For the 35th straight month the United States unemployment rate has been above 8 percent and the White House wants to cut into that statistic by bringing jobs back to the America. President Obama Wednesday hosted a forum called Insourcing American jobs. President Obama is offering tax incentives to companies that bring their business back home.  The overall unemployment rate is 8.5% and the black rate stands at 15.8 %.   Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed attended the event and discussed the impact on the black job market in Atlanta with the Presidents efforts.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

The amazing thing about this trailer is that it could be an ad produced by the Democrats against presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It makes all of the arguments that Democrats will ultimately make against Mitt: that he is a corporate raider who puts his own greed ahead of people (and who won’t show his tax returns but has used offshore tax havens to avoid paying income taxes…) and it features the kinds of working class, older folks who Republicans traditionally entice with pro-corporate messages. It’s an odd, odd tack for a Republican candidate, but it could prove ultimately devastating to Romney. Watch the trailer to the 27 minute film that will follow Mitt to South Carolina:

And then wonder this …

Who is the Winning Our Future PAC working for? Newt Gingrich? Does Newt really think he’s going to become the nominee of a fundamentally pro business party via a populist message that assails capitalist greed more effectively than most Democrats do at this point? Really? On the up-side for Romney, if there is one, it does give him several months’ lead time to fashion a response to the fundamental argument against him: that he is a rapacious, job killing plutocrat. Or as DWS puts it: a “job cremater.” If he can parry the pro-Newt super-PAC, he may have a sufficiently robotic answer prepared when President Obama’s team hits him on Bain Capital in the fall.

On the other hand, I don’t see how this helps Republicans, because the fundamental argument against Romney is in essence an indictment of the entire conservative ethos — which is stridently pro-capital and anti-labor. The idea of “creative destruction” growing the economy, even if it costs jobs in the short run — and the idea that the pursuit of self-interest is fundamentally good for the country (as explained by Jeb Bush in his “right to rise” op-ed, or as championed by George Will in his takedown of Gingrich last month that included the description of laid off workers as “dead weight…”) is GOP 101. How does a supposedly conservative political action community tear that down, even in the interest of tearing Mitt Romney down, and not make the 99 percent versus 1 percent argument stick against any Republican?

The mind reels.

Link: the super-PACs

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

One day the GOP will get a legitimate black conservative voice. That day hasn’t come.

• By: David Swerdlick

 

This past Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, the once jocular and front-running, now defiant and rapidly crumbling GOP presidential contender Herman Cain announced that he’s indefinitely “suspending” his bid for the White House — and in the process he killed black Republicanism.

That probably wasn’t his plan, but after running a race filled with gaffes and gimmicks and lacking any humility or substance, Cain left the conservative movement unharmed and the mainstream GOP alive and well, but he may have finally laid to rest the peculiar strain of political thought that’s been driving black Republicans ever since the kinder, gentler Rockefeller Republicanism of former Sen. Edward Brooke and the late NAACP President Benjamin Hooks was replaced by the talking-point parroting brand that found its ultimate distillation in Cain.

After Cain’s woeful run, American politics may have finally seen the last of the “I’m-not-like-those-other-blacks” candidate — and good riddance.

Cain called himself conservative, but he mostly encouraged supporters to see him as the ultimate anti-Obama — claiming to be the “real black man” in the presidential race and saying America needed “a leader, not a reader.” Yet when the time came, Cain couldn’t back those claims up.

Read more at The Root

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

The former candidate isn’t an embarrassment to the race, just himself. My, how far we’ve come.

• By: Paul Delaney

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The United States logged yet another month of mediocre job growth in November.

The Labor Department said Friday that the nation’s employers added 120,000 jobs last month, after adding 100,000 jobs in October.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent, after having been mired around 9 percent for most of 2011.

“The unemployment rate has been stuck in the mud all year,” said Andrew Tilton, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs.

November’s jobless rate was the lowest recorded since March 2009. The rate fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force, and the jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work.

November’s jobs report reinforced how much President Obama needs additional stimulus, a tidy and fast resolution to the European debt crisis or some other economic miracle to reinvigorate the economy before the 2012 presidential election.

On the issue of government action to stimulate the economy, there has been some movement in Washington toward extending the payroll tax cut, which is currently scheduled to expire at the end of this month. Economists have said that allowing the expiration of the tax cut — which lets more than 160 million mostly middle-class Americans to keep 2 percentage points more of their pay checks — could be a severe drag on both job creation and output growth.

“If isn’t extended, it will have an impact on consumer spending in the first half of next year because it’ll put a big dent in consumer income,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics. “To the extent that reduces spending, there will be second-round effects on hiring.”

The other major stimulus program schedule to expire by 2012 is extended unemployment insurance benefits, which allows some jobless workers to continue receiving benefits for as long as 99 weeks. The average duration of unemployment has been near record highs this year, and so ending extended benefits is likely to affect a sizable chunk of the unemployed.

Unemployment benefits are believed to have one of the most stimulative effects on the economy, since recipients of these benefits are likely to spend all of the money they receive quickly and so pump more spending through the economy.

“They say businesses are refusing to look at résumés from the unemployed,” said Esther Perry, 59, of Bedford, Mass., who participated in a recent report on unemployed workers put together from USAction, a liberal coalition. “What do you think my chances are? Once unemployment runs out, I don’t know what I will do.”

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.