Who could have imagined that a Black U.S. president in the 21st century would invite the nation to “cut domestic spending to the lowest level it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower was President.” But that’s what Barack Obama offered this past Monday night, asking the public to endorse trillions of dollars in permanent cuts that will, indeed, bring us back to the Fifties. Barack Obama was smiling as he asked the nation to embrace a return to an era before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the great social movements that brought some level of civilization to a savage and brutal America. He was confident that his most loyal constituency, Black America, would accept being Shanghai’d into his backwards time machine. “While many in my own party aren’t happy with the painful cuts,” said Obama, “…enough will be willing to accept them if the burden is fairly shared.”
But of course, there can be no fair sharing between rich corporations and individuals who might lose a few tax breaks and deductions, and people who already have next to nothing. And Black people have already been in the time machine, having lost 53 percent of their meager household wealth between 2005 and 2009. According to the Pew Research Center, Black median household wealth fell from one-tenth to one-twentieth that of whites in just four short years, the largest racial disparities since the Census Bureau began tracking such data, a quarter century ago. Thirty-five percent of Black households have zero wealth, or negative net worth. How can there possibly be fairness in shrinking the government to a size that cannot possibly be of support to the one-third of Black households that own nothing, or less than nothing?
The Black middle class, which is employed disproportionately by the government, is at the edge of oblivion. Obama’s “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans, if they will only take it, would push hundreds of thousands of Black families into the abyss. The nine percent of Blacks that owned stocks in 2005 lost 71 percent of their portfolios by 2009. Whites lost only nine percent of their stock holdings. Bye-bye, Black capitalism.
Black America has already been pushed back at least a generation, to a point somewhere before 1984. And what does Obama propose? That we revert to an Eisenhower-era government.
