White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett maintains the Obama administration has entered one of the most critical phases of its economic recovery program: job creation. Over the past 10 months, the president’s domestic agenda, with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as its centerpiece, has stabilized the financial system and enable the nation to avert Depression 2.0.
In recent weeks, there have been a number of positive economic indicators: the U.S. Commerce Department reported that GDP grew at a 2.8% annual rate for the third quarter — ending four quarters of economic contraction — and sales of new homes rose 6.2% in November, the highest level in more than a year. Moreover, Friday’s U.S. Labor Department report on employment showed the unemployment rate dropped to 10% in November from 10.2% in October. There has been little movement, however, in the African American unemployment rate which currently stands at 15.4%.
To further address this pressing issue, Jarrett said the president convened last week’s White House Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth to bring “a cross section of people together to focus very specifically on what we can do to bring down the unemployment rate and create jobs. We think there is a good opportunity for both the public and private sector to collaborate and come up with suggestions.†The 130 business leaders, labor officials, economists and mayors discussed initiatives in areas such as infrastructure, manufacturing, small business, international trade, and renewable energy.
Operating the White House’s intergovernmental affairs and public engagement apparatus, Jarrett served as one of the top officials who orchestrated this summit among some of the nation’s leading business innovators. Next, she will coordinate grassroots and digital outreach efforts to divergent business, political and civic communities in pursuit of even more job creation and industry development concepts. Jarret’s expectations: “Out of all this conversation, we are hoping that some very specific, concrete ideas surface that the president and his economic team can get behind and work with Congress, if necessary, to get legislation passed.†On the day of last week’s forum, Black Enterprise Editor-in-Chief Derek T. Dingle conducted a one-on-one interview with Jarrett on the administration’s plans to ensure that the nascent economic recovery will come with jobs.
Black Enterprise: By putting together this summit, is it an indication that the stimulus package isn’t working?
Valerie Jarrett: The stimulus package is doing exactly what it set out to do. When the president came into office, he inherited the worst economic meltdown in our life
time and took very bold steps to bring us back from the precipice. In January, when he was inaugurated, we were losing 700,000 jobs per month. That number has dropped precipitously since then. We’ve had a whole range of actions taken on behalf of the administration to stop the dramatic down spiral of the economy and we are seeing that the gross national product is actually, for the first time in two years, on the upswing. So we know we are moving in the right direction. However, as productivity increases, we also know that employment is usually a lagging indicator. So what the president said is now, what more can we do to help jumpstart job creation?How quickly will the administration move on the recommendations from the jobs summit?
The president has instilled in his team a sense of urgency. So I would expect to see, in the days and weeks ahead, the president will begin to unveil his ideas that have come from this process.
Small business is one of the engines of employment. Because of the dire state of small and minority businesses, will there be a task force developed on the White House level similar to the one created to strengthen the auto industry?
As a part of the President’s daily briefing with his economic team, there is always an emphasis on small businesses and we’re always looking for those that are most vulnerable. So I don’t know whether it would be premature to say whether we’re going to set up a special task force but you should know that it is on the agenda of the president’s economic meetings every single day. We have had, in the White House alone, several sessions with the President, with small businesses, with the Small Business Administrator, the Commerce Secretary and the Labor Secretary. [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner, [National Economic Council Director] Larry Summers and I have all gotten together with small businesses and really tried to understand the challenge.
Small and minority business still have a tough time getting access to capital.
There is a tension here which I will highlight for you. We’re encouraging [community banks] to lend to small businesses and the regulators are saying to them, quite appropriately, make sure that you have reserved enough assets on your books in case we have more shoes to drop in the next year. So they are caught in this tension between trying to satisfy the regulators and trying to provide access to capital.
And that’s at a time when they’ve been given the 90% guarantee on SBA loans?
Even with that, it’s still not enough. So the question is what, if anything more, is appropriate for government to do and what is appropriate for the private sector?
So is the administration trying to encourage major corporations to invest in their suppliers and help grow them to a size where they can be self-sufficient?
Exactly. Or even just get them through this period [with working capital since] there is this tough time finding access to capital. So those are the kind of creative ideas that we are hoping will come. It’s a really good example of where the private sector is doing something to help another part of the private sector because of the economic climate in which we find ourselves.
The National Urban League recently held a Green Jobs Summit. One of the proposals put on the table was the development of green empowerment zone similar to the urban empowerment zones of the ’80s and ’90s. Have you looked at developing a similar model for distressed communities and small businesses?
Well, we have looked at it and we’ve worked very closely with the Urban League. I think what we want to do is figure out how we can take those kinds of ideas and strategically figure out what is the best use of the resources that we have? And we want to balance that against other priorities. We have to believe green jobs are a terrific way to stimulate the economy because it’s moving us into the forward direction. I think the idea of having some sort of incentives that induce the creation of those jobs is very good. And we have a Green Jobs Task Force that has been working with a broad collaboration of people within the administration as well as many outside companies to really drill down and see what we can do to jumpstart green jobs.
Is the administration presently working with Congress on the jobs creation bill?
We’re going to share with them the results of the summit. We are working very collaboratively with Congress as we always do.