(Akiit.com) Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan could have saved his breath when he furiously demanded that GOP leaders denounce the blatant racists among them. The loud chorus from other Democrats, civil rights leaders, and even an online petition from an advocacy group begging the GOP to speak out against its naked bigots is a good preaching to the choir PR gambit, but it won’t change anything at the GOP top. The GOP would cut its throat if it denounced its racists and racism, and really meant it. The shouts, taunts, spitting, catcalls, joker posters, N word slurs, Confederate and Texas Lone Star flag waving by tea baggers is and has been an indispensable political necessity for the GOP.

Despite the GOP’s narrow health care defeat, maybe even because of it, the GOP’s programmed racist public ugliness is having some success. Obama’s approval ratings, always tenuous at best among white males, have plunged into free fall among them. A bare 35 percent of them say they will back Democrats in the fall mid-term elections, and less than half of white women say they will back Democrats.

The spark to reignite the GOP’s traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists, and increasingly white female supporters, has always been there. The final presidential vote gave ample warning of that. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters, contrary to popular perception, McCain (not Obama) won a slim majority of their vote in the final tally. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. Overall McCain garnered nearly 60 percent of the white vote.

The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. Blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation’s voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP’s white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three political facts. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.
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(Akiit.com) A congressional report reveals the dire details, but does one sector have a strategy that will help turn the tide?

As the Great Recession’s scythe slices through industries, states, cities and neighborhoods, African Americans have received the most devastating wound.

Blacks, and particularly African-American males, have suffered disproportionate rates of unemployment and underemployment historically, for reasons that include weaker educational attainment, lack of connections, less mobility, a high percentage of workers in blue-collar jobs and discrimination. Thus many have marginal links to the labor force, and after negative experiences when trying to finding work, others have stopped looking.

That African Americans have it worse is not new news, but a recent Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) report provides much-needed illumination on just how badly blacks have fared in the economic downturn. It details the previously unaddressed impact of long-term unemployment among black men and its corrosive effect on the black community.

The situation for African Americans is dire. In the first two months of 2010, the black male jobless rate was 19 percent, and just over 13 percent for black women. Before this recession, the overall black unemployment rate was 9 percent.

The future looks bleak. Roughly 6.1 million workers of all backgrounds have sought work for at least 27 weeks, the sign of long-term unemployment. But while blacks comprise just 11.5 percent of the labor force, they account for more than 20 percent of the long-term unemployed, and 22 percent of workers unemployed for more than a year.

Teens Need Jobs, Too

The job outlook for black youth between 16 and 24 is also clouded. The youngest and least educated teens fare badly when they compete with Generation Xers, Millennials, Baby Boomers, and retirees, of every background. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University (CLMS) reports that in late 2009, only 14 percent of black male teens, and 15.5 percent of black female teens had jobs. By contrast, 28 percent and about 31 percent of white male and female teens, respectively, were employed.
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(Akiit.com) The President of the United States of America, Barack H. Obama, signed into law universal health care coverage for every American, for the first time ever in our nation’s history. It was a long time coming. Almost 100 years. The United States was the last industrialized nation to do so.

The construction of health care reform in America started at the root with the need for the world’s richest nation to do something very fundamental in fulfilling a basic right to provide treatment for the sick, the infirmed and the aging. However, at the core of the debate as to why America did not have universal coverage was … greed. The last two decades have been froth with the emergence of “insurers” who took over health care in the United States.

Health care insurers dominated the industry and dictated who received coverage, what kind of coverage they received, who was exempt from coverage (something called “pre-existing conditions”), who was dropped from coverage. At the end of the day, your doctor no longer told you if you were going to live or die, your HMO or PPO insurer did. After a year long debate, one that saw the President hand over the issue of reform to Congress-who let town hall meetings to into a summer circus, only to take it back when thought health care was dead-and use the legislative maneuvers that had long been used to empower the rich and privileged to empower the sick, uninsured, the poor and the struggling middle class. Our hats are off to President Obama for fulfilling a campaign most believed he would not be able to achieve.

