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Depression, Not Recession Rocks U.S. Ghettos
By Sherwood Ross
In case you didn’t know it, what’s called a “recession” in White America is called a “depression” in Black America. During much of last year white unemployment held steady at around 8.8 percent. Down the block, though, it was about 12 per cent for Latinos and in Afro neighborhoods across town it averaged 16 per cent. And as unemployment spiked at 24 percent for white teens last year it hit 45 percent for black teens, according to the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University.
To his credit, President Obama signed a $26 billion federal aid package last summer to help the states rehire teachers and save public service jobs, where many Afro-Americans earn their paychecks. But at the same time Obama keeps pushing needless wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq—the last of which alone is costing Americans three trillion dollars. At the same time, Obama is opening a new war front in Libya—in all, waging wars in four countries that will cost infinitely more than America is spending on the unmet needs of its cities and its citizenry.
Year after year, decade after decade, Washington has cheated black communities out of economic opportunity. Instead of investing in a framework to help blacks advance by their own initiative, the Federal government has flushed billions down the toilets of friendly foreign strongmen such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek. Black neighborhoods have been the last to get public services from flower gardens to tot lots to street lamps to garbage collection to low-rent housing. They’ve been the first to have their children pulled off to fill the beds of privatized prisons and fill the ranks that march off to fight Washington’s wars of aggression. Their children have gone to the most run-down schools and have been expected to learn to read from raggedy books. The story of dilapidated housing is also well known. As one child in a Washington, D.C., slum not far from the White House told me, “The rats come runnin’ through here like express trains.”
Back in 1962, the Urban League’s Whitney Young pleaded for a “domestic Marshall Plan” that would revitalize the nation’s ghettos. But Washington preferred to spend its money on military hardware in Viet Nam. A half century has gone by and not that much has changed. Marc Morial, the UL’s president, is hard at work pushing childhood education, trying to stop home foreclosures, and canvassing employers to provide jobs for minorities. The change is that instead of fighting in Viet Nam, Washington is fighting in the Middle East. Same difference.
Instead of an “America First” policy that would put the interests of America’s 300-million people first, Congress, particularly the House Republicans, have called for obliterating aid to the unemployed and training for the unskilled. According to an Urban League news release, “high poverty school districts would lose nearly $694 million in funding, 200,000 Head Start children would be shown the door and thousands of teachers would lose their jobs (while) low-income students…would see their maximum Pell grant reduced by $845.”
Republican governors in Wisconsin and elsewhere have made a show of union-busting as if state workers are responsible for the nation’s economic woes, rather than the foreign wars that have poured a tidal wave of profits into the coffers of defense contractors. Cutting state jobs, again, disproportionately impacts Black workers. The same governors, by the way, seem unable to keep corporations from abandoning their employees and quitting their cities for foreign shores even though taxpayers outrageously subsidized those same corporations with tax-free benefits of all kinds to set up shop in their communities in the first place.
In its May 23 issue, Jet magazine asks the question of whether the Urban League is “still relevant.” Of course, Morial says it is. Maybe what Jet should be asking is whether Washington is ever going to become relevant for the American people, especially the ignored and long-suffering minorities. Instead, the Obama regime is wasting your tax dollars on foreign wars against small, defenseless countries that just happen to have a lot of oil or whose geography, as in Afghanistan, makes them ideal for laying pipelines.
To sum up, 25-30 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed and can’t find a good job, 44 million Americans are on food stamps, 95-million Americans have housing issues, 43-million Americans are living in poverty—and the eminent amateur Mussolini in the White House is going after Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. As I’ve urged before, it’s past time to switch the budgets and personnel size of the Defense Department and the Peace Corps, raising the latter’s staff from 16,000 to 3-million, and putting them to work doing good—-starting in Los Angeles and Newark. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll revealed that 59 per cent of our people want the U.S. out of Afghanistan now. Is the White House listening? Is your member of Congress?America first! #
Disclosure: Sherwood Ross was employed as News Director for the National Urban League in the mid-Sixties. His opinions are solely his own. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=106920
Posted by Sherwood Ross on May 23 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under Economy, Editors Picks, Jobs & Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Interesting article, did I miss this or did you? Adjusting back to civilian life can be a difficult process for many returning veterans, especially if they are injured. Finding employment in the middle of an economic recovery can be even more difficult. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor says more than 20 percent of young Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were unemployed last year – more than double the average unemployment rate? Your article appears to me to not be backing our troops while they are in combat.
