The Expanding Vengeance of Affirmative Action

Some use the more traditional term “affirmative action.” Others prefer the more cheerful, unifying-sounding “diversity.” Either way, one would be hard-pressed to deny that mandating equal outcomes among racial and sexual groups over time has become the official coin of the realm in this country. What is perhaps most remarkable is the absence of any real political opposition to this regime.

Prime evidence of affirmative action’s capacity to expand can be found in a 36-page report issued this April by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) titled “Survey of Federal Laws Containing Goals, Set-Asides, Priorities, or Other Preferences Based on Race, Gender, or Ethnicity.” The study counted 12 government-wide and 264 agency-specific statutes that require or encourage such preferences; the grand total of 276 is about 60 percent higher than the 172 examples the CRS found during a similar review in the mid-Nineties. The report underscores the tendency of all bureaucracies to become captive of the constituencies on whose behalf they regulate. It also demonstrates once more that most lawmakers are petrified of angering black and Hispanic “civil rights” leaders.

The new study is welcome and overdue. Since its beginnings in 1965 with President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 – an order continued by every president since – affirmative action is now woven into the fabric of American everyday life and not simply the federal work force. Indeed, virtually nobody prominent in government, business, labor, philanthropy, sports, entertainment or religion now thinks of challenging it. They know well that a misperceived stray remark, not to mention a “discriminatory” policy, can end their career or, failing that, threaten their social standing. Corporate officials now regularly celebrate their respective companies’ commitment to racial, ethnic and gender “diversity,” often contributing generous checks to nonprofit groups controlled by civil-rights hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to avoid lawsuits or boycotts.

As unwritten rule would have it, the primary beneficiaries of the affirmative action edifice are nonwhites, especially blacks; the secondary beneficiaries are women, especially single women. Advocates of these arrangements believe, and with few inhibitions about saying as much, that whites, having been privileged for too long. Thus, the ostensibly privileged must make way for those who have been “excluded,” “underrepresented” or “disadvantaged.”

Affirmative action operates on a presumption of collective grievance. Even if individuals within a privileged class – e.g., whites – haven’t disparaged the rights of nonwhites, the argument goes, they still owe their good fortune to past acts of discrimination imposed by their own. All white success, in this view, in some measure is a legacy of injustice. Affirmative action has succeeded over the years because members of putatively privileged groups, especially white males, have been made to feel a strong sense of guilt. Under this new regime of rights, an employer, contractor or college can’t simply be race-neutral in its decisions; it also must take proactive steps to boost its percentage or numerical representation of underserved groups to a level that authorities deem appropriate.

Into this morass has stepped the Congressional Research Service. The CRS is a nonpartisan research shop on Capitol Hill, a division of the Library of Congress. Its new monograph is couched in dry language. And on the issue of affirmative action, it is neither “pro” nor “anti.” But the findings are exceptionally useful all the same, documenting how far federal program design and administration have incorporated affirmative action, regardless of which party holds power. The study’s authors, Jody Feder, Kate Manuel and Julia Taylor – respectively, a pair of CRS legislative attorneys and a CRS law librarian – sought to catalog race, ethnic and gender preferences according to federal agency or program category. Using LEXIS/NEXIS and WESTLAW data searches, they developed a list of individual items, accompanied by a brief description.

What follows is a tally of the number of programs, by agency/program area, that are required or encouraged by federal law. The list is not comprehensive. The authors admitted they had to exclude most regulations and executive orders, plus general anti-discrimination statutes (e.g., Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) that don’t mandate racial, ethnic or gender preferences per se. What did make the cut were “any statutes found during the course of our research that appear, in any manner, to prefer or consider race, gender, or ethnicity as affirmative factors in federal employment, in the award of federal contracts, or in granting any federal benefit to individuals or institutions.” This included laws directed to “socially and economically disadvantaged” individuals, groups and institutions, a term that even the authors admitted is a proxy for beneficiaries of affirmative action. Here is the breakdown:

Program Category/Number of Programs Government-wide – 12 Agriculture – 32 Banking – 17 Commerce – 7 Communications – 6 Defense – 18 Education – 41 Energy – 8 Environment – 3 Health and Human Services – 53 Homeland Security – 8 Housing and Urban Development – 6 Immigration and Naturalization – 1 Interior – 6 Internal Revenue – 1 Justice – 4 Labor – 5 Office of Personnel Management – 6 Science and Technology – 11 Small Business – 9 State Department and Foreign Affairs – 9 Transportation – 7 Veterans Affairs – 6 Total – 276

Here are a few examples of affirmative action mandates, as worded in the CRS report:

Banking. 12 U.S.C. Sec. 635a-4: Requires the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank to attempt to ensure that a major share of any loan guarantee ultimately serves to promote exports from small, medium-size and minority businesses or agricultural concerns.

