What Obam isn't, not a genetic drop of, is "African-American," the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Look for the Union Label
June 10, 2008
What do the farm bill, the cap-and-trade global warming bill, the clean water bill, the housing bailout bill, and the school construction bill all have in common? Not much, except that in each one and countless others the Democratic majority in Congress has inserted "prevailing-wage" requirements that amount to a super-minimum wage.
We're speaking of Davis-Bacon, the 1931 law that originally applied to road building and other federal construction projects and set a floor on wages in part to price black and Mexican workers out of the work. Today, its main impact is to require de facto union wages. Many reputable studies have estimated that Davis-Bacon inflates federal construction costs by anywhere from 5% to 39%. A Heritage Foundation analysis of wage data reports that in many cities the mandated Davis-Bacon wage is twice as high as the market wage. In Nassau-Suffolk in New York, for example, Davis-Bacon requires a minimum wage for brickmasons of $49.67 an hour, though the more common area wage for that work is $25.50.
So while Democrats insist that one of their top priorities is to solve America's "infrastructure crisis," what they aren't saying is that we could be building about 25% more bridges and roads by repealing Davis-Bacon. Instead, they want to expand its rules to nearly every activity that receives a penny of government money. Congress is even trying to require all state and local governments to pay these escalated wages. This year's farm bill was the first in 75 years to require Davis-Bacon wages, in this case for the construction of ethanol plants. Democrats also slipped in Davis-Bacon rules for the wind, solar and other alternative energy projects.
Democrats support these blanket Davis-Bacon policies even though minorities are still victimized by the wage law. A 2001 study by economists Daniel Kessler of Stanford and Lawrence Katz of Harvard found that when states have repealed their Davis-Bacon laws, this "is associated with a decline in the union wage premium and an appreciable narrowing of the black/nonblack wage differential for construction workers."
By the way, Barack Obama is a big fan of Davis-Bacon. He recently jibed at a gathering of building trade-union workers that "John McCain seems to think Davis-Bacon is something that comes from a pig farm." Mr. Obama has proposed a new taxpayer-supported $60 billion infrastructure bank that would siphon billions off to his union friends by mandating Davis-Bacon. That's "change," we suppose, right out of taxpayer pockets.