Pander Mandate Mania

Michelle Malkin
Pander Mandate Mania

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.

You know what else won't benefit black unemployed Americans all that much? The new White House executive order granting mass deportation waivers. To mollify open-borders activists, Obama signed a blanket directive of immigration non-enforcement last week that will grant reprieves to at least an estimated 2.1 million "DREAM Act" illegal alien students and workers. Instead of deportation papers, they'll be served work authorization permits and green lights to attend publicly supported colleges and universities. Those who refuse to hire or admit these waiver golden ticket winners will face the certain and immediate legal and political wrath of La Raza, the American Civil Liberties Union, Catholic leaders and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

When Obama rolls out his hodge-podge jobs plan after descending from Martha's Vineyard, he'll undoubtedly tout a regulatory rollback that the administration claims will save $10 billion over five years. But what about the costs of all the pander-mandates they're furiously heaping on taxpayers as 2012 nears?

According to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the last DREAM Act proposal (which failed in December on a bipartisan vote), the amnesty now in place by administrative fiat would "increase projected deficits by more than $5 billion in at least one of the four consecutive 10-year-periods starting in 2021." And that doesn't include the costs of all the unlimited family members that the millions of DREAM Act beneficiaries will eventually be able to bring to the U.S.

Hispanic politicians can pretend it's not a zero-sum game. But the rest of us can't afford such delusions. Indeed, it's a self-perpetuating, voter-recruitment racket for the Democratic Party. Among the first White House deportation waiver beneficiaries: an illegal alien student from Mexico who led protests on Capitol Hill for the DREAM Act and another left-wing activist from Mexico who was able to evade deportation by marrying her lesbian lover.

On Monday, black Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters hectored an Obama jobs official to spell out exactly which Americans were suffering under the Democrats' failed policies. "Let me hear you say 'black,'" she taunted at an economic forum. The crowd whooped it up. But it's cronies of color like Waters who have joined hands with the open-borders alliance, backed every special-interest bailout and hyped diversity for diversity's sake as the cures for her community's ills.

Let me hear you say "pot and kettle."