Education. 20 U.S.C. Secs. 1051 et seq.: Provide a range of assistance to institutions of higher education that serve high percentages of minority students.

State Department and Foreign Affairs. 22 U.S.C. Sec. 3922a: Requires the head of each agency utilizing the Foreign Service personnel system to develop a plan to significantly increase the number of members of minority groups and women in the Foreign Service in that agency, with particular emphasis on mid-level positions.

One could go on, but the point should be clear: Federal law almost reflexively now operates on an assumption that mandatory racial, ethnic and sexual diversity is necessary, for government and for the nation as a whole. Democrats in Congress and the White House may lean on federal agencies harder than their Republican counterparts in order to meet standards, but neither party, save for a brief moment in time, has made any real attempt to challenge the assumption.

That brief moment in time occurred during the afterglow of the 1994 congressional elections which saw a major Republican pickup of seats in the House and Senate. On December 22, 1994, Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., sent a letter to the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service requesting “a comprehensive list of every federal statute, regulation, program, and executive order that grants a preference to individuals on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or ethnic background. Preferences include, but are not limited to, timetables, goals, set-asides, and quotas.” The CRS obliged him soon enough. On February 17, 1995 it sent Dole’s office a list and accompanying brief descriptions entitled, “Federal Laws and Regulations Establishing Preference Based on Race, Ethnicity or Gender (1995).”

The list, like the more recent one, was the product of several searches of LEXIS/NEXIS and WESTLAW legal databases. The categories were somewhat different from the more recent report, but results indicated that racial, ethnic and gender favoritism already by then had become bloodlessly incorporated into the federal regulatory apparatus. Here was the breakdown:

Program Category/Number of Programs Federal Acquisitions – General – 4 Agriculture – 15 Banking – 10 Commerce – 5 Communications – 6 Defense – 7 Education – 28 Energy – 7 Environment – 5 General Services Administration – 3 Health and Human Services – 8 Housing and Urban Development – 9 Interior – 9 Labor – 7 NASA – 2 Small Business – 4 State Department and Foreign Affairs – 3 Government Procurement Agreements – 6 Transportation – 6 Veterans Affairs – 2 Other – 3 Equal Opportunity Laws – 11 Federal Regulations – 12 Total – 172

Comparing the total for this list with the new one, the number of federal mandates for racial, ethnic and gender “diversity” has risen by about 60 percent. The areas of “Agriculture,” “Defense,” “Education” and especially “Health and Human Services” have witnessed especially rapid growth in directives.

To stem this tide, Sen. Dole and Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., in July 1995 introduced legislation, the Equal Opportunity Act, to bar the use of affirmative action criteria in all federal laws and programs. Dole, Canady and other supporters of the bill were subjected to a torrent of criticism that they were insensitive toward racial minorities and women. With President Clinton increasingly giving signs he would veto the bill, backers quickly lost their nerve and withdrew their support.

It wasn’t as if there was all that much nerve in the first place. An anonymous Republican staffer at the time put it this way: “Republicans have been ambivalent from the beginning about Dole-Canady. So this is not a surprise.” Affirmative action critic Clint Bolick, then-Vice President of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit legal group, the Institute for Justice, was more direct: “The Republican leadership has consistently been terrified of this issue for unknown reasons.”

Actually, the main reason for the terror was obvious, if unspoken: Whites in power don’t want to be known as “racists.” The power of that word to define a public figure’s legacy has become the ultimate political card, regardless of party. Even the two black House Republicans, Gary Franks (Connecticut) and J.C. Watts (Oklahoma), declined to lend support. Who within the Republican Party wanted to anger them?

Supporters of the Dole-Canady legislation reintroduced a stripped-down bill in 1996 that would have applied only to federal contracting, but that, too, went nowhere. Dole distanced himself from the measure once he left the Senate to become a full-time candidate for president. Further undercutting his credibility was his selection of former New York Republican Congressman and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, an unabashed affirmative action enthusiast, as his vice-presidential running mate.