Your Comment: “Year after year, decade after decade, Washington has cheated black communities out of economic opportunity. Instead of investing in a framework to help blacks advance by their own initiative, the Federal government has flushed billions down the toilets of friendly foreign strongmen such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek.” Cheated black communities?? How about social engineering that has made “black communities” dependent serfs on Uncle Sam’s Plantation. Well written you have an interesting perspective. Thanks I’m J.C.
Good points, Sherwood, but keep region in mind too.
Face it, parts of Pennsylvania and Michigan have had depression unemployment rates since Reagan but there’s no talk of it. Hell, GERMAN writers have noted the Fed disproportionately held investment dollars back from “formerly high-union membership areas” as any old Steelworker can tell you.
The fix is in to bust the US standard of living for all but the billionaires. As such it will hit ghettos hard no doubt. But also lots of Rustbelt areas, Appalachian counties, the Ozarks and any area dense enough to have paid lower-middle-class wages to factory workers from Truman Administration through the Carter years. Look for them all; this is not a case of which side of the canoe has the hole in it.
Franz, if you’re saying the whole damn canoe is leaky, I won’t argue with you. Is there any evidence the Fed held investment dollars back from high-union membership areas? I know a Fed commissioner and he seemed like a very decent business executive, not out to bust anybody, only to spread prosperity. Thanks for writing, Sherwood
It’s always been that way in black and brown communities. There’s always been a depression here when there’s a recession elsewhere in America. The problem is our communities suffer more than white communities, but we all suffer. Look into the black community if you want to see where the white community will end up.
Whites are being treated as second-class citizens now as well as blacks. Ask the people who run the church soup kitchens and see if they don’t tell you about an influx of white middle-class families en route to the poor house dropping in for dinner. Most Americans can’t save anything. Their rent is too high, their mortgage is too high, the cost of education is too high, their gas and their groceries are too high, and the employers to whom they were so faithful abandoned them. A nation that wages illegal wars abroad and keeps a record 2.3-million prisoners behind bars at home, is in trouble. These conditions have come about because we are not concentrating on making our country a city on the hill.We are allowing the greedy in the industrial complex push the country into wars to control the world’s energy supply, so that profits in the military contracting business are setting records, just like oil prices…. — Sherwood
You’re right Sherwood….I sometimes think Buchanan 2000 was America’s last chance…and he had no chance
Mr Ross Thank you for a thought provoking: Do research these questions:
How we as citizens define “miniority” and how the Fed defines minority are, they defined as, equal- Veterans are the minority with only 1% serving in this generation and era. So II’ll just focus on this as a centric- population as a “poet would” not a fed employee.
.
-Why the increase in minority veteran suicides?
-Why the increase in women veterans suffering stress illness?
-Why the increase, veterans divorce?
-Why the increase in minority veterans unemployed
-Why the increase in minority veterans drug use? (legel scripts as well?)
-Why the increase in minority veterans college dropout?
-Why the increase in minority veterans violence?
-What is “stress” illness? Is it the same in minority as non-minority in medical science?
-What “cultures apply? In the stress and the wellbeing?
–If disease is a power, has a hierarchy, a rank, a,chain of command…what is it? And how can we as a veteran family help our veterans transition with diginaty as a power greater than the disease?
These are the most talked about questions in the soup kitchen I work at as a volunteer in my city? Minority today is not my Grandfathers defination of Minority it would appear? vr j.
Financial hardship complicates many personal and familial relationships; drug use often sets in, like alcoholism, when people are in despair. There’s many an anecdotal story about GIs that were on drugs in Viet Nam that quit cold as soon as they returned home. This may answer some of your questions. Sherwood