They Cut the Plumbing, Not Just the Jobs

Analysis

Politics / National — REAL POWER.TV

An RealPower.TV analysis of Antjuan Seawright’s August 12, 2026 column in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. Read the original column here.

“Doing very well with the Black jobs,” the President says.

Here is what that sentence is covering for. National unemployment sits at 4.2%. Black unemployment hit 6.6% in June. Marc H. Morial, who runs the National Urban League, put the timeline where it actually belongs: “For Black America, the recession has already arrived.”

We published the first half of this argument in July. The numbers have not moved. What has moved is the paperwork, and that is the part worth your attention this week, because a bad quarter is weather and a repealed program is climate.

In his August 12 column, Seawright lays the machinery out in order. Trump refused to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies, premiums went up, and now roughly 57% of Black Americans say they cannot afford healthcare. The Big Ugly Bill took more than $500 billion out of hospitals and essential care facilities and carried the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in American history. Black homeownership sat at 43.9% through the first half of 2025 and foreclosures spiked 18%. Credit card debt in this country has passed $1.25 trillion.

None of that is an accident of the business cycle. Every line of it was voted on. Somebody’s name is on each one.

But the piece of Seawright’s column that deserves the most attention is the piece least likely to make the evening news. He writes that the White House is working to make sure the Community Development Financial Institution Fund and the Minority Business Development Agency are “things of the past.”

Understand what those two things are. The CDFI Fund is how capital reaches neighborhoods that commercial banks redlined and never came back to. The MBDA is the federal government’s only agency built specifically to help minority businesses scale. They are not welfare. They are plumbing. A job cut is a bad year. Killing the institutions that let Black people borrow is a foreclosure on the next generation of Black ownership, and it does not show up in a monthly jobs report at all.

That is also why the DEI rollback numbers hit the way they do. Around 300,000 Black women lost jobs in a single three-month stretch. More than half a million Black men were pushed out between November and February. Roughly 600,000 Black women are still unemployed. And 59% of Black Americans do not have enough savings to survive a layoff, against 40% of white Americans. There is no cushion under any of this.

Now bring it home, because here is the Cleveland problem. You cannot organize around a number you cannot see. Ohio’s county-level unemployment data has been stalled since the federal appropriations lapse in October 2025 — the state’s own labor office says as much in its published notes. The last Cuyahoga County figure on the books is December 2025: 3.4%, which ranked us 79th out of Ohio’s 88 counties. Everything since is a blank page. Whatever is happening to Black employment in this county right now is happening off the record, and it will stay off the record until somebody makes noise about the data itself.

So here is what to watch, and it is narrower than it sounds. Watch whether the CDFI Fund survives the next appropriations cycle. Watch whether the MBDA still has a Cleveland-facing footprint by the end of the year. Watch when Ohio LMI starts publishing county unemployment again, and what the first Black-specific number looks like when it does. Those three tell you more than any headline about a “soft landing.”

Seawright ends his column where the argument actually lands, so we will let him have it:

“Recent headlines have white folks smelling the smoke of the economic crisis. But Black America has been on fire for more than a year. So let’s do something about it.”

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Antjuan Seawright is a political strategist and syndicated columnist. His column “While Trump says the economy is booming, the reality points to a Black recession” ran in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder on August 12, 2026. This is an RealPower.TV analysis of that column, not a reprint. Ohio county unemployment data: Ohio Labor Market Information.

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