Barack Obama is the first affirmative action president in our nation’s history and the evidence for his being so is overwhelming. Throughout the course of his rise to the pinnacle of American power, he was benefited time and again from the hand of identity politics.
Obama’s fairytale life is a Shangri-la fabricated from society’s obsessions with oppression. Based on past performance, he appears to be but an above-average man. Our commander-in-chief is no more messiah than he is Rosie O’Donnell. Regardless of how illusory his example, a majority of Americans are invigorated and inspired by him. Indeed, he is a beacon of promise for all who covet unearned riches.
Since 1969, when Richard Nixon foolishly imploded America’s prospects for equality by turning the concept of affirmative action into a reality, the country’s race shysters and guilt peddlers have come a long way, baby! They polarized the nation and discern disproportionate treatment out of every difference between individuals.
This is true for minority hustlers of every stripe. Foremost among the con artists to cash in on a once-proud nation’s guilt are the radical feminists. Gender feminists are a virulent strain of far-leftist whose power has exponentially grown over the past four decades.
Feminists continue to flourish in 2009 despite women being the recipients of every imaginable form of state-sponsored privilege. Yet no matter what funds are expropriated and what rights are eroded, leftist feminists always demand more. Everybody’s got “to have some skin in” their game. In response to those behaviors they do not understand or that allegedly offend, they counter with a “there ought to be a law” mindset.
Rather than be pleased by the Republican crack-ups of 2006 and 2008, these groups think the time is right to ratchet up demands. They may be correct. Without an unbelievable 70-to-29-percent level of support among single women, Barack Obama would still be an Illinois senator and “Blagojevich“ would not be a word known to all men.
Women made Obama, literally. Thus, in the spirit of his victory, feminists — who do not reflect the views of women on aggregate — are in the mood to divvy up the spoils. Will they get a seat at the porcine table? Answer: they already have.
The first to make public the need to shake down Obama, a transformative “articulate and bright and clean” version of “the Man,” was “feminist philosopher” [sic] Linda Hirshman. She penned an article, “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?,” which graced the pages of the toxic and soon-to-be-defunct New York Times.
Hirshman became famous a couple of years ago for writing a book about “how the unjust family prevents women from getting to work.” Her stance revealed once again that feminists are a wolf to traditional women. In the retired academic’s words, “the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.” Well, no condescension there.
Upon hearing of Obama’s proposed job creation plan she responded with massive criticism, a method ubiquitous among feminists. Of his purported yen for infrastructure building, she sniffed, “There are almost no women on this road to recovery … and as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.”
Where does one begin? Ms. Hirshman is wrong at every level. No evidence is offered for her assertion. This is in keeping with feminist patterns, as without ignorance their social movement would cease to exist. A glass snake could peer through their arguments and even slither past them. Indeed, a January 22, 2009, Reuters report illuminates Ms. Hirshman’s pervasive alienation from economic reality:
The economic crisis is hitting men much harder than women in the workplace, largely because male-dominated industries like construction and transportation are bearing the brunt of job losses, figures show.
Women, meanwhile, dominate sectors that are still growing, like government and healthcare, experts said.
“It’s men that have taken the hit,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s been an overwhelmingly male phenomenon.”
Four-fifths of the 2.74 million people who lost their jobs between November 2007 and November 2008 were men,” Sum said.
It took a month but the news eventually found Battleship Hirshman. She followed up her original article with another appearing in Slate on January 13, 2009. She countered facts and figures with speculation: “Doesn’t this sound wrong? Could it possibly be that women have lost only 20 percent of the jobs that have vanished in the last, devastating year?”
Yes. Women (generally) favor public-sector jobs that are not contingent on high rates of productivity and involve little personal risk. Being a teacher, an academic, a social worker, and/or a bureaucrat are not careers wherein one is exposed to physical danger or the elements. Therefore, it is no surprise that they are largely immune to economic downturns because government never cuts programs. Living on a budget is something only the taxpayers need do.
More and more the United States is paralyzed by the effects of creeping socialism, but this is a bonanza for those lucky enough to toil in bureaucratic redoubts. Most of what functionaries do — while undoubtedly of assistance to largesse recipients — has no positive impact on our trade deficit, the national debt, or the level of entrepreneurial activities in America. Moreover, beadledom eradicates venture capital as sclerotic, unprofitable structures have a corrosive effect on the economy as a whole.
The most astounding aspect of Ms. Hirshman’s perspective is that she has no notion as to what “economic stimulus” means. Of course, I am not implying that the Obama administration’s Keynesian hallucinations are valid, but the idea (purportedly) was to help employers, foster opportunity, and establish market incentives for the creation of jobs.
One can easily understand, though, based on past government policies, why Ms. Hirshman confused such actions with a desire to increase woman’s privilege. Yet instead, would it not be best practice for women to gravitate towards areas of the economy short of labor before deciding on a career path?
Rather than contract the economy by funding make-work jobs, Hirshman would serve women better by realizing that economies grow when businesses provide citizens with goods they wish to acquire. Sadly, it appears that Ms. Hirshman had the last laugh, as feminists invariably do nowadays. It turns out that Barack Obama — assuming that he ever did want to stimulate the economy in the first place — has buckled to pressure.
Two of his advisors released a report that reaffirms our president’s commitment to identity politics:
Summing across industries suggests that the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42% of the jobs created by the package. Given that so far in the recession women have accounted for roughly 20% of the decline in payroll employment, this calculation could reflect that the stimulus package skews job creation somewhat toward women, possibly as a result of the investments in healthcare, education, and state fiscal relief.
Perhaps this was the type of change that Barack was alluding to all along. Genius Mark Steyn noted that the meaning of economic stimulus has morphed into: “transfer massive sums of money from what remains of the dynamic sector of the economy to the special interests of the Democratic Party.”
I guess language isn’t what it used to be. There is no stimulus in funding non-productive people, but once President Obama’s package of goodies for the faithful becomes law that is precisely what we will be doing.
Obama’s other acts are even more troubling. Our president appears to believe every lie that feminists utter. Nine days after the inauguration he signed the Lilly Ledbetter bill as “a simple fix to ensure fundamental fairness for American workers.” His description of it was totally fallacious.
The bill makes a mockery out of the original statute of limitations and could result in employees suing over supposed discrimination emanating from supervisors who, in the case of Ledbetter, are long dead. The law is a disgrace and allows women, via phantom evidence, to break companies.
During the Ledbetter signing ceremony, Obama made clear that he accepts the spurious notion that when women are paid less than men it is a product of free-floating (and invisible) discrimination. Yet Thomas Sowell, in his outstanding 2008 book Economic Facts and Fallacies, labels the male-female wage discrepancy as being “one of the central fallacies of our time.”
Sowell reaffirmed my earlier point that women eschew vocations involving physical hazard and also that divergences in salary are attributable to other factors such as the time mothers spend raising children. He argues that there will always be “a premium paid for workers doing heavy physical work” and that men comprise 92 percent of all employment-related deaths. One suspects that erasing the sex-based disparity in vocational deaths is not a cause Big Feminism will soon champion.
Barack Obama appears to be one with the feminist privilege machine. When combined with his obvious lust for pork-barrel spending, it is clear that our current president is every bit as partisan as Jimmy Carter and should be seen for what he is: a uniter of radical leftists.
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