Waters Takes on Jobs Issue, But What About Her District?

During the Congressional Black Caucus’ Jobs Tour this past summer she was referred to by a colleague as the ‘Queen of the Caucus.’

Undeniably so, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has emerged as the most vocal member of the CBC in its collective effort to curb high Black unemployment.

We’ve watched her all summer urging folks at town halls during the jobs tour to “put pressure” on President Obama and, specifically, to address Black unemployment.

While some have considered Waters’ tactics caustic, divisive, and even anti-Obama, many in her congressional district believe otherwise, and credit her with shifting national attention to the scourge of Black unemployment.  While the Congresswoman’s office, strangely enough, failed to provide any comment to Politic365.com by deadline, many in her district had quite a bit to say about what’s driving Maxine Waters.

“You have to understand – [she] is right on the ground here in South L.A.  She’s part of this community,” argues national commentator and author Earl Ofari Hutchinson during a phone interview with Politic365.com. Hutchinson lives in Waters’ district. “She sees on a first-hand basis, day in and day-out in her District, the major problems that unemployment is causing in terms of a whole range of issues. So it would be very difficult for someone in that position to essentially ignore it, and pretend that this is not an issue that has to be frontally addressed by the White House.”

“So I think in that sense what she’s really trying to do is not so much disparage, not so much divide, not so much cast a negative shadow in any way [that] demeans what the President is doing.  But, essentially kind of give him that prod, that continual prod saying ‘Mr. President, this is a crisis issue.’  When you’re talking about a major part of your voting constituency, and African Americans are certainly that by any standard, who essentially have so many colossal needs – the poverty, the unemployment, and all the things that stem from that in our communities, then you have to address it, you have to speak out on it, you have to talk about it, you’re duty bound to do that,” said Hutchinson.

Janet Kelly, Executive Director of Sanctuary of Hope, claims that support for Obama in South L.A. hasn’t wavered. As Kelly runs her life coaching and mentoring non-profit for young adults and youth discharged from foster care, she sees many constituents in Waters’ district still respecting her – although they don’t want her taking a bite out of the President’s base.

“I think people respect what she says.  I think they are acknowledging what she says, but at the same point, they still want to promote the President.”

But others have been more critical of Waters, like Black conservative Star Parker, who challenged Waters in her bid for the Congressional seat.

In an email to Politic365.com, Parker charged that “Maxine Waters has been more of the problem than the President because she has been pushing big government welfare state policies that have brought us to this brink for many more years than the President has. We should recall the words of Margaret Thatcher that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Today we have run out of other people’s money. Waters’ career has been built on spending other people’s money and building a culture of dependence in Black America for which blacks are paying a very dear price today.”

Referencing her recent column on the subject, Parker also stated that while she believed it was “good” that the CBC is “vocal about the very poor economic conditions in so much of the black community,” she believed that “the CBC just wants to do more of what has already failed. The President’s policies and the policies that the Black Caucus wants – more government, more spending, less freedom and free enterprise, is the problem not the solution.”

However, Refugio Mata, Communications Coordinator with Good Jobs L.A., a coalition of community organizations that sponsored the “Kitchen Table” summit in Los Angeles this past August (where Waters told the Tea Party to “go straight to hell”) told Politic365.com that the Congresswoman helped change the debate on Capitol Hill – from unproductive sweating over deficit reduction to a focus on job creation.

“In a sense, her voice and her opinions really helped push things to the point where everything is about jobs,” said Mata.

L.A. residents have good reason to be concerned about jobs.

Algernon Austin, Director of the Race, Ethnicity and Economy Program at the Economic Policy Institute said that that Black unemployment in the L.A. metro area was about 19.5 percent.

Recent statistics put the national Black unemployment rate at just over 16 percent.

“I doubt that it’s any better in 2011 than it was in 2010,” Austin soberly points out.

Austin claims the bursting of the housing bubble in a number of the sunbelt states like California was possibly a primary factor leading to higher than usual unemployment in the area.

Mata said that at the Good Jobs L.A. summit there were a wide variety of reasons attendees said they could not find jobs – from being chronically unemployed or having no access to a computer.

“South Central L.A. and the Watts area, even in the best of times, has always been chronically at the top of the list in terms of the highest unemployment rate of any area throughout L.A. County,” says Hutchinson.  ”And when you talk about overall, nationally the unemployment rate in that area has always been off the charts, it’s always been double digits, especially for Black males, sometime even triple than its been for young Whites. So that’s just been an ongoing situation, and it hasn’t changed. As a matter of fact, it’s gotten worse.”

Hutchinson added that given the upcoming election, Waters and other Black leaders would likely continue to engage in efforts to bring attention to Black unemployment.

“This is October, you’re still thirteen months out from November 2012, you’ve got a whole election cycle next year that we’re going to go through and my guess is that with Maxine Waters, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the Urban League, and many others too, that they’re going to press the President,” he said.

Kenneth Mallory, a political correspondent for Politic365, is an award-winning journalist and attorney who has free-lanced for several publications, in addition to serving as a general assignment reporter for the Washington Afro-American Newspaper. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in addition to his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law.

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One Response to Waters Takes on Jobs Issue, But What About Her District?

1. Astralis says:

   7:47pm October 8, 2011 at 7:47 pm

   Star Parker challenged Laura Richardson, not Maxine Waters. Same difference, really.

   Reply