quite been the same nor did it return to pre-Katrina form has it? As a matter of fact, studies show that the event has left many psychologically and mentally scarred, with many of them being children. Surely we all remember Hurricane Katrina; well folks, the current economic turmoil and extended joblessness within communities of color is our collective Hurricane Katrina. And the truth is: like New Orleans, we’ll forever be changed; and, we’ll never be the same again

he unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years. (read more)

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