April D. Ryan

There was more discussion on differences than common ground at the Health Care Reform Summit at Blair House. Major disagreement is on the cost for the plan. Republican Senator, John McCain says the current bill should be scrapped and reconstructed from scratch as most Americans are against the bill. President Obama disagreed saying if that were to happen it would generate more televised debates on cable television than actual reform to the system. The original thought for this effort was to move health care reform to the next step and ultimately its passage.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn during the Summits Lunch break, made it to the White House to talk with reporters.

President Obama walking back to Blair House was asked if he was hopeful for session two.

The Health Reform Summit began in the morning across the street from the White House. Just outside and several feet away, there was High Tea, minus finger sandwiches and Petit Fours. The tea party hosted a demonstration with participants chanting “kill the bill.”
Republican congressman, Paul Ryan equates the health care reform to a ponzi scheme. The Ponzi definition, a fraudulent investment operation. Congressman Ryan believes the “government should not be in control of all this”, but people should be in control. He contends there is not common ground like the president says between the parties on Health Care Reform.

The Administration believes that comprehensive health reform should:
• Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government
• Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs
• Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans
• Invest in prevention and wellness

• Improve patient safety and quality of care
• Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

• Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job
• End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions

Obama: No ’second Depression’
By: Eamon Javers
February 16, 2010
Barack Obama had no way to know it at the time, but when he signed the $787 billion stimulus bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009, it would be the last major legislative achievement he would put his signature to during his first year in office.
In the months that followed, Obama’s health care effort would run into a brick wall. His regulatory reform measure would face Wall Street delaying tactics. Cap-and-trade legislation would be vaporized by economic worries.
That left the stimulus, which Obama signed less than a month into his presidency as the defining legislative achievement of the president’s first year. And - with gridlock in Washington showing few signs of loosening up in this election year - the massive spending bill may yet come to define the first half of his first term.
That’s why the White House is locked in a messaging war with Republicans in a struggle to define the stimulus as a success in the public consciousness, with the administration stressing the early need for action.

Obama defended the stimulus act in remarks Wednesday, saying, “One year later, it is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second depression is no longer a possibility.”

Obama also got in a dig at Republicans who criticize the program, but accept the money for hometown projects all the same. “Now, despite all this, the bill still generates some controversy. And part of that is because there are those, let’s face it, across the aisle who have tried to score political points by attacking what we did, even as many of them show up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts,” Obama said.

President Obama and civil rights leaders discuss economy and black AmericansBy Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 11, 2010; A03

President Obama hosted a rare Oval Office meeting with civil rights leaders Wednesday to discuss his plans for improving the dire economic conditions gripping much of black America. 

Obama had not met exclusively with civil rights leaders since he took office, and he used the occasion to signal his concern about mounting black joblessness while enlisting his guests’ support for his proposals.

Despite a paralyzing blizzard in Washington, Obama brought together the Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, NAACP President Benjamin T. Jealous and Marc H. Morial, president of the National Urban League, for a conversation that lasted nearly an hour. Dorothy I. Height, the 97-year-old chair of the National Council of Negro Women, was prevented from attending by the severe weather.

The participants emerged from the meeting convinced that Obama is deeply worried about the desperation felt in many communities across the country about the economy. 

“You could see that the president felt the gravity of the problem facing not only African Americans, but all Americans,” Sharpton said. “I think he was very clear that he was not going to engage in any race-based programs. But at the same time, he was determined that, going forward, we can correct some of the structural inequalities that are currently in place.” 

Jealous said the conversation focused less on race than on the many economically hard-hit areas of the country, from Detroit to rural areas in North and South Carolina. “The reality is that poverty has been greatly democratized by this recession,” he said. “What all Americans have in common is that they are hurting and struggling and want to see the pace of progress quicken.” 

The meeting occurred as some African American leaders and scholars are expressing increasing frustration with the willingness of the first black president to directly address the economic problems plaguing black Americans. In December, some members of the Congressional Black Caucus threatened to oppose new regulations for the nation’s financial system unless Obama did more to fight the pressing economic conditions in many black communities. 

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who has had a sometimes contentious relationship with Obama, has been working to pressure the administration to do more to address home foreclosures, while complaining that the president’s economic advisers have been more responsive to the needs of big business than of struggling individuals. 