If opponents of affirmative action in Congress went wobbly, in California, at least, they did not. In 1996, opponents placed a statewide initiative on the November ballot to amend the state constitution known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, or simply Proposition 209. Drafted by two white academicians, Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, and chaired by a Sacramento-based land use planning consultant, Ward Connerly (a mixed-race black), the measure sought to ban preferential treatment by race, ethnicity or sex throughout the state in public employment, education and contracting. Voters approved Proposition 209 by nearly 55 percent to 45 percent. Defenders of affirmative action promptly went to court to block the law from taking effect. They eventually failed, but not without injecting enormous uncertainly into the enforcement process. In August 2010, nearly 14 years after passage, the California Supreme Court ruled, for the second time, that Proposition 209 was constitutional. Connerly would lead similar efforts in Washington State (Initiative 200) and Michigan (Proposal 2). Here, too, voters approved measures banning affirmative action mandates in state law, only to see implementation delayed or otherwise undercut by lawsuits and political pressure by quota supporters.

Affirmative action, at bottom, represents a radical redefinition of rights. It focuses not on an individual’s desire to be free from acts of aggression or fraud, but on whole classes of persons allegedly denied opportunity to realize arbitrarily determined social and economic outcomes. The latter vision holds that inter-group inequality, by its nature, is a product of injustice and thus is in need of forcible redress. This redefinition has triggered a growing State, which in turn has created an official means of stigmatizing innocent persons and institutions. Opponents of affirmative action do have one ace in the hole: It is unpopular. More to the point, it is deeply unpopular among whites, even if they fear the consequences of fully verbalizing their thoughts. Christopher Caldwell, writing in Time magazine (June 8, 2009) on President Obama’s nomination of affirmative-action supporter Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, recognized the concept’s capacity to antagonize:

Affirmative action has been a revolution in American rights and in our ideas of citizenship. To judge from almost all polls and referendums over the past few decades, it is reliably unpopular. Judges prop it up. Since the election of the first black President, it has been a shoe waiting to drop. The rationale it rests on – that minorities are cut off from fair access to positions of influence in society – has been undermined, to put it mildly. Elevating a hard-line defender of affirmative action is thus a provocation in a way that it would not have been in years past.

Yet if affirmative action is more indefensible than ever, that it doesn’t mean it was ever defensible in the first place. Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, in his 1975 book, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, the first full-length treatment of the subject from a critical standpoint, explained the impossibility of enlisting all of society to accurately make amends for group grievances:

Compensation for the past is a dangerous principle. It can be extended indefinitely and make for endless trouble. Who is to determine what is proper compensation for the American Indian, the black, the Mexican American, the Chinese or the Japanese American? When it is established that the full status of equality is extended to every individual, regardless of race, color, or national origin, and that special opportunity is also available to any individual on the basis of individual need, again regardless of race, color, or national origin, one has done all that justice and equity call for and that is consistent with a harmonious multi-group society.

Supporters of affirmative action view harmony as something within reach only until all population groups achieve equity. That this goal is neither possible nor desirable is a possibility they refuse to fathom. Their ceaseless insistence upon enforced social outcomes has been realized in an obsessive federal bureaucracy backed by the will of Congress. The Congressional Research Service once again has performed a public service by cataloging this obsession.

http://townhall.com/columnists/carlhorowitz/2011/06/18/the_expanding_vengeance_of_affirmative_action

The Heroic Temper

Amen…from CWNY

[He] loved chivalry, truth and honour, freedom and courtesy” but was head-strong, stubborn, romantical and most unwise. – Soldiers of Misfortune by P. C. Wren

In Baroness Orczy’s magnificent novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, an English nobleman frequently risks his life to rescue members of the French nobility who have been condemned to die on the guillotine in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In subsequent novels, the Scarlet Pimpernel (Sir Percy Blakeney) brings down Robespierre and the entire revolutionary government.

