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While millions of jobless Americans struggle in the rough-edged recession, Washington employment is booming, driven partly by new racial and gender quotas.
The swollen federal government under President Obama has guaranteed a robust job market for regulators, policy wonks, contractors, Washington elitists, and plenty of under-qualified job-holders. Helping Washington’s job boom is a provision of the new financial regulation law requiring race and gender employment ratios in private financial institutions that do business with the government. A new diversity overseer, with staff, will take office in each of the many federal financial regulatory agencies, including new ones created by the new law. At least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” will be thrust into agencies and offices ranging from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve System. They will be among the 264,000 government regulators (as calculated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce).
The federal government now has moved “from outlawing discrimination to setting up a system of quotas,” wrote Diana Furchtgott-Roth in RealClearMarkets. She is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The inclusion rule would apply “not just to the agency’s workforce but also to the workforce of its contractors and subcontractors. The mission of this troupe of monitors is to assure “fair inclusion,” a definition as wide open as the mouth of the Grand Canyon. Governmental Inclusion entities also would include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration, Controller of the Currency, and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The result, says Ms. Furchtgott-Roth: “redundant hiring and wasteful expansion of payroll overhead.”
The law also dictated that recruiting for the Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion should be at historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions and women’s colleges, at job fairs in urban communities, and at inter-city high schools with mainly minority pupils. Recruiting ads are to be placed in newspapers and magazines oriented toward minorities and women, Fox News radio detailed.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a “post-racial” Administration? But apparently not post-racist. We most recently have seen the ousting of the now famous Shirley Sherrod from her Department of Agriculture job when the White House with hair-trigger speed acted to avert what they mistakenly thought was racial action in play.
Cabinet level Departments of the federal government already have individual offices of Civil Rights and Diversity. Many minorities are in high and low posts in Uncle Sam’s service. One of President Obama’s closest advisers, often called his “alter ego,” is Valerie Jarrett, a black woman from those good old Chicago political days.
But the inordinate build-up of minorities and women in the federal workforce is only part of the rampant growth of the Washington Metropolitan area since Obama took office. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, those with even tangential connections with government have flowed into the area for the near-guarantee of a more prosperous existence. The Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University released a set of charts showing the population growth in the Washington area and the growth of the federal government over the years. The university has four campuses near Washington.
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