GREENS Report: Black Folks Thrive During Recession

Shocking Numbers Show African-American Community Thriving During Recession

A report issued today by the General Roundtable on the Economic Encouragement of Negros (GREENS) stated that, “Due to the overwhelming impact of the collapsed credit market, the dissolution of the banking and finance sectors, and now the impending implosion of the domestic auto industry, blacks, who have a four hundred year history of making due with next to nothing, are finding their survival skills are now in high demand.”

In Oakland, California, one Soul Food Cooking School instructor noted that class enrollment is an all time high. Miss Betty Collards, head of the school told BlackPower.com, “I ain’t never seen this many white folks sign up for classes. Now that they can only afford neckbones and beans, they’ve discovered they don’t know what to do with them.”

Miss Collards, who also participated in the GREENS study, said that all of her friends and neighbors with kitchen hair salons, black market cd businesses, and hand car washes are thriving during this downturn. In fact, several community entrepreneurs have set up a Survival School for the Formerly Wealthy.

“I am in charge of the Make Due with Less curriculum, while my husband, who was a mortgage broker with Wells Fargo until recently, is running our budgeting and financial management program: Paycheck to Paycheck, How to Make that Dollar Stretch,” said Miss Collards.

The GREENS institute study determined that even at the times when the U.S. economy is thriving, the massive wealth and affluence, still largely based on the enormous wealth created by slave labor and continued on low wage labor performed by blacks, Latinos, immigrants and poor whites, does not reach the hardest hit. The study concluded that even when the economy is roaring, most of the black community lives in recession.

Miss Collards commented that, “I don’t need a study to tell me that when those white folks that started Facebook and other dot coms and stuff were making their billions that didn’t mean a damn thing for working class black folks. As a matter of fact, real incomes for black folks declined in the late 1990s when America was at the height of its so-called boom.”

She concluded with, “Boom. Boom my ass. Boom is the sound that those white folks jaws made when they saw the big board at the stock exchange this morning.”

Already, the GREENS study found, President-elect Barack Obama is being called on to clean up the mess created by his soon to be predecessor. And the white folks in charge are getting antsy. Barack Obama has largely stayed hands off asserting that there can be only one President at a time. An assertion that holds water.

But, House Banking and Finance Committee Chairperson, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has been all up in the President-elect’s kool aid calling on him to take a more active role in solving the financial crisis.

The GREENS study found that Representative Frank should shut the hell up and sit down as the President-elect can only participate in negotiations, but his power to enact change is rightfully limited until January 20, 2009 when he becomes president.

In the end, the GREENS report concluded that the African-American community will weather this recession with the same creativity, passion, and hamhocks that has kept it solvent for the last 400 years.

“Times are always at or near rough for our people. But love, community, and some black eyed peas go a long way to making things alright,” quipped Miss Betty Collards.

The GREENS report agreed.