I think of the Scarlet Pimpernel whenever I read some underground newspaper report from Rhodesia or South Africa. The people in those nations are desperately in need of Sir Percy Blakeney. But would he be of any use to them? The French aristocrats were given refugee status in England while the beleaguered whites in Rhodesia and South Africa are denied refugee status in every nation of the world. Where then could the Scarlet Pimpernel take the Rhodesian and South African whites? It is against the rules of Liberaldom to flee paradise, and don’t you realize that Rhodesia and South Africa are paradises now that black men are running the show? No matter how trivial the reason, a black African can be granted refugee status in the white countries, but a white Rhodesian or South African is denied refugee status in the face (at least it would be ‘in the face’ of the liberals if they hadn’t turned all their faces away) of an unrelenting campaign to murder every single white person in Rhodesia and South Africa.

You would be incorrect if you claimed that the Scarlet Pimpernel only existed in the imagination of Baroness Orczy. He exists in the spirit of every European who refuses to allow colored barbarians to torture and kill other Europeans. Christian chivalry was embodied in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; in Henry Havelock, the British avenger of Cawnpore and liberator of Lucknow; and in Andries Pretorious, the hero of Blood River, who led the punitive expedition against the Zulus after they massacred Piet Retief and his followers. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a true myth; he is the embodiment of the antique European’s vision of the proper response to bloody tyranny and the murder of the innocents. The response must be non-democratic — no petitions against murder and torture to a people addicted to murder and torture — and it must be violent if violence has been used against one’s people. We react according to how hard the enemy is attacking. In the case of the modern liberal and the black barbarian attack on white people, there is no question that the white man must fight back, certainly using different tactics than men like Forrest and Pretorius, but never doctrinally renouncing violence, claiming it is unChristian or impractical. What could be more unChristian than standing idly by while your white countrymen and kinsmen are slain, and what could be more impractical than declaring your Quaker-like pacifism in the face of savage, bloodthirsty barbarians?

Of course any plea for white people to start defending white people falls on deaf or hostile ears. Satan has destroyed the spiritual resolve of the European by poisoning his love for his kith and kin. Without that spiritual resolve the European is cut off from his source of strength – the God who comes to man through His love of kith and kin. If a man does not love his own, he cannot know God, which is why the godless liberals have joined with the black barbarians in a bloodbath that equals in horrific intensity and surpasses in numbers the massacre of Piet Retief and his followers.

The Boers died fighting hopelessly to the last. Retief was made to witness the death of his son and his followers. The young boys were killed with the others. The bodies were piled upon the hill of death, and over them were the bodies of the grooms and attendants. The heart and liver of Retief were removed and taken to Dingaan so that he might look upon them. Over sixty Boers, one Englishman, and numerous attendants lay dead in the sunlight of that morning in February, and the vultures of Hlomo Amabuta came down from the sky. – In Search of South Africa

The Zulu chief Dingaan always feasted and celebrated after the torture and murder of white people, much like The Obama who recently partied at the White House with rapper Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., who sang a song of rapture about Assata Shakur, convicted murderer of the white New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foester. It’s an ongoing race war with only one side fighting, the liberals and the black barbarians. And let no white man hope to vote the war away. Every Republican candidate renounces white people before he runs for office. Witness Ron Paul, one of the better candidates, who recently decided that the deportation of illegal aliens was “too harsh”! Is this the promised end? The white Democrats campaign under the banner of an immediate extermination of the white race while the Republicans campaign under the banner of a gradual extermination of the white race. The promised end of the white man that both parties yearn for is not the promised end that a European, who still remains a European, longs for or supports.

In 1971, two men, Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina, published a book called American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro. In the book Weyl and Marina made a modest proposal that they thought would end much of the racial conflict in the United States. They suggested that white people should have the right of private association, in other words, the right to segregate themselves from blacks in sport, in housing, and in schooling. Such a practical measure, the authors felt, would eliminate the racial tension which was sweeping the country. The authors of American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro were right, and they were wrong. They were right in saying that their proposals would eliminate much of the racial unrest in the nation, but they were wrong to think that white liberals want to live in a diverse society where black and white get along by respecting their neighbors’ segregated fences. Liberals don’t want the blacks to have their culture and the whites theirs; liberals want to eliminate the white European culture altogether and replace it with the black Babylonian culture. And now, some 40 years since Weyl and Marina penned their modest proposal, the liberals have created their own version of a “diverse” culture. It is a culture dominated by anti-European liberals and black barbarians.