The back story here is really the breakthrough of the Democrats in Congress to finally stand for something they claimed they stood for, but had never been able to deliver on. The Democratic Party has been recently viewed as a figment of their own imagination as the vanguards of the poor and disenfranchised.
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(Akiit.com) The National Urban League today released its annual “State Of Black America” report. Such a report should be done, as a way to annually assess our progress and challenges. However, the “State Of Black America” report would be much more valuable if there was a paradigm shift in three areas:

1. The report obsessively focuses on whites. The Equality Index compares black Americans to a white American benchmark, and thus equates whiteness with normality. In a first for the NUL, this year’s report even has a Hispanic-white index (why is the NUL diluting its mission?). However, many statistics on white Americans aren’t good either. For example, would we be satisfied if our out-of-wedlock birth rate was the 33 percent white rate versus 70 percent? I’d argue that even 33 percent is still too high, given that out-of-wedlock birth rate statistics are connected with issues such as educational attainment, crime, and health. Statistics should be too high or too low for black Americans, because of its impact on us and not because of what whites do or don’t do.

As an alternative, the report could compare today’s generation to previous generations of black folks. It is also ironic that even though the report regularly mentions NUL’s 100th anniversary and the report itself has been done since the 1970s, no in-depth comparison of this sort was done. However, such a framework would capture black America’s progress over time (which tends to get glossed over in NUL’s annual reports), any areas where we have backslid, and remaining areas of challenge.

2. It compares apples and oranges. The NUL lists the black-white Equality Index at 71.8 percent, a slight increase from last year’s revised figure of 71.2 percent. However, the report across several categories fails to control for a key variable: the high percentage of single-mother households in black America. This variable results in disproportionate poverty and influences much of the health, education, home ownership and other statistics that NUL highlights in its report. Nearly one out of every three black households (29 percent) is headed by a single woman, the highest percentage of female-headed households in the U.S. Meanwhile, married-couple households are 28.5 percent of black households. In the most recent U.S. Census figures, 35.3 percent of black single-mother families are poor. For black married families, it’s only 6.9 percent. Single-mother households and a low marriage rate are hurting our progress, yet both issues are virtually absent in the NUL’s report.
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(Akiit.com) President Obama earned well-deserved accolades for his dogged fight to make a much needed, and long overdue comprehensive health care reform a reality. The president can and should savor the victory and feat. But there’s another equally hard battle that desperately needs to be fought, and that’s the fight to dent the massive and chronic joblessness of young blacks. The crisis is inching close to epidemic proportions. The National Urban League has urged the Obama administration to spend billions more to train and to put young blacks to work. The money is desperately needed and needed now.

The one out of three young blacks out of work matches the figure for joblessness at the peak of the 1930s Great Depression. The jobless figure for young blacks, especially young black males, is not much different than what it was even before the economic meltdown. During the Clinton era economic boom, the unemployment rate for young black males was double–and in some parts of the country–triple that of white males.

Three years ago, when the job crisis among young blacks was marginally less severe than the present, a stunned Congressional Black Caucus and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reflexively blamed President George Bush. They claimed that his fiscal and economic policies have resulted in the loss of millions of jobs during his years in office. They demanded that he radically increase funding for job training programs and provide more tax incentives for the working poor. Bush did none of these things. Neither did Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus. They did not vigorously push for a crisis job training and creation program for young black males. The crisis continued to mount.

The bitter new reality is that the job crisis is no longer Bush’s crisis. It’s Obama’s. This requires a candid look at why so many young blacks are unemployed and why they have stayed unemployed so long even when times were relatively good. 
State and federal cutbacks in job training and skills programs, the brutal competition for low- and semi-skilled service and retail jobs from immigrants, and the refusal of many employers to hire those with criminal records have been prime culprits in driving the numbers higher and higher.
 The high number of miserably failing inner-city public schools also fuels the unemployment crisis. They have turned thousands of blacks into educational cripples. These students are desperately unequipped to handle the rapidly evolving and demanding technical and professional skills in the public sector and the business world of the 21st Century. 


There’s an even bigger reason for the stubbornly high numbers that defy reason in the good times, a reason that conservatives routinely deride, and liberals downplay out of political fear. That’s the persistent and deep racial discrimination in the workplace. The mountain of federal and state anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action programs and successful employment discrimination lawsuits give the public the impression that job discrimination is a relic of a shameful, racist past.
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