Jack & Jill Politics

There aren’t a lot of Black MBAs out there. It’s actually a small, underrepresented group of people compared to say, lawyers & doctors, in the black community. The facts:

The GMAC’s 2002 Global MBA Survey of graduating MBA classes states that “Among US citizens who were asked their race/ethnicity, 84.7 percent are white (non-Hispanic). Asian Americans make up the next largest group at 6.7 percent, followed by Hispanics (4.5 percent) and blacks/African Americans (4.1 percent).”

I have an MBA and one of the things that stuck with me that one of my business school professors drilled into us in class was this: “Hope is NOT a strategy.” He said it over and over again until we understood what he was saying. This advice has helped me a lot in the business world. It’s too bad no one had that little chat with Barack Obama before he gave Wall Street a whole bunch of Main Street’s money in the Hope that they would release the money back out to Main Street in the form of loans, loan modifications, business lines of credit, mortgage re-financing, etc. The Hope that Wall Street would Change…well, that hasn’t quite panned out, has it?

The Wall Street bailout was incredibly unpopular with ordinary Americans for good reason. People wondered why our tax dollars were being given to the tune of billions to the very same knuckleheads who had driven our economy into a ditch using bright ideas like racially discriminatory subprime mortgages and illusory derivatives to fuel their greed for money. It was akin to giving a drug user just a little more junk to get them through the night and stop the shakes so he would stop breaking into people’s cars to steal their radios.

Naturally giving a junkie desperate for drugs more drugs means they are not likely to share those drugs with other people. No, they’re more likely to hoard those drugs. And that’s kinda what happened. Trickle down economics didn’t work under Reagan and it’s not working for Obama. It was a tragic error to hand over a bunch of benjamins to banks without forcing them to agree to some very specific strategies & goals for how they would return that money back into Main Street’s pockets. There was no plan for how they would use our money to help us rather than just helping themselves to more cushy bonuses.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s proof that the stimulus is working and it’s too bad it’s not getting more media coverage. The CBO just released a report on jobs saved due to the Stimulus package. From the White House blog which rightly slammed the Wall Street Journal for its poor reporting on the stimulus:

Between its inception in February of this year and the end of September, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has:

• Saved or Created up to 1.6 Million Jobs (midpoint estimate: 1.1 million)
• Added up to 3.2% to the Growth of Real GDP (midpoint estimate: 2.2%)
• Reduced the Unemployment Rate by as Much as 0.9 Percentage Points (midpoint estimate: 0.6 ppt)

Still by their own reports, people are still losing jobs. Don’t matter if the blood loss is slowing. Americans still feel the pain. This kind of thing (also from the White House blog) is not what people want to hear:

Payroll employment declined 11,000 in November.  This is a dramatic improvement from the decline of 597,000 in November 2008 and 741,000 in January 2009. […] The unemployment rate, which had risen to 10.2% in October, declined to 10.0% in November.

The nation wants to hear from the White House how they plan to get their cousin Tyrone a job so he stops borrowing money from them. And moves out of their basement. We want to hear how you are going to help us get retrained for good jobs so they can save their homes  from foreclosure.

This is why we elected Obama — because we thought he’d be on our side. Yesterday’s White House Jobs Forum is a good start. We’d like to see more ideas and hard work to help us get jobs. The Stimulus is working but the Wall Street bailout ain’t. We all still know folks who are unemployed, underemployed or are jobless and broke our damn selves. What we want to know is what the Prez gonna do about it…