Weyl and Marina were well-meaning, practical sons of Martha who lacked a deep understanding of good and evil. The liberals do not want to co-exist with antique Europeans; they want to eradicate them. The false assumption behind every practical, well-meaning proposal to prevent bloodshed between the black and white is the assumption that the liberals want to prevent bloodshed. Quite the contrary is true. The liberals want to see rivers of blood flowing from white victims who have been offered up on sacrificial altars built to appease the black gods of the liberals.

If you doubt that the liberals want blood, the white man’s blood, just look at the evidence. What happened when blacks ran amuck in the New Orleans Superdome and the surrounding areas where white people were especially vulnerable, because of the flood, to black marauders? Were the liberals outraged? Yes, they were outraged. They were outraged that some white people armed themselves with shotguns in order to save their families from being sacrificed to the black gods. Recently the columnist Matt Drudge reported that which is not supposed to be reported: black on white crime. Again, are the liberals outraged? Yes, they are, but not with the black atrocities; they are outraged with Drudge for reporting the atrocities. And such is always the case, from the “cry me a river” black columnist exulting in the torture murders of Channon Christian and Christian Newsom, to the satanic “loving forgiveness” of Pope John XXIII after black savages tortured and murdered his own priests and nuns. The message is clear: our ancient foe is using his minions, the liberals and the black barbarians, to destroy the Christ-bearing race. He hopes to strike the Creator by attacking His Creatures.

There are two fallacies in the modern propaganda of tolerance, “you respect my culture and I’ll respect yours.” The first fallacy is what we have just articulated: liberals and black barbarians do not want to respect any culture other than their own, especially the white European culture. And the second fallacy is linked to the first: how can people who have no concept of charity or mercy, like the liberals and the black barbarians, have any respect for a people who want to maintain their link to Christian Europe where men revered the God of charity and mercy? The principle of “you respect my culture and I’ll respect yours” can only be applied to differences between Christian European nations. The non-European does not respect other cultures; he wants to destroy them. The Christian European was the only man who could be trusted to treat “the lesser breeds without the law” with paternal charity instead of merciless cruelty. Now that there is no Christian European presence of any significance in the formerly European countries, there is no charity or mercy to be found there. We live in Babylon, where a green-haired, white girl can walk into any abortuary and destroy her child or, if she so desires, cohabit with one of the black gods. In either case the green-haired girl with the ring through her nose is a citizen of Babylon, a nation ruled by merciless, techno-barbarian liberals and black, barbarian demigods. The European hero is a hero because he still has his spiritual resolve, his love for kith and kin. “Mock my people and my God, and I’ll strike you. Strike my kith and kin, and I’ll kill you.” That is the vow of the hero: William Tell, Alfred the Great, Robert Bruce, Henry Havelock, Charles Martel, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Andries Pretorius, and every European who love their own so much that they see His blood upon the rose.

While wandering through Britain in the early 1970s I saw an old English newsreel in an old, small town movie theater that proudly proclaimed Piccadilly, the center of London, to be the center of the civilized world. The newsreel went on to praise such stalwart Brits as Lord Wellington, Lord Nelson, and Alfred the Great. There was even great praise lavished on Andries Pretorious and Robert E. Lee as men of the heroic temper, and therefore spiritual brethren of the Brits. Such respect for the heroes of our race has completely died out. The mere mention of the fact that your heroes are antique Europeans is enough to label a man an imbecile and/or a racist. But we are a race of Scarlet Pimpernels. In fact we are the only race of people who hold the heroes of charity, the defenders and not the conquerors, to be the greatest of heroes, because they follow Him, the King and Lord of Heroes. In that hideous plastic song of the sixties, “The Age of Aquarius,” the lyrics speak of the wonders that will ensue when the stars are in alignment. The European does not care about the stars; he cares about the things of the heart. When the European’s heart is aligned with His heart, the age of the hero will return; it will be “The Age of the Man on the European White Horse,” who rides in defense of the European things, faith, hope and charity; above all charity.

I like the sagas from the Christian era that the liberals call the Dark Ages. (Of course the age when the Europeans saw the light of Christ’s love would be considered the Dark Age to liberals.) I recall one such saga from my childhood. An Icelandic warrior, newly Christianized, was in constant strife with his still pagan neighbors. The Christian Icelander called the heathen world the “twilight world” and his new-found Christian world he called the “world of light.” Every time the twilight world infringed on the Christian warrior’s world of light, he felt compelled to defend his world by driving the heathen back to their world of darkness. The task of the modern European Christian is the same as that of the Icelandic warrior. We are called upon to drive the heathen back to their world of darkness. Blackness is sacred to the liberal and the black, but it is virulent poison to the antique European, and the people who peddle it are the European’s enemies. But the psalmist assures us that He will not fail us in the day of battle.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. — Psalm 91: 1-7

The hero believes that God’s word applies to him. How can we doubt it? He set His love upon our ancestors, and He will set it upon us if only we listen to and heed the wisdom of our European hearts.

