Running for re-election while slyly urging voters to “fire” his Democratic opponent, non-office holder Russ Feingold, Sen. Ron Johnson also has been making big noise in Milwaukee's black neighborhoods, associating himself with a small, private job-matching program run by Greater Praise Church of God in Christ, a central city church.
The Johnson campaign has placed at least two large billboards in black Milwaukee neighborhoods to go with a TV ad touting his association with the ambitious but tiny Joseph Project, a private, church-based effort which helps underemployed black males find work outside the city through a volunteer van program to transport them to jobs — jobs that are an hour’s ride and two counties away.
"The Ron Johnson you don't know is changing lives in our community," the billboards and TV ads proclaim.
You likely don't know about this Ron Johnson for good reason. Wisconsin's Republican U.S. senator, a tea party favorite, perhaps deserves a wee bit of credit here, but only a wee bit, and then only in context: That's 35 jobs filled by formerly unemployed black Milwaukeeans ... and only 100,000 to go, give or take.
The latter number is a floating estimate of the number of adult black males out of work in Milwaukee -- 52.7% of them were still jobless in 2012 four years after the Great Recession, and while the numbers have improved since then, they are still atrocious. Nor does that number include black Milwaukee teens looking for work or adult black women.
Johnson’s effort, however well-intentioned, thus makes for pretty weak tea party. The Joseph Project van program recently has helped 35 Milwaukee black male adults get to jobs in the Sheboygan area. A pair of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories last February and in September described the program, identifying a state Republican official -- later a Johnson staffer -- whose job was to reach out to black constituents.
The staffer helped connect the churches to employers in Sheboygan, two counties away and about 55 miles north of the big city. Apparently, closer employers in suburbs ringing Milwaukee were disinterested. The program reportedly has operated on a shoestring, starting out with a 13-year-old van that was persnickety. It has more vans now and apparently is about to begin a similar operation in Madison -- another Democratic, urban, and black stronghold, although one with less poverty.
Johnson's move to make in-roads among nominally Democratic urban black voters by touting his narrow, modest, community involvement is in line with a series of Republican Party efforts to widen its electoral base among minorities. That’s a hard task made harder by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has informed America’s blacks that they all live in urban hell holes where they could be shot any second.
According to one news story, the project is named after a book by black conservative Robert L. Woodson Sr. The conservative National Review has touted the effort, which also in conservative circles grandly has been dubbed, "Ron Johnson's anti-poverty project."
Johnson for his part says "outsourcing” compassion to government programs doesn't work. Oh, really? Check out that other Johnson, name of Lyndon. LBJ’s so-called Great Society efforts in the 1960s made solid in-roads against national poverty, before Congress began slashing funds for it.
So far it's unclear how much if any money Johnson actually has given to this small charity. All we do know is that the Grammie Jean Foundation, Inc., a family foundation that Johnson personally controls, last year donated mostly four-figure amounts to churches and other groups, according to the foundation's most recent tax return. The Grammie Jean foundation is kindred to the Trump Foundation, one of those wealthy family instruments designed as a tax sink and, yes, occasionally making contributions to charity.
Most of Grammie's 2015 donations were to institutions in neighboring Minnesota. Only three donations went to organizations in Wisconsin, not including the Greater Praise Church; two of them were not-for-profits in Oshkosh -- multi-millionaire Johnson's home base -- and one to a church in Fond du Lac. The Grammie Jean Foundation's total Wisconsin-based contributions last year were $25,000. Maybe something on the Joseph Project will show up in the 2016 tax filing.
In September's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel feature story, Johnson called the project “the best thing that’s happened to me” during six years in the Senate. “This is a joy."
Johnson's pet project probably also is a joy to the handful of men who nevertheless endure two-hour round-trip commutes to get to jobs those two counties away. And the project no doubt serves as a positive symbol for modern conservatism's meme that government is useless and private-sector action is the solution.
But here's the thing: While admirable and helpful, this modest effort is quite inefficient and far, far short of the need. Nor is it likely the project could be scaled up to a size that really would bite into the problem of black unemployment.
Ron Johnson is a powerful United states senator who, other than this modest project, is philosophically opposed to most any meaningful social safety net. Social Security is in his words a "Ponzi scheme" and the Affordable Care Act -- which has extended decent health insurance coverage to many working poor people -- is mass "consumer fraud."
If you want to know how he really feels about helping the poor on more than a small scale, Johnson went so far as to blame several days of violence and unrest in Milwaukee's low-income Sherman Park neighborhood this August on federal anti-poverty programs (actually, the direct trigger was a police shooting of a young black male suspect).
Johnson thinks the solution to such unrest is more “faith-based, community-based programs, helping individuals one person at a time.” You know, like the Joseph Project. But expecting an economically stressed urban sector to bootstrap itself entirely through churches or other local not-for-profits with some private charitable help is, to put it bluntly, unrealistic.
Putting numbers to the Johnson mindset: If Milwaukee only had several thousand more private efforts like the Joseph Project, and there were perhaps 100,000 more job openings in Sheboygan (population around 50,000, so don't hold your breath waiting for that economic boom), we'd really have something that could move the arrow on Milwaukee poverty and social neglect. Of course, then we'd also have 10,000 or 15,000 vans making multiple workday round trips between Sheboygan and Milwaukee, clogging Interstate 43. Just an unrealistic thought experiment -- but in terms of scalability, there you are.
Truly workable and realistic solutions in Milwaukee necessarily will involve government action to improve mass transit between underemployed urban neighborhoods to (much closer than Sheboygan) suburban jobs, and job creation within those distressed Milwaukee neighborhoods as city government is working hard to achieve, despite heavy criticism from conservatives. They don’t like mass transit either. [For those unfamiliar, Milwaukee is heavily segregated from its mostly white suburbs, where many formerly city jobs have been relocated and where for decades city leaders and residents resisted black migration.]
Further, government should work to ensure that more black high school kids can earn a drivers license, often a key to getting and maintaining a job. A University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee study noted that only 17% of African American male teens in Milwaukee have a driver’s license compared to 64 percent of white male teens living in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
Of course, many of these black Milwaukee youth are so impoverished they can't afford an automobile, now or upon reaching adulthood. Car ownership among Milwaukee’s black adults likewise is low, hence the need for better mass transit. Joseph Project van pooling is cool, but that is more like a demonstration project that proves the wider concept that Johnson doesn't support.
To accept Johnson's private-charity focus means believing in the viability of a Joseph Project flotilla that hasn't and likely can't be created. The problem in metro Milwaukee is so huge and the honorable Joseph Project so tiny that Johnson's touting of it is not only politically convenient in an election year, but amounts to looking through the wrong end of the telescope, focusing on tiny ripples of hope in a sea of turmoil.
When you're adrift on high seas, the Coast Guard is a good thing to have around.