A1A South

Son-in-law is very depressed now. As y’all know, at the beginning of this whole meltdown thing, the company where he worked merged with another company. He was the manager and the new company already had their own managers. He found another job at a lesser salary but then last month, that company let half its work force go.

Son in law received another job offer surprisingly quickly but, before he had a chance to start, budget cuts eliminated the position. He can’t catch a break.

When I read that women’s groups protested the “stimulus package” that was supposed to generate jobs in manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure building and the inept president obligingly changed the package, it pisses me off. From the Weekly Standard:

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.

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. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

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.” As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE– Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

No matter that those burly men were the ones who had lost most of the jobs. The president-elect’s original plan was designed to stop the hemorrhaging in construction and manufacturing while investing in physical infrastructure that is indispensable for long-term economic growth. It was not a grab bag of gender-correct programs, nor was it a macho plan–the whole idea of economic stimulus is to use government spending to put idle factors of production back to work.

This is major craziness and an indication of just how out of touch government is that it would pander to special interest groups and refuse aid to the sector most needing it. Guess what? Those higher salaries in sectors that men gravitate to pay house payments, child support, buy clothing, appliances, and vehicles. When men are unemployed, it is not good for the economy. Keeping men unemployed is not good for women. Keeping men unemployed is not good for children. Keeping men unemployed is not good for bankers. Keeping men unemployed is not good for the states. What the hell is the matter with our government?

*sigh*

I know I’ve asked that question (WHT is wrong with government) about 10,000 times, but this is just lunacy. I’m beginning to believe that these (Congress, Senate, and President) individuals should be Baker acted for a mandatory mental health evaluation (by Doctors!) because they are definitely a danger to others.

A simple test question to evaluate their sanity would be “Do you believe that government run health care will save taxpayers more money and provide superior care to that provided by the private system?” Anybody that answers “yes!” should be involuntarily committed to a mental ward.