This year’s theme is “Austerity for Whom?” and is intended to inform and buttress the arguments of those who are resisting – or should be resisting – efforts to further shrink the public sector and destroy government’s ability to act as a counterweight to corporate power, all in the name of saving the nation from looming bankruptcy. The 2011 edition suffers, however, from a great flaw, one that is rooted in the deep Black political crisis that has become grotesquely acute with the rise of Barack Obama.

The report arrays the facts necessary to show the racial impact of so-called austerity measures: the assaults on government employees, who are disproportionately Black; deepening insecurity for all workers, with devastating consequences to communities of color; undermining of Social Security and the whole range of “entitlement” programs, on which Blacks and Latinos are far more dependent than whites; income and wealth transfers to the rich through regressive tax policies that further aggravate vast racial disparities. “Austerity for Whom” effectively answers the question: Who benefits and who suffers from the feverish attacks on government? However, the report utterly fails – for the same reason that Black politics has so completely collapsed since the advent of the Obama Phenomenon – to identify the forces arrayed against Blacks and browns in this austerity offensive.