Cambria Will Not Yield

What have we lost?

VJ Day, Honolulu Hawaii, August 14, 1945

U.S. Mortgage Proposal May Result in ‘Rental Entrapment’

I guess I am a sentimental fool but I have this almost masochistic hope that white men will one day grow tired of having their ass reamed.

Minorities and the working class may find it harder to buy homes under a U.S. plan that would require larger down payments to qualify for lower-cost mortgages, according to lenders, consumer groups and lawmakers.

Bankers and consumer advocates, often at odds on policy issues, united today to make the case for revising the government proposal and released data that they said shows the rule would deny loans to millions of borrowers while doing little to reduce defaults.

“This is a civil rights issue,” John Taylor, chief executive officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Washington, said in an interview. “It falls around people of color. It’s a class issue.”

The rule could lead to “long-term rental entrapment” for “large numbers” of Americans who would need at least a decade to save for a 20 percent down payment, said David Stevens, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. It would take at least a decade for a family to save that much in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Birmingham, Alabama, he said, citing U.S. and industry data on household incomes and home prices.

Deadline Extension

Regulators plan to extend the deadline for public comment on the proposal from June 10 to Aug. 1, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the decision hasn’t been made public. That may delay the law from taking effect.

Spokesmen for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment. Spokesmen for the Federal Reserve and the Federal Housing Finance Agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Taylor and Stevens, former commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration, were among mortgage-finance professionals who held a press conference in Washington where they accused regulators of overreaching and asked that the proposal be rewritten. More than 200 Republicans and Democrats in Congress have expressed similar concerns in letters to regulators.

Reduced housing demand ”due to an overly burdensome dictate, could threaten a full-fledged economic recovery,” more than 160 House lawmakers wrote in a May 31 letter to regulators.

Risky Lending

The Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul enacted last year required lenders and bond issuers to keep a 5 percent stake in the loans they bundle for sale to investors. Forcing the industry to share potential losses was meant to encourage less risky lending and avoid mistakes that led to a flood of subprime mortgages, which helped trigger the 2008 financial collapse.

The law requires regulators to exempt home loans that are deemed safe, including those with fixed interest rates and long repayment terms. Those exempt loans, known as qualified residential mortgages, or QRMs, in theory would have lower interest rates because they would be considered less risky.

Regulators responded to the law with a proposal to exempt mortgages only if borrowers make a 20 percent down payment and spend less than 36 percent of their income on debt payments.

Neither rule would lead to fewer defaults, Stevens said. A quarter of 2009 mortgage borrowers would have been disqualified under the new rule, said Stevens, citing FHFA. At the height of the housing bubble in 2006 and 2007, the rule would have cut delinquencies by less than 3 percent while reducing mortgages by more than 15 percent, according to the data.

No Down Payments

Today, some lenders are offering loans with little or no down-payment requirements. Last year, the Navy Federal Credit Union began offering loans requiring no down payments to borrowers with good credit and income.

Those opposing the rule are doing so for different reasons.

Industry executives, including mortgage bankers, real estate agents and builders, have said they’re concerned that a decline in lending may hurt housing and the economic recovery.

That would disproportionately affect middle-class and minority borrowers, consumer advocates say. Groups that advocate for limited government, including the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, say the plan may drive home lending to federally insured programs such as the FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Dodd-Frank exempted from the risk-retention rule.

The Heritage Foundation, in a May 31 letter to regulators, called the 20 percent down payment requirement “utterly at odds with the realities of today’s housing market,” where only 16 percent of first-time buyers in 2010 would have met the standards for a lower-cost qualified mortgage.

The National Urban League said the plan would create a category of “‘high-risk’ borrowers formerly known as the responsible middle class.”

