Agenda-Driven Stimulus
You already knew that, after the wild porkfest that the drunken rampaging chimp known as Congress engaged in, and the shoveling of stimulus funds to save as many government jobs as possible from their long-overdue reckoning.
Now, Christine Hoff Sommers at the Weekly Standard describes the “man-cession” and how feminists strong-armed Obama into diverting stimulus funds from the male-dominated, economy-driving construction sector that was hurting worst to the female-dominated health and education sectors, somewhat more indirect as economy drivers and way up in numbers anyway.
Hey, wait a minute. I thought Obama said the answer to our economic woes was to spend less, not more on health care. Never mind, here’s Sommers:
Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period …
Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
Women’s groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” A group of “notable feminist economists” circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.”
… Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan.
You’ll want to read on for the descriptions of the backroom encounter group and the public gloating. Turns out “shovel-ready” meant ready to shovel into agenda-friendly programs. Sommers notes that many of the sidelined burly men are married to women and have daughters who are now suffering as a result of feminist activism. Yeah, well, no one ever said affirmative action had to be fair, or make sense.
Topics: Obama, men, money, women
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:36 am on Monday, June 22, 2009
3 Responses to “Agenda-Driven Stimulus”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
It’s worth noting too, that these female-friendly jobs (”nurses, social workers, teachers, and librarians”) are at the lower end of the pay scale, and are largely funded by taxes. Where do these feminists think those taxes come from?
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:37 pm
[...] as Sommers piece shows, the bill was hijacked by the grievance-mongers and quota queens and billions was diverted to fields that were actually gaining jobs and weren’t at any real [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Next time NOW’s headquarters are afflicted by overflowing toilets and/or other nasty stuff, the local plumbers and sewer workers should tell them that they’re so busy they won’t be able to get to them for a month or two.