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OP-ED: Vote Like Your Money Depends On It

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“It’s not businesses that create jobs” ~ Hilary Clinton

 

Seriously? The following quote was taken from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign speech last week. Is she also going to tell us that water is not wet?

To the entrepreneur that starts out with a dream and an idea and that works 80 plus hours a week to build a business those words of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sound like nails going down a chalk board. Obviously neither Hillary Clinton nor this administration knows where jobs come from because the job creation during this administration is dismal at best.

Thisadministration is touting that the unemployment rate has dropped to 5.9% the lowest since the summer of 2008. But if that is truly the case why is everyone still not working? Because it is not the unemployment numbers we should be looking at it is the job participation rate.

The Labor Force Participation Rate which in September slid from an already three decades low 62.8% to 62.7% the lowest in over 36 years, matching the February 1978 lows. And while according to the most recent Household Survey, 232,000 people found jobs, what is more disturbing is that the people not in the labor force, rose to a new record high, increasing by 315,000 to 92.6 million people who have left the work force.

And this trend is not getting better. According to an article in the Kansas City Star, titled Business Startups Hit a 30 year Low “Startups of new businesses, which are historically the key source of new jobs. Are at their lowest point in 30 years. They’re occurring so sparingly that U.S. businesses are now dying faster than they’re being born. The news is shockingly bad and starting to look like a death spiral.”

Indeed, a Kauffman-funded Census report cites that “new firms and young businesses account for about 70 percent of gross job creation and disproportionately contribute to net job creation.” Over 50% of the working population works in a small business ergo, less entrepreneurs will continue to cripple the U.S. economy.

And for black Americans a simple glance of a list of the wealthiest blacks in America from the Oprah Winfrey’s to the Robert Johnson’s prove that wealth creation for black Americans is in entrepreneurship. The story of Greenwood, Oklahoma in the 1920’s known by many as the Black Wall Street because of it’s vast wealth and prosperity had amassed over 600 successful business.

The blacks in Greenwood would become multi millionaires because of the businesses they started which ranged from grocery stores, movie theaters, banks, law offices, a hospital and even a bus system. Tragically , Greenwood, OK aka Black Wall Street would fall victim to the Tulsa race riots of 1921 which has been coined one of our nation’s worst acts of American racial violence in which 35 square blocks of business and homes were torched by angry white mobs.

Karen Watson is the author of the book, “Being Black and Republican in the Age of Obama”. Email karen.watson@gopbuzz.com

Karen Watson is the author of the book, “Being Black and Republican in the Age of Obama”. Email karen.watson@gopbuzz.com

As you go to the polls to hire a politician to work for you question whether their ideas and intents are pro entrepreneur or not. And make sure your choice is fiscally sound, if we begin to vote as if our paychecks depended on it we might just see a new Black Wall Street rise again!

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of May 7 – 13, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of May 7 – 13, 2025

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Oakland Post: Week of April 30 – May 6, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of April 30 – May 6, 2025

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Arts and Culture

BOOK REVIEW: Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy

When Bridgett M. Davis was in college, her sister Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

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Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.
Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Bridgett M. Davis, c.2025, Harper, $29.99, 367 Pages

Take care.

Do it because you want to stay well, upright, and away from illness. Eat right, swallow your vitamins and hydrate, keep good habits and hygiene, and cross your fingers. Take care as much as you can because, as in the new book, “Love, Rita” by Bridgett M. Davis, your well-being is sometimes out of your hands.

It was a family story told often: when Davis was born, her sister, Rita, then four years old, stormed up to her crying newborn sibling and said, ‘Shut your … mouth!’

Rita, says Davis, didn’t want a little sister then. She already had two big sisters and a neighbor who was somewhat of a “sister,” and this baby was an irritation. As Davis grew, the feeling was mutual, although she always knew that Rita loved her.

Over the years, the sisters tried many times not to fight — on their own and at the urging of their mother — and though division was ever present, it eased when Rita went to college. Davis was still in high school then, and she admired her big sister.

She eagerly devoured frequent letters sent to her in the mail, signed, “Love, Rita.”

When Davis was in college herself, Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

First, they lost their father. Drugs then invaded the family and addiction stole two siblings. A sister and a young nephew were murdered in a domestic violence incident. Their mother was devastated; Rita’s lupus was an “added weight of her sorrow.”

After their mother died of colon cancer, Rita’s lupus took a turn for the worse.

“Did she even stand a chance?” Davis wrote in her journal.

“It just didn’t seem possible that she, someone so full of life, could die.”

Let’s start here: once you get past the prologue in “Love, Rita,” you may lose interest. Maybe.

Most of the stories that author Bridgett M. Davis shares are mildly interesting, nothing rare, mostly commonplace tales of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a sibling. There are a lot of these kinds of stories, and they tend to generally melt together. After about fifty pages of them, you might start to think about putting the book aside.

But don’t. Not quite yet.

In between those everyday tales, Davis occasionally writes about being an ailing Black woman in America, the incorrect assumptions made by doctors, the history of medical treatment for Black people (women in particular), attitudes, and mythologies. Those passages are now and then, interspersed, but worth scanning for.

This book is perhaps best for anyone with the patience for a slow-paced memoir, or anyone who loves a Black woman who’s ill or might be ill someday. If that’s you and you can read between the lines, then “Love, Rita” is a book to take in carefully.

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