Even liberals get it.
Obama’s not just a dud, but a failure.
It’s not so much that he hasn’t lived to up to the hype as Messiah, as he hasn’t lived up to ordinary expectations for a fallible, human president.
When I rack up the score on all of the things Obama’s been wrong about, it’s hard to credit that my Democrat friends ever touted him as a “genius”.
If this is genius, it’s clearly not of the political type. Or the foreign policy type. Or the economic type.
Six years into the Great Recession and the labor market hasn’t improved much, as even liberals are now conceding.
The government has created more money than ever before, and while it’s making some people wealthy, it’s not creating jobs, especially not in the Black community, and especially not amongst black males.
Supposedly the “genius” did this on purpose. Or he didn’t.
“Blacks disproportionately left the labor market,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal economic outfit, “with the labor force participation rate for African Americans dropping by 0.3 percentage points to 60.2 percent, it’s lowest rate since December of 1977. The rate for African American men fell 0.7 percent to 65.6 percent, the lowest on record.”
Whoever else Obama may have benefited, it’s clear that black males haven’t been high on the priority list for him.
African Americans currently have an unemployment rate of 11.9 on the topline official stats. That’s double the rate of unemployment for women over the age of 20, and close to double the male unemployment rate for males aged 20 and over, which came in at 6.3 percent.
And even those numbers are much worse than it seems.
“The share of the working-age population with a job did not increase in December,” said Heidi Shierholz of the union controlled Economic Policy Institute “and the labor force participation rate dropped back down to its lowest point in 35 years. The number of‘missing workers’ increased from 5.6 million to 6 million. If these workers were in the labor force looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 10.2 percent instead of 6.7 percent.”
If you impute the same math to the Black community, unemployment for African-Americans comes in at 18.1 percent. That’s nearly one-in-five blacks without jobs today.
But the news gets worse even than that.
“In 2010, the incarceration rate for white men under local, state and federal jurisdiction was 678 inmates per 100,000 white U.S. residents,” says Pew Research, “for black men, it was 4,347. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black men were more than six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated in 2010.”
We don’t have numbers for 2011, 2012 and 2013.
But it’s not hard to figure that nothing plus nothing equals nothing.
Gays, check.
Whacko environmentalists, check.
Gun control nuts, check.
Radical, social theorists, check.
These are all interest groups that Obama has spent considerable political capital on.
God forbid that Obama should strain himself to propose something constructive to address the destruction going on in neighborhoods he has lived in and that’s directed mostly at black males.
There isn’t a more disenfranchised group in America than black males and Obama’s done very little to reverse that.
While marriage is down about a third amongst whites since 1960, it’s been cut in half in the black community, to 31 percent of black adults.
Guess what is the single biggest marker for poverty in the United States?
Being a single mother. And that trend has inordinately affected the black community.
While liberals like Obama do everything they can to provide aid and assistance to gay couples to get married, heterosexual black families get the back of the hand.
The result is poverty.
We know that there's a strong correlation between the composition of households and poverty. Households that lack two parents are many times more likely to live in poverty than those with two parents.
I’ve been optimistic that someone, somewhere in America will do something to address the crisis amongst black males in our community.
What we need is a touch of creativity here.
Republicans, Democrats, Bueller, Bueller, helllooooo?
It’s more than disgrace.
It is in fact a sin.
But don’t bother Obama about it.
He doesn’t want to know.
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