SAN FRANCISCO — An executive order seeking the termination of the CDFI Fund in the Treasury Department and the Minority Business Development Agency on March 14 runs counter to any intent to improve conditions in urban and rural communities, according to the founder of the 21st Journal of Black Innovation National Black Business Month.
John William Templeton, the nation’s first Black business newspaper editor in 1987 at the San Jose Business Journal, said the moves would enhance prospects for a recession in 2025. Templeton predicted the 2008 downtown and also projected the recovery in a October 2008 article for the New York Society of Securities Analysists.
“VOTEBLACKBUSINESS: State of Black Business, 21st edition showed that the Ten Key Factors for Black Business Success, developed by Templeton in 2004, created a gain of 600,000 new jobs by Black-owned firms in the three years after the passage of the Minority Business Opportunities Act of 2021, which turned the Minority Business Development Agency into a Congressionally-mandated part of the Commerce Department,” said John William Templeton.
It is the latest self-inflicted wound on the American economy. “University research is the primary economic engine in most urban areas, replacing manufacturing in places like Cleveland and Pittsburgh,” adds the 52-year-veteran journalist.
African-American leadership and employment in federal agencies has also enhanced the national core value of representation. “It is taxation without representation, the very issue that led Crispus Attucks to give his life as the first of five million Black veterans for the past 249 years, when we do not share in the financial liquidity and contracts created by the federal government which leased its first offices from a Black-owned business operated by a trusted aide to George Washington.
Legally questionable layoffs of federal employees, particularly in the senior executive service are targeted at African-Americans through such code words as “DEI,” notes Templeton, referencng the sacking of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He addresses the global implications of the most anti-Black administration since Woodrow Wilson, who carried out a similar purge of Black federal employees. “The targets for reduction are suspiciously similar to the ratios of Black federal employees,” he adds.