Here is the transcript of my latest editorial for Shared Sacrifice. This week, I talk about the recent economic efforts by President Obama, Black unemployment and the right’s control of language. Audio component is posted online at dotrad.

This past week, President Barack Obama outlined plans for a new stimulus package to create jobs and change the economic fortunes of people struggling financially in the United States.

It was part of a fresh effort to challenge Republicans on the economy as November elections loom. At a Friday press conference, Obama said Congress should provide tax relief for middle class families while warning about the dangers of low taxes for families earning more than $250,000 a year or more. The GOP, he said, is stymieing economic reforms over tax breaks for the wealthy.

Close to the time of the Obama announcement, some three million people in France particpated in a general strike against the Sarkozy government’s austerity measures. Journalist Rick Wolff acknowledges, years of anti-capitalist agitation have created a strong public consciousness that sees the economic crisis as caused by corporations’ investment decisions — and especially those of financial corporations.

In the U.S., such consciousness has not sparked that level of action.

Perhaps it is partially because gadgets and gear obscured money woes. Economic opportunity in the United States in truth has been cushioned by globalization. Community organizer Ben Becker says exploitation and extreme impoverishment of workers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as an industrial monopoly and technological domination in the U.S., permitted a temporary rise in living standards in North America. However, plentiful iPads, designer t-shirts and sweatshop sneakers can only be paid for through so much credit. With such bounty rapidly coming to an end, an adequate response has not been forthcoming.

The Obama Administration has been widely criticized for its handling to the economic crisis, unemployment and housing problems. In addition, the finanial collapse has further exposed already persistent disparities in unemployment for whties and people of color.

Professor William Darity remarks the unemployment rate for whites who have never finished high school or high school dropouts in the age range of 18 to 25, is 10 to 12 points lower than the unemployment rate for blacks who have had some college education in the same age range. At nearly 16 percent, the Black unemployment rate is staggering. In additon, sociologist Devah Pager, Darity reminds us, found white males with criminal records were more likely to be hired for jobs than black males with no criminal records, all else being equal.

Darity calls the Black unemployment rate the index of the degree of discrimination in the economy.

Is the economic contraction troubling? Certainly. Where many movements tussle politically with the right strategy is in asking the correct questions.

A pitfall of people getting active around struggles that directly relate to their own harships is what Mike Ely of the Kasama Project calls a built in tendency to get drawn into the same-old, same-old type of politics — elections, deal making, fighting for a slice of the pie, reaching agreements with the employer etc. — that never result in substantive change.

Surely many uprisings have been based on people being mobilized against their own oppression. Historically some groups used these issues as a jumpoff point from which people would theoretically see institutional problems from an isolated space, and new activists would flower.

Talking about and organizing around the economic crisis means the necessity for a better understanding of the world we live in.

It is time to declare Black unemployment a national emergency, and to talk about consistently higher unemployment rates for people of color as a issue the country must take seriously. And when I say seriously, I mean not as cause for creating simply a jobs program or for politicians to show up for photo ops to make promises. Rather, seeing what is facing the Black community and other communities of color should be reason for a national emergency in which the matters of racism, discrimination and lack of accountability — from the job site to reparations — move to the country’s front burner.

Organizers must speak more about corporate power and the disaster capitalism that has taken over in this period, a time when seemingly every corporation is demanding shameful tax breaks under the pretense that they will not create jobs without them. One report notes half a century ago, corporations paid one-third of the tax revenues taken in by the federal government — and they still managed to be profitable. Today, they pay less than 10 percent.

Glenn Beck and his tea party minions spend plenty of time talking about socialism, communism and anarchism as specters of the American way of life and economy. Such posturing needs to be tackled straight on. In Beck’s world, socialism is Josef Stalin and capitalism is My Pretty Pony and rainbows. But what we’re seeing now in the economy is not a grand scheme of Barack Obama or even George W. Bush, but a free-market system birthed by robber barons, slaveowners and corporations that made their millions off the backs of poor and working people around the globe. The North American genocide that was chattel slavery that put American capitalism on the map slaughtered far more people than Mao or any other communist reportedly did. Yet in Glenn Beck’s Pony fantasy world, colonization never happened. It’s like Columbus docked on a land of strip malls and Starbucks, with nice brown people offering lattes and skinny jeans. If we continue to let Beck and the tea party crowd control the language, up will always remain down, and any penny paid by the wealthy will be tantamount to the resurrection of Lenin himself.

The idea that capitalism has its cycles and will always bounce back is part of the enduring mythology of the free market. In the United States, that such a system is always bound to succeed is part of the fabric of the American Dream. But empires fall and systems fail. As the economic crisis gets tighter, change in our approach and politics must happen now and not later.