Kenyon Farrow on Obama and HRC

On the eve of the National March for Equality, President Obama spoke to the Human Rights Campaign in Washington DC, and laid out his gay policy agenda for his administration. But does that agenda speak for the rest of us? Kenyon wrote an opinion piece for The Grio.com, proclaiming “HRC doesn’t speak for me.” He writes,

"When Obama delivered his “gay agenda” speech to the well-fed, well-scrubbed mostly white crowd of gays and lesbians at the Human Rights Campaign’s Annual Dinner on Saturday night, anyone outside of the LGBT community would have assumed by the applause that the entire “gay community” is in agreement that access to serve in the military, gay marriage, and hate crimes legislation are our primary issues. But in reality, HRC’s political agenda is not what I want. It does not speak for me, nor for the lives of many other black, poor and working class LGBT people."

Given the fact that we’re in a long recession where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in almost every month of 2009, and national unemployment numbers are at nearly 10 percent, why are we not talking about the issues that most people are concerned about - health care and the economy - and their impact on the LGBT community? The truth is, for many people at that dinner who could afford the cheapest ticket at $250 a plate, jobs and wages are of little concern.

To read the rest of the article, go to THEGRIO.COM.

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Comment by Bill Perdue on October 20, 2009 at 9:31pm: I agreed with most of the post.

Here's a note and source for unemployment figures.

The 10% figure counts only those receiving unemployment insurance, not those unemployed. It's a "new" method of counting unemployment adopted, if I remember correctly, during the deep recession of Reagan’s first administration as the export of union jobs, speedups and job cuts created the rust belt.

The real figures, “U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers” is 17.0 percent for September 2009. It’s likely to breach the 20 percent mark in early 2010. 20 % is comparable to the rate during much of the Great Depression.

Unemployment is growing and persistent. The new profitability and competitiveness of the economy is due to bailouts being turned in to management bonuses and the determined union busting actions of Obama’s administration which gutted the UAW contracts as a condition for the auto bailouts, an exact duplicate of Bush’s refulal to bailout airlines with unions in the crisis following 9-11 when man large carriers failed.

Monthly updates on real unemployment figures can be found at the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics at this link: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm