Category Archives: Affirmative Action

Demographic Diversity In Borrowing, Again

Affirmative Action, Business, Economy, Journalism, Multiculturalism, Racism, Regulation

Building On yesteryear’s willful errors, the Orwellian named “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010”—“the 2,300-plus-page conference bill which is designed to protect households from predatory practices by banks, subprime lenders, brokerages and other financial intermediaries”—entrenches yet more affirmative action in lending, the kind that contributed to this depression.

The fecund female who has set-up the same pigment-based privileges that guided state lenders Freddy and Fanny is Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Carl Horowitz’s Townhall column is extremely edifying (this is the kind of comment I will read on Townhall because it does vital shoe-leather journalism. Ditto Malkin’s work; she does the footwork. The punditocracy’s ignorant opinions I don’t bother with):

“… The measure, in addition to giving the U.S. Treasury the authority to liquidate banks that pose a threat to financial stability (a mixed blessing at best), all but exempts lenders from shutdown if black and other minority borrowers account for high portions of their loan portfolios, especially in minority neighborhoods. The bill states: ‘The orderly liquidation plan shall take into account actions to avoid or mitigate potential adverse effects on low-income, minority or underserved communities affected by the failure of the covered financial company.’ In other words, federal bank examiners should make every effort to keep a failing institution open so long as it underwrites lots of mortgages to the kinds of borrowers instrumental to the disaster in the first place!

There is more. The amended bill would create a Financial Stability Oversight Council headed by the Secretary of the Treasury to consider a struggling financial institution’s ‘importance as a source of credit for low-income, minority or underserved communities’ before any takeover. The measure also would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion within each of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve System. Rep. Waters’ amendment is explicit: ‘Each agency shall take affirmative steps to seek diversity in the workplace of the agency, at all levels of the agency.’

All of this looks like quota legislation, even if Rep. Waters can’t quite bring herself to admit as much. And although these diversity-or-else offices wouldn’t be vested with formal enforcement powers, one can be sure that the Justice Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies with a civil rights mandate will find every pretext possible, however flimsy, to crack down on lenders whose practices create disparate impacts by race.”

MORE.

Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod

Affirmative Action, Ethics, History, Human Accomplishment, Journalism, Media, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The following is an excerpt from my new WND.com column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod”:

“‘Expectations tend to be self-fulfilling,’ said an anonymous wag. Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. Except very little and that’s all you’ll get. In modern-day USA, a kid so much as dials 911 in an emergency, and he is decorated for bravery. And if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites—she is up for beatification.

Repudiate this elevated ethical standard, and a deranged, fulminating Keith Olbermann will pelt you with a panegyric on the imagined martyrdom of one Shirley Sherrod, now the most celebrated public servant in the United States, and perhaps the world. …

… Keith Olbermann is a crude pamphleteer who imagines himself a modern-day Emile Zola. Most recently, the anchor has sunk to the level of fraud and falsehood in comparing Ms. Sherrod—a contemporary black woman, who has, hitherto, enjoyed safe and secure sinecure in liberal, post-Civil-Rights-Act America—to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a nineteenth-century Jew living in illiberal France, falsely accused of the worst military breach possible.

The similarities are as startling as Olbermann’s leveling logic.

In 1894, this patriotic Frenchman was charged with spying for the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason with no due process of the law. He was sentenced to a lifetime on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in South America. There, Dreyfus languished until 1899. Outraged at the miscarriage of justice, French writer Emile Zola penned a stirring tract, ‘J’Accuse,’ in defense of Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated twelve years after his ordeal began.

Dreyfus’s fate clearly mirrors that of Sherrod. Especially glaring are the parallels between Sherrod’s 48-hour, celebratory ride on the cable news merry-go-round, and Dreyfus’s four-year romp around Treasure Island, in French Guiana.” …

Read the complete column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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The Making Of An American Saint

Affirmative Action, Glenn Beck, Government, Journalism, Media, Race, Racism

ROSA PARKS REDUX. Glenn Beck was in tears (just about). Shepard Smith is being as solemn and pious as I’ve ever seen him; the White House press corps is in a collective conniption—all over the great injustice done, and corrected forthwith, to a black Agriculture Department employee who turned out to be less of a racist than was alleged.

Andrew Breitbart is alleged to have created the confusion with a misleading, incomplete report of this allegedly decades-old incident. Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Lawrence Auster has termed “low-grade conservative media.” “Tease journalism,” I wrote.

Shirley Sherrod, state director for rural development (Great Journalism doesn’t say which “rurality”), said this (16 minutes into the tape), paraphrased: she began her work intending it to be for black people. G-d put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer came to her for assistance with a superior attitude. (I guess if it were a Brother, she might have described him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances.) So many black people had lost their land, and here she was faced with having to help a white man save his property. [Hallelujah; what a pure heart] “So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod said. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of Them; to his own kind.”

Paradiddle, please: (verbatim): “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod goes on to reveal how she did her job even when it came to a desperate, downtrodden white man. She may be a charming woman, but she does not deserve to be beatified, as she is, by the BHO admin and the press. She came to work preparing to work for her Race. Arguably, this is not uncommon among blacks and Hispanics who have a sense of cohesion and unity in opposition to mainstream whites.

Here Andrew Breitbart makes excuses for his shoddy excerpting:

UPDATE II: The Law Of Rule Doubles Down

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Energy, Free Speech, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

A member of the South African opposition (as I have already mentioned) characterized the effects of the ANC’s deployment of law as living under the law of rule rather than the rule of law. This characterization applies equally to Big Man Obama and his posse.

According to Fox News’ Megan Kelly, who does some fine reporting, the decree to dismiss the New-Black-Panther voter intimidation case originated with 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Recall: the thugs who received a reprieve flanked the voting location in formation shouting variations on “kill crackers and their kids.”

A note to libertarians celebrating free speech and the beauty of an exhortation to kill in a “free society”: I’m sympathetic even to the last, believe it or not. But this is not about free speech. this is about a legal apparatus under which some are better than others. Don’t get me wrong: we’ve always lived under such an apparatus; my new book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, (completed now and being prepared for publication), records this very reality. However, it has become manifestly obvious that things have gotten way worse (albeit on the same continuum) under the racial rule of Brother Barack.

To those interested in the law’s position on speech, here it is stated in one of my columns:

American jurisprudence allows the regulation of speech only under very limited circumstances. .. the jury would have had to find that … [the] speech posed a “Clear and Present Danger.” While the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment doesn’t protect words that are likely to cause violence, the required threshold is extremely high. And so it should be.

However, speech that falls under the rubric of civil and voter rights law seems to get different treatment—when uttered against the pigmentally privileged.

UPDATE I: To prove this post’s point, the White House is threatening another lawsuit against Arizona. I believe it will try, this time, to make the racial profiling fiction stick. Is this an attempt to prosecute an infraction that has yet to occur? You see what I mean by the law of rule. As I write, coverage of this is hard to come by on the Net, so please do some digging.

UPDATE II: BHO will not abide by a “no you can’t!” The Law had ruled against the Rule in the matter of a moratorium on deep-water offshore drilling.

“[J]udge, Martin L. C. Feldman of United States District Court, issued a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a late May order halting all offshore exploratory drilling in more than 500 feet of water. A ‘blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium … with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger,'” is how the judge justified smacking BHO. (Here is District Judge Feldman’s decision.)

But the law of rule wants an outcome of its own. And so, th “Obama Administration Issues New Moratorium on Offshore Oil Drilling.”