Category Archives: Racism

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.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

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:

UPDATED: Tea Party Central

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Politics, Race, Racism

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.