Obama Economic Advisor Robert Reich Makes Racist Statement Against Whites

That's strange. A self-hating white guy that doesn't want other white guys to benefit from the stimulus.

 

I am really confused by his statement. Why does it matter if it's white males or women or other people? All blue collar workers are suffering with the drop in construction spending.

Like orangerowdy, I support Obama. Obama needs to put Reich in his place.

Obama is going to get a reputation as president for blacks and not a president for every man/woman, if he doesn't stop this type of racism.

 

I get what he's saying we should give more jobs to illegal immigrants yay!!!

 

I don't think that every white man has come to grips with his guilt yet, but soon there won't be any opposition to this sort of thing.

 

The jobs need to be available first. I'm glad I don't work in that field, having to compete with a big pool of workers who'll work cheap.

 

Wow. That was an incredibly stupid statement to make. I don't really know what to say. I'm going to assume/hope that does not reflect the President's view for the Stimulus.

 

If I am Obama, the last thing I want is to have the appearance that there is a quota for minority jobs put into the stimulus. If that happens, it will be very difficult to defend it come 2012.

 

White construction workers are losing jobs just as fast as any other construction workers. These statements are dumb. I guess if Obama comes out and says this is bad, he actually has ackknowledge it was said when most people wouldn't even know it was said in the first place. If this was a leading CNN story, he'd probably have to say something.

 

Crazy, but for clarity's sake, did he mean specifically worker jobs or was he talking about the contruction companies like say KBR?

 

You all are making a big deal of nothing. He's simply saying that a stimulus package should touch on all demographics of society and not just white males who already on average might make the highest wages and have the lowest rates of unemployment. Wall Street is white male dominated and got a massive bailout. I'm guessing construction overall is white male dominated as well, especially management. If a $750 billion package were going to NBA players then it would be disproportionately helping black men as opposed to society as a whole which is the point. It's not difficult to grasp what he's trying to say. One demographic benifiting far more in a stimulus plan than every other, particularly not one based on need, is a problem.

 

Dumb thing to say all around by Reich. Fortunately, he's not exactly one of Obama's top economic people. Obama has the official group with Summers, Geithner, etc. Then he has his unofficial people that have been with him for years - Austin Goolsbee and the like. Reich is an add-on type, but I doubt he's at the core of the Obama team. That's probably why he's giving Obama suggestions on his blog.

 

This is true. A Rush Limbaugh thing. I bet. Pick. Pick. Pick. The daily gotcha. It's crap like this thread that make me think that we cannot really get things done in this counry. It makes me wonder if we can take definitive steps to get us out of our ecnomomic funk. It might be good for Limbaugh and Hannity and Fox to hype this type of thing, but trying to make a big deal out of this is bs.

Obama, won. Get over it and let's move on. We have real problems.

 

I believe Reich's only official role with Obama was as a member of his economic transition team before he became President. I'm not sure he's even affiliated with the Obama admin at this point. And there were something like 15-20 people on that transition team.

 

I don't think that's racism. I think it's more like PC insanity. (That video is terrible, btw. The speaker says one thing, and then text comes across the screen saying that he said something very different. Awful.)

With respect to hiring men, the construction industry was disproportionally hit when the economy headed south, so it's not surprising that that's where most of the new jobs would come from. Construction workers, who are mostly men, were almost certainly disproportionately laid off, so it's not surprising that they should be disproportionately hired. This is what should happen.

I don't get the comment about white construction workers, however. Don't black guys work construction in the US? Is Jim Crow still alive and well on construction sites? Unless that comment was just complete PC insanity I really don't understand where it was coming from.

PC insanity is something Obama will doubtless have to deal with however, because there are still a number of those folks around. I think there is a fairly distinct generational split with that problem. Boomers are quite prone to PC insanity, it seems to me, but Gen X and down generally don't suffer from the same problem.

 

He's jewish, not white.

 

there's nothing racist about that statement....and Reich is not Obama's economic adviser.

 

don't know edited the video but it definitely makes Reich sound like he has his priorities wrong. I don't think the critieria should be based on race, sex, etc. - but need. Maybe Reich was just intimating that a disproportionate amount of the neediest are, in fact, minorities. If that was the case, then I would probably have to agree with him.

 

I'm fairly certain that I'm jewish and white. Last I heard, Judaism is a religion. White is a color.