women

“Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun,” urged a recipient of more than $25,000 from Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which received the money through the National Endowment for the Arts. The stimulus is also being spent on “nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night ‘pervert’ revues,” and “pornographic horror films.” While providing taxpayer funds for “numerous” sexually perverse projects, and lots of money for welfare, the stimulus package has done little for America’s roads and bridges.

Why? Because feminist leaders complained that rebuilding roads and bridges would employ working-class men, who have borne the brunt of the recession, rather than women or the “sexually diverse.” Unemployment is very high among transportation and construction workers, who are overwhelmingly male. The vast majority of people who have lost their jobs in the current recession are male — 82%. But the stimulus package is not aimed at helping them. In response to demands from feminist leaders, the Obama Administration rewrote the stimulus package to largely exclude them, as Christina Hoff Sommers has chronicled at length.

The Obama Administration purged the stimulus package of most of the investments in roads and bridges originally suggested by economists, and filled it instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

As Christina Hoff Sommers points out, “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.”

But when the Administration floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

The Obama Administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

“A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Less than 6 percent of it ended up going to transportation.

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. The stimulus package largely repeals the welfare-reform law passed by Congress in 1996.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

The stimulus package also imposes on states racial set-aside requirements and prevailing-wage requirements, which increase the cost to taxpayers of government contracts. The prevailing-wage requirements will inflate the cost of state construction and transportation projects by at least $17 billion. Racial set-asides also are very costly to taxpayers.

Racial quotas, set-asides, and affirmative action are also mandated by Obama’s health-care plan, drawing criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reports today’s Washington Times. Earlier, the Commission criticized the Obama Administration for turning a blind eye to racist voter intimidation by black panthers, including an Obama poll watcher and Democratic official who used a nightstick and racial epithets to drive white voters away from a Philadelphia polling place.