The leaders invited to the White House had requested the meeting with Obama in a letter two weeks ago, and Jackson was not among them. A spokesman for Jackson would say only that he was not invited. 

In January, black unemployment ticked upward to 16.5 percent, while overall unemployment fell to 9.7 percent — a yawning gap that persists in good times and bad. Numerous studies have found that black and other minority homebuyers are disproportionately affected by the home foreclosure crisis, and the rampant loss of wealth that has come with it.

But Obama has refused to separate the economic challenges faced by black and other minorities from the nation’s broader fiscal struggles. Initiatives such as increasing federal financial aid for college, putting huge sums of federal money into public schools, and pushing to expand access to health care would disproportionately benefit working-class people, many of whom are black, he has said. 

“Is there grumbling?” Obama asked rhetorically, in a December interview with American Urban Radio Networks’ April D. Ryan. “Of course, there’s grumbling, because we just went through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

 He went on to say that black people “were some of the folks who were most affected by predatory lending. There’s a long history of us being the last hired and the first fired. As I said on health care, we’re the ones who are in the worst position to absorb companies deciding to drop their health care plans,” Obama said. “So, should people be satisfied? Absolutely not.”

Still, Obama said that he should not tailor policies just to African Americans. “I’m the president of the entire United States,” he said. “What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That, in turn, is going to help lift up the African American community.” 

The leaders who attended Wednesday’s meeting said that, while they had never before met with Obama as a group, they had good relationships with many of his top advisers and his Cabinet. They added that they plan to meet in the coming weeks with the bipartisan leadership on Capitol Hill to make their case. 

“A lot of what we are frustrated by comes down to other actors in the government, not just the White House,” Jealous said.

No good news for blacks in latest jobless numbers
By DeWayne Wickham 

USA TODAY

 
I hope this isn’t what people mean by a “colorblind society.”

 
When the Department of Labor announced that the unemployment rate fell from 10% to 9.7% in January, Democrats from the White House to Capitol Hill gushed like a school kid who had just aced a test in a class he was struggling to pass.

 
“While unemployment remains a severe problem, today’s employment report contains encouraging signs of gradual labor market healing,” said Christina Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi credits the $787 billion economic stimulus bill President Obama signed a year ago with helping to create or save nearly 2 million jobs.

 
Troubling detail

 
Overlooked by Romer and Pelosi is this troubling (at least for me) detail: While the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate declined in January for whites and Hispanics, it went up three-tenths of a percentage point for blacks.

 
Even more worrisome, the jobless rate for black men 20 and older rose a full percentage point to 17.6%. That rate is closer to the level of Americans who were unemployed at the height of the Great Depression (24.9%), than to the percentage of white men (9.1%) out of work in January.

 
This largely overlooked fact should do more than put a damper on last month’s “good” employment news. It ought to cause the Obama administration and the Democrats who control Congress to worry aloud about whether the economic recovery they believe is underway is leaving their most loyal constituents behind.

 
But Romer has made only a vague reference to the “unacceptably high” unemployment rate of “black or African American workers,” without acknowledging that it’s moving in the wrong direction.

 
Promises, promises

 
In November, the National Urban League urged the White House and House and Senate leaders to create a new $168 billion stimulus plan that would target job creation in “communities with the highest rates of unemployment and the long-term unemployed who often face the greatest barriers to getting a job the longer they are without one.”

 
Then in December, National Urban League President

 
Marc Morial met with Lawrence Summers, head of the president’s National Economic Council, to push that idea. “We’re reviewing the president’s proposed budget as well as both Senate and House jobs bills” to see whether any of what his group suggested ended up in a piece of legislation, Morial told me. That’s a subtle way of saying he hasn’t heard from the White House or Congress since making that pitch.

 
That should make a lot of black folks want to holler. That it apparently hasn’t ought to cause a trembling in James Weldon Johnson’s grave. In 1924, when blacks were as tightly linked to Republicans as they are now to Democrats, Johnson, the NAACP’s executive secretary, offered this assessment of their political standing: “The Negro demands less by his ballot, not only in actual results but even in mere respect for himself as a voter than any of all the groups that go to make up the American citizenry.”

