Obama’s October Surprise - 7.8 % Jobless – Conservatives Angry About Good News

Choosing substance over performance is a novel thing in a world fixated on drama, flash and shiny objects. Mitt Romney unleashed a tsunami of animated policy reversals during the first Presidential debate. On Friday October 5, 2012 President Obama answered loudly when the September unemployment rate came in at 7.8%, the lowest in 44 months.

As soon as the lower unemployment rate was made public some conservatives lost their minds and accused the Obama administration of cooking the books to make the President look good right before the election. Some highly respected business leaders, politicians and journalists went berserk with conspiracy theories. One even said that Obama supporters were misrepresenting their employment status to lower the jobless rate.



Now the picture is crystal clear. President Obama has been trying to bring the economy back from the brink of depression with an opposition party that is admitting it was in their best interest to keep unemployment high until after the 2012 election. Will a political party be held accountable for not doing everything it could to help get Americans back to work? It seems that the tantrums being thrown because it appears that more Americans have found work is a testament that many have placed politics above the needs of the people.

Some need to take a hard look into the mirror and consider their vote. Why would you cast your vote for someone rooting for a higher level of suffering among your fellow citizens because it served their political ambitions? Some may say they would have made things better after they took office, but when you hold public office it should be the American people that come first, not your political party. Delaying any efforts that would have put more people back to work as quickly as possible meant more lost homes, hungry children and despair. There should be a price to pay if anything was intentionally done or not done in order to delay the speediest economic recovery possible.

The Mean Index – Profit Over Jobs In U.S. – Opposite In Europe & Japan

 Empty - Ghosts of the Middle Class

There was a time when recessions caused employers in the United States to figure out ways to keep employees busy in order to keep from losing them. Now laying off workers seems to be the first, not last option for U.S. companies compared to the rest of the world.

In the past when economic downturns would hit, U.S. companies would do everything it could to keep from losing employees. Employees would be assigned cleanup tasks, filing and straightening up the storeroom. It seems that something has dramatically changed in the United States. An article titled “Unlike competition, U.S. values profits over jobs” by Paul Wiseman March 31, 2011 and published on the MSNBC website shows the difference in how some foreign country based companies treat employees in a recession versus United States based firms.

In the United States worker productivity is up as fewer employees are producing more output after companies shed workers during the recession. According to the article that is not the case in Japan and Europe. Productivity actually went down during the height of the recession during 2009 by 3.7 percent in Japan and 2.2 percent in Europe while U.S. productivity growth doubled from 2008 to 2009 and again in 2010. Now that U.S. corporate profits are at record levels, U.S. firms are hiring a pace far lower than businesses in other recovering nations.

It seems that companies in other developed nations kept more of their employees during the downturn, even at the cost of profits and productivity. Something has changed in the United States as employees are not seen as being as valuable as they once were. Downsizing and trimming the workforce seems to be the first strategy to deal with a downturn as opposed to keeping more employees and sacrificing some level of profitability. Earnings per share and bottom line profits have won out over retaining skilled employees throughout a downturn. Pumping every ounce of output from the remaining workers is seen as a better strategy than hiring new employees as profits bounce back, employee morale and well being take a back seat.

I guess the United States is firmly entrenched in the “employee as a unit of labor input” formula as opposed to an individual with respect, responsibility and loyalty if treated well. This should be no surprise when the action that are taking place in some states towards professionals such as teachers and firefighters as they are hammered down into the roles of “just shut up and work.”

Do We Need A National Black Intervention

This not just another shower of negativity about African Americans, but with a 62% high school graduation rate, 4% of black men in prison and 15.4% unemployment rate, do we need a national black intervention?

It is said that we don’t manufacture anything in this country anymore, but I beg to differ. I feel we are manufacturing and assembly line of failure conditions for African Americans in general and for young blacks in particular.

Drop Out Rate

A Time magazine article by Andrew J. Rotherham on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010 indicated that only 62% of African American students graduated high school in 2008. You can say this is the beginning of feeding the raw material into the assembly line. In a world where even a 4-year college degree does not guarantee someone the security of being employable, having less than a high school diploma is a recipe for constant struggle.

The lack of a high school diploma does not mean someone is automatically on the road to prison or unemployment, but the conditions that existed for someone in that situation to be successful have greatly diminished. An economy based upon an abundance of industrial, construction and agricultural jobs is a distant memory. The options are few for the unskilled and uneducated.

Prison The Human Warehouse

An article published on ABCnews.go.com by Pierre Thomas and Jason Ryan on

June 6, 2008 stated that, “Four percent of U.S. black males were in jail or prison last year, compared to 1.7 percent of Hispanic males and .7 percent of white males. In other words, black males were locked up at almost six times the rate of their white counterparts.”

Now some will say the prison rate and dropout rate can’t be necessarily connected, but the conditions for someone with limited options to become swept up in activity that may lead them to incarceration is logically higher. The inequity of drug sentencing laws are a factor, but being involved in activity for the laws to become a factor has more impact.

Joblessness

Next we have the issue of the unemployment rate in the black community. Being at 15.7% for the month of November 2010 compared to 8.4% for whites according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. That rate for black unemployment is 86% higher than whites and that is getting very close to double. An article by William Alden that was published on 09-30-10 in the Huffington Post indicated that those in prison don’t count in the unemployment rate. Can you imagine the unemployment rate if the African Americans in prison were counted in the statistics.

This seems to be a crisis by normal definitions and some other issues have not even been included here. The question is what can be done to stop the movement in these negative directions. There is not a group to march against, sit down to stage or organization to boycott. It is us. We need an intervention with ourselves. How do we do it, I’m open to suggestions.