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Friday, December 11, 2009
Congressional Black Caucus calls on Obama to address minority unemployment
Posted by Mitch Perry on Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:06 AM
The Congressional Black Caucus, which includes 3 Florida House Democrats (Kendrick Meek, Corrine Brown and Alcee Hastings) has been at odds with President Obama over several issues in recent weeks, but they got what they wanted in Congress this week after boycotting a House committee vote and threatening to abandon support for banking regulations.
What did they get? $4 billion added to a Wall Street regulation bill and $2 billion to a proposed House jobs bill in spending they sought for African American communities.
The group will hold a news conference Friday morning, where they're expected to say President Obama hasn't done enough to specifically address joblessness in minority communities across the country.
Of course, that's a complaint heard round the country - not about minority areas specifically- but joblessness overall, and what the President might be able to do to try to contend with the continuing problem.
Caucus members appreciated the President's speech at the Brookings Institute earlier this week, but want more.
Last week's announcement that the unemployment rate did not increase was cause for celebration at the White House, but as Paul Krugman writes in his column today, the job outlook still looks bleak and there's nothing in the immediate future to indicate it's going to turn around.
In the Nobel Prize winner's column, he writes:
I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up to the financial press.
Krugman says the Federal Reserve needs to do more by buying $2 trillion in assets. In this political climate, I'm not sure that will fly.
Meanwhile, for further discussion comes Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column, that says President Obama, with his moves in Afghanistan and his non-peace like speech in Oslo yesterday, is now turning himself to be more centrist. I think many progressives would react that he always was a centrist, while others might agree (disappointingly). Anyway, read and discuss amongst yourselves.
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