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The slideshow illustrates the unemployment data for each July for the last decade, 2002 to 2011.

Bureau of labor Statistics graph of black unemployment rates 1982-2011

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has kept data on unemployment among American blacks since 1972. The record high rate of unemployment was in June 1983, 20.7%. The record low was in April 2000 at 7%. For June 2011 the black unemployment rate is 16.2%.

The last thirty years have seen four peaks for black unemployment and three troughs.

The highest rate of black unemployment in the Obama era was 16.5% in March and April 2010. It has now been fourteen months since that peak. Black unemployment has dropped to 16.2%.

In comparison, after the first peak in the table, black unemployment had dropped from 20.7% to 16% in fourteen months. After the second peak it went from 14.7% to 12.7%. The fourteen months after the third peak saw black unemployment go from 11.5% to 10.5%.

The last Census report on poverty in America was released in September 2010 for the year 2009. Black poverty was up from its record low rate in 2000 of 22.5%. In 2009 just over one in four American blacks lived in poverty. For blacks living in a household headed by a woman, 40% lived in poverty.

Over the last generation, reductions in black unemployment have become increasingly more difficult to achieve. Even the record low rate set in 2000 was the highest of any minority and came during the one of the greatest economic upturns since World War Two. In the midst of an economic boom, seven percent of blacks remained unemployed.

Black unemployment, like black poverty, contains a core group that may not be reachable by economics and the free market as we know it. This hardcore cluster of poor blacks was created by social dynamics and governmental policies that may have created a permanently disenfranchised class lacking the ability to change their own condition.

The January 2011 unemployment numbers have been released by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We have placed the records for each statistic into this table. The records clearly demonstrate the Clinton era boom when unemployment was extremely low. As prior stories have reported, the Bush era maintained near record lows until the last year of his administration.

Nearly 1 million Americans have left the labor force since Barack Obama was inaugurated. The average number of weeks on unemployment has nearly doubled.

Hispanic unemployment has increased by 20% in the last two years but has more than doubled since its record low in 2006. Unemployment for blacks has gone up nearly 25% under this administration and has more than doubled since its record low in 2000.

The unemployment rate for women reached a modern low in December of 2000 at 3.3%. In January 2009 it was 6.4% and it was 7.9% in January 2011. As other media outlets have reported, unemployment appears to be affects far more men than women.

The names of the first 111 exemptions from the Obama Health Care Plan have been located. We undertook an examination of the contributions by these entities, or their principal officers, to see which party received the most contributions. Many corporations use their own PACS or donate to other PACS. The unions do the same.

Curiously, it appears that Republican donors did well in obtaining exemptions and donated much less so far in 2010.

One of the exemptions seems to have gone to an organization that benefits only non-citizens. The CWVBEA is a group that provides insurance to legal non-citizen workers in the U.S. from various Caribbean nations.

The full report, showing all 111 exemptions, may be found in PDF format at this link.

The information in this report is not complete. It includes PAC contributions and contributions from corporate officers to candidates and committees that were clearly Democratic or Republican. Most donations to candidates by PACS in the record were not researched.

The information used in this report was culled from two FEC pages, Advanced Transaction Query By Individual Contributor and Summary Reports Search, and from Open Secrets.