Front-page story in the New York Times today about how the city’s Human Rights Commission has reached an agreement that pressures the advertising industry to hire more African Americans. What the article doesn’t mention, of course, is that the usual goals and timetables—that is, quotas—that the agreement contemplates are, as a legal matter, permissible only if the industry had a recent history of discriminating against blacks in hiring, and there appears to be no allegation of this. There is instead only the usual nonsense in the article about how the industry ought to reflect the city’s population (oh, so it would be okay to put a cap on “overrepresented” groups—or to refuse to hire blacks in, say, Idaho?), and that only blacks know magically how to sell to blacks (puzzling how Phoenicians, Jews, and the Chinese have been able to trade outside their groups–and would it be okay to refuse to hire blacks if you were trying to sell more widgets to Asians?). Since this agreement violates the federal civil rights laws, where is the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?