President Obama visited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday, giving a pep talk on the work that lies ahead.

"Every one of you here has a critical role to play in making sure that everybody plays by the same rules," Obama said of the agency, created under 2010's financial regulatory reform bill to hold banks and other financial firms accountable for unfair or deceptive practices. "To make sure that the big banks on Wall Street play by the same rules as community banks on Main Street. To make sure that the rules of the road are enforced, and that a few bad actors in the financial sector can't break the law, can't cheat working families, can't threaten our entire economy all over again."

The president swung by the bureau days after appointing Richard Cordray its director, along with installing three members to the National Labor Relations Board, amid objections from Senate Republicans who had blocked Cordray's nomination last month.

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With neither side budging, the courts may weigh in next.

"The only court that would take it up would be the Supreme Court, and there's a lot of reason to believe that the Supreme Court would side with Obama," David Bositis, senior research associate for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told The Root. "Even though they're not liberal, they tend to side with executive privilege. The Republicans' argument of ‘We're not really in recess' sounds like they're trying to take Obama's power of making recess appointments away from him. My guess is that the Supreme Court would tell Congress, 'Screw you.'"


Read more at The Root.

State Sen. Ben Brooks has the highest percentage of black constituents of any Republican in the upper chamber, a fact that has made his district one of more competitive in Alabama.

That seems likely to change, however, when the Legislature adopts a plan to redraw the political map this year. The result could be a much safer Republican seat.

The rewrite is required by law after each Census to keep political districts roughly equal in population. Lawmakers also must maintain the same number of majority-black districts to comply with federal law.

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For decades, under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, states have been drawing political lines to carve out majority-black districts to increase minority representation. The effect has been a dramatic increase in the number of black leaders elected to office.

But Bositis, who written about the issue, said the Republican approach differs from when Democrats were in charge. Democrats created majority-black districts but also designed others with a high enough black population to elect white Democrats.

He said he would expect to see districts with very large black majorities after this year’s redistricting.

“When they’re done, they could all but ensure that the Legislature remains Republican for the rest of the decade,” Bositis said.


Read more at the Mobile Press-Register.

With two contests down, and several more to go, all eyes are now on South Carolina, the first state in the GOP presidential nominating race to boast a significant African-American population. And while as in New Hampshire and Iowa, Blacks will play a minimal role, that doesn’t mean that people of color around the nation should ignore what Republicans will be saying as they vie to win the first-in-the-South primary and, ultimately, the GOP nomination.

Rep. James Clyburn, Congress’s highest-ranking African-American, was waiting for frontrunner Mitt Romney’s arrival in his home state on Wednesday. After congratulating him on his New Hampshire primary win, Clyburn said that in South Carolina, “things are a little bit different.”

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David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said that Obama will definitely have to up his game.

“The economy is just starting to pick up and Obama will have to do everything he can to keep it going in that direction,” Bositis said. “If the GOP tries to damage the economy, which it’s perfectly capable of doing, including Romney, and make people suffer if it ups their chances of winning, he has to call them out and make everyone aware of what they’re doing.”


Read more at BET.

With the nation's first GOP presidential primary three days away here, a confident Mitt Romney spent most of Friday in South Carolina as Rick Santorum tried to build on his near upset in Iowa to make up ground on the front-runner.

Michigan native Romney is comfortably ahead in the Granite State, and back-to-back victories could solidify his lead among six candidates early in the nominating process.

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South Carolina's primary is next, on Jan. 21, and a pair of polls out Friday shows Romney ahead, despite the state's conservative, evangelical tilt. Romney, a businessman who has stressed job creation, struggled in his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign in part because conservatives see him as too moderate and evangelicals are wary of his Mormon faith.

"Romney has got money, and he has the best operatives of any of the candidates," said politics expert David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

Read more at The Detroit News.

The glass ceiling will shatter when the practices that support it have been eliminated from labor market hiring, firing and promotion decisions. Since women’s lack of educational credentials is seldom a part of this, the increased pursuit of higher education by young women in this dour economy is unlikely — by itself — to shatter the ceiling.