 
The “colorblind society” that hoisted Obama into the White House threatens to make those words as haunting today as they must have been 86 years ago.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

The federal government has surpassed the initial dollar amounts President Obama dedicated for Haitian earthquake relief. After the January 12, 2010 devastation, President Obama announced the United States would start the humanitarian response with 100 million dollars. Rob Nabors, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget says, “We’ve actually spent over 300 million dollars in federal funds in Haiti to date.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is looking at a10 year world plan for Haitian reconstruction. The cost is not known. 

American financial estimates continue to climb. The State Department, Health and Human Services, along with the Defense Department continues relief work in the Port Au Prince area. 

Nabors says, “What we are going to do, is not let money stand in the way. We are going to do what we need to do …and so the United Sates steps up and does its share in support.” 

The death toll from the earthquake has reached 212,000.  More than 300,000 were injured and 1 million left homeless. 

The Justice Department has notified the White House that a settlement is near for black farmers discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture. The plaintiffs in this case 80 to 90 thousand black farmers. The issue dates back to the late 1990’s and the Clinton administration. 

 
President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal includes 1.2 billion dollars in settlement monies for the black agrarians. If approved by congress, it would mark the second time federal funds were allocated for the discrimination award for black farmers in a presidential budget proposal. In the past, President George W. Bush proposed the monies, but, congress cut the farmers hoped for compensation. Rob Nabors, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget says, “The President [Obama] put forward a proposal last year; and, it is continued in this year’s budget where we have a proposed settlement of approximately 1.2 billion dollars. The Department of Justice is currently negotiating the settlement.

“It is about ensuring Justice is done. It is important in this situation,” contends Robert Gibbs White House Press Secretary. 

John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association contends, “It has been very frustrating for the black farmers. He is hopeful this latest settlement offer, makes it into the black farmers hands after years of promises. 

“Nearly 80 to 90 thousand black farmers are waiting for justice and they are getting older everyday and they are dying everyday”, says Boyd. 

 
In 1999, 14 thousand black farmers were awarded a settlement from the original lawsuit. Boyd reminds that those farmers received “62,500 a piece totaling over a billion dollars.” Farmers who did not know about that initial suit were able to file claims against the United States Department of Agriculture. Now, tens of thousands of black farmers are possibly in line for the federal monies to correct the wrongs by the Agriculture Department. 

Boyd contends, “Not all those are going to get their money. Those farmers who are eligible will get there money. Those who are not, will get closure.” 

Boyd says, the issues originated from a “lawsuit in 97 [1997] for discrimination in farm lending programs and subsidies (farm service agency USDA). The National Black Farmers Association allowed for late file lawsuits in 2008.”  He also believes the only way farmers will get their overdue settlement monies is if President Obama and the Democrats in Congress fight for the budget item approval.

President Obama has officially proclaimed February African American history month. On the first day of Black history month, Vice President Joe Biden and the Second lady, hosted the Alvin Ailey Dance theatre. The internationally acclaimed modern dance troop’s honor coincided with the beginning of a series of performances in Washington, D.C. for their annual shows in February at the Kennedy Center. Bruce Gordon , form Head of the NAACP and board member of the Alvin Ailey Dance theatre says the dinner with the Vice President is a high honor. 

Next week, President Obama hosts a Public Broadcasting concert featuring the music of the Civil Rights era. At lease one of the Performers for the event, Chicago Native and Grammy Award winner, Jennifer Hudson.

President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal includes 1.2 trillion dollars in budget cuts over 10 years. The White house contends the plan does not make across the board cuts but adds money in some areas and cuts others. Within the six percent increase in education funding, there is a 98 million dollar proposal for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.   White House officials contend President Obama understands the importance of HBCU’s to this nation.   In 2009, the Obama administration allowed increased funding allotted by then President George W. Bush to sunset at the upset of many of the countries 100 plus HBCU’s.  

 
Haitian funding is not included in the fiscal proposal as the earthquake occurred after the budget was compiled. President Obama initially pledged 100 million dollars in emergency funds. That money will grow overtime as the United States is joining world communities in financial help to rebuild the quake shattered area. At the Haitian Donors Conference slated for March in New York City, the discussions will center around commitments of just how much will be given for the country over the next ten years.