Pander Mandate Mania

[Geee]

TownHall:

Hey, you know what the beleaguered American economy could really use right now? More special-interest mandates imposed by the White House on employers and taxpayers. Team Obama is "Winning the Future" by strangling it in red, green and rainbow-colored tape.

In a hapless bid to mollify minority politicians and criminal flash mobs of jobless hooligans in their districts across the country, the White House last week issued an executive order "establishing a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce." Apparently, as record numbers of people collect food stamps and unemployment benefits, what's really eating at them isn't their hopeless dependency. It's the skin color, national origin and gender breakdown of the Nanny State drones doling out their public benefits.

"Only" 39 percent of the federal workforce is made up of minorities and "only" 43.9 percent is female, President Obama's diversity mandarins decry. But disproportionality does not equal automatic discrimination. How about this: Let's see the Obama campaign meet fantastical diversity goals for its own donor base before forcing them on the publicly subsidized federal workforce.

While Obama lolls around Martha's Vineyard with corporate CEOs, Ivy League profs and Hollywood celebrities, his minions at the Office of Personnel Management are now hard at work developing strategies, goals and timetables to meet racial proportionality targets.

Presumably, these will supersede the pre-existing plethora of "diversity" rules long enforced by the racial preference bureaucracy. It's the bean counters' stimulus.

The inconvenient truth, of course, is that government-engineered "diversity" has already produced scores of minority-dominated pockets across the elite federal civilian sector. But forcing both public and private employers to hire-by-racial-numbers has done nothing to solve chronic unemployment and underemployment among black Americans outside the Beltway. The jobless rate among blacks is a sky-high 15.6 percent.