Young women and young men are both responding rationally to the current economic environment in which being previously unemployed puts one out of the running for many available jobs. Being enrolled in school is not considered being unemployed, so young women are right to think they may have better job prospects by the time they finish school and when the economy has improved.

Read more at The New York Times.

Social Security reform is not solely a critical issue for seniors, the disabled, and the dependent survivors of workers who die young – each community of color has a distinct stake in its outcome.  Please join us for a dynamic, interactive dialogue discussing:

• How Social Security reform uniquely affects African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans;
• How Social Security reform uniquely affects men, women, and children of color;
• The current political climate, including why conservatives perpetuate the myth that Social Security is bankrupt; and,
• Recommendations for strengthening Social Security in a targeted, equitable way.

Panelists are members of The Commission to Modernize Social Security and include:

• Maya Rockeymoore (Moderator), President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions
• Dave Baldridge, Executive Director of the International Association for Indigenous Aging
• Wilhelmina Leigh, Senior Research Associate of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• Meizhu Lui, Director Emeritus of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative
• Leticia Miranda, Associate Director of the Economic and Employment Policy Project, NCLR

The United States Census Bureau and the National Urban League will hold a Profile America Forum on the black population in the U.S. on Wednesday, February 1, 2012, at the BET studios in Washington, DC. The Joint Center's Dr. Roderick Harrison will serve as a panelist at this forum.

For more information, please visit the United States Census Bureau.

The National Academy of Social Insurance will hold its 24th annual conference, entitled Social Insurance in a Market Economy: Obstacles and Opportunities, on January 26 and 27, 2012, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. This gathering will explore how a strong, competitive economy requires strong, innovative social insurance programs – and vice versa.

Dr. Brian Smedley of the Joint Center's Health Policy Institute will take part in a session entitled Health Care: The Quest for Higher Quality at More Affordable Cost at 1 PM on Thursday, January 26. On Friday, January 27, the Civic Engagement and Governance Institute's Dr. Wilhelmina Leigh will speak at a session entitled Changing the Conversation: Messaging Social Security.

For more information on the conference, please visit the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Elections are about opportunity. And with so many critical issues hanging in the balance at present, 2012 will be an especially important time for Americans themselves to influence the direction of our country.

With the recovery just beginning to pick up the pace, 2011 was a challenging year for most everyone, regardless of their race, across nearly all economic indicators – jobs, net worth, home values. And while it is true that black unemployment runs almost twice that of the general population – at more than 16 percent – some studies now show that as a direct result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, some 6.9 million Americans were kept above the poverty line, including 1.3 million African Americans.

It is also true that President Obama inherited an economy that was in almost unprecedented free-fall and acted quickly to stop the hemorrhaging and began to rebuild. He has been working to help create the economic conditions for employment growth through efforts to rebuild critical infrastructure and our public education system.

And while current economic conditions point to job creation and economic recovery as the premier issue for the 2012 campaign, the past year has not been devoid of hope and the outlook is not without considerable promise for the African American community.

For example, at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies we have been encouraged by our progress in directing greater focus under the new health care law toward addressing longstanding racial disparities in health outcomes and access to health services.

Read more at The Washington Informer.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is under fire for his office's denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, with critics in the local and national press and blogs taking the mayor to task for shielding public records from public view. Underscoring this lapse in transparency is Emanuel's vow to foster "the most open, accountable and transparent government that the City of Chicago has ever seen." Cities like Boston, Phoenix, and Seattle all routinely release such information, according to reporting by the Chicago Tribune's David Kidwell, implying that they do transparency better.

This is not to suggest there has been no progress on transparency under Mayor Emanuel. Indeed, he has backed the release of large amounts of government data, including the June release of salary information for all city employees. The city's September release of city-wide crime statistics for the past decade not only helps crime-fighting agencies, but also journalists, advocates and businesses create more targeted programs to address local concerns.

Chicago, like its big city peers, just needs to decide if government transparency is a core attribute of its government. For the Emanuel Administration, releasing some data and not others does little to shed the old paradigms of closed door politics where waste, government fraud and abuse were the norm.

Read more at Huffington Post.