“Adding high minimum down-payment requirements will only exclude hundreds of thousands of consumers — including legions of minority renters — from homeownership, despite their creditworthiness and proven ability to afford the monthly payment,” the group wrote in a June 1 letter to regulators.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-06-02/u-s-mortgage-proposal-may-result-in-rental-entrapment-.html

Racial change in the air?

Probably not but it is a start…

Racial Violence Has Not Made It Into the Conversation about Race

If we’re going to have a conversation about race, we should include violent black mobs in the list of conversation topics. After all, recent mob violence is the closest our nation has come to widespread racial strife in over 50 years.

If mobs of white youths were going about chanting the phrase “white boys,” beating mostly on blacks and attacking black-owned businesses, then the nation would pay attention. Academic, media, political, and legal elites would be calling for symposia, expanded reporting, legislation, and lawsuits.

In fact, a mob of black youths in Philadelphia went about chanting the phrase “black boys,” beating mostly on whites, and attacking businesses. The same kind of racial mob violence has occurred in Las Vegas, and just last week in New York City. Few are paying attention, and liberal elites are largely silent.

Of course, liberal elites are quick to associate white violence with right-wing politics or white supremacy. But what happens when mob violence is carried out by favored minority groups or liberal constituents?

Time and again over the last few years, mobs of black youths attacked mostly white victims in Philadelphia. There were at least 6 such mob scenes in Philadelphia during 2009 and 2010.[1] These black mob attacks, euphemistically named “flash mobs,” have not received anything close to the attention they deserve. In one attack, a mob of blacks beat a young white woman senseless — a mob that had chanted “black boys” and “burn the city,” according to the New York Times.[2] The 27-year-old woman, Anna Taylor, was attacked viciously last March. According to local news reports, “a large group of male and female juveniles ganged up on her, kicking and punching her until she fell to the ground, where they continued to kick her in the face and head.”[3] Someone in the mob punched her so hard, the punch “split her upper lip so severely that much of it was hanging from her face and she was unable to speak.” Some reporting has, amazingly, made the simple observation about the racial make-up of these mobs: that they are “mostly African American.”

These horrible mob attacks must be viewed in the larger context of interracial violence in America. Department of Justice statistics show that 33% of white murder victims are killed by a non-white while only 8% of black murder victims are killed by a non-black.[4] Even greater disparities exist in violent crime and robbery.[5] The disparity in interracial crime is certainly indicative of some form of extremism, racial hostility, or selective targeting. The mobs reflect something worse: organized and widespread anti-white ethnic violence.

Mobs of black youths have taken to randomly attacking pedestrians and businesses. This problem is nightmarish in its implications: a subset of the population has no self-control, was not raised to control violent impulses, and evidently gets pleasure out of hurting other people — particularly people of other races. This type of person usually has done nothing to create anything of value, but rather destroys for pleasure. They organize using social media, and their goal is mayhem. They have been coddled and socialized by the welfare state and public education system. With an aggressive sense of entitlement, and no regard for others, they will predictably become more violent. The mobs reflect an undesirable character type, and the vast majority of those in “flash mobs” are of the same race.

Now, the cultural enrichment of “flash mobs” is spreading to New York City. In Greenwich Village last week, security video captured “a group of youths climbing on counters, throwing chairs and throwing tables in a violent attack on workers” at a Dunkin’ Donuts. This was the second such attack on Greenwich Village businesses in a week. Watching the video, one is struck by the extraordinarily callous behavior of the teens, who were all black — a fact not mentioned in any of the reporting about that attack. Unlike the case with many acts of violence, certain youths are evidently becoming more and more comfortable with public, organized group violence. When we see behavior this terrible, political elites often ask about root causes:

What kind of environment did the attackers come from? What kind of politics or ideology did they have?

Examples are numerous: Before having any facts, liberal elites like Paul Krugman blamed the Arizona shootings on “toxic rhetoric” and the “climate of hate” created by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and conservatives. When lone extremists commit violence against abortion doctors, organizations like NOW blame the “pro-life” movement. When there is some fanciful, theoretical possibility that returning veterans could be recruited by extremist organizations, the Department of Homeland Security takes note. In 2009, the DHS released a report claiming that “the return of military veterans” could expand the pool of extremists.[6] DHS was so eager to make connections between politics and violence they concluded that “white supremacist lone wolves pose the most significant domestic terrorist threat.”[7] If this is the way liberal elites make connections between politics and violence, then shouldn’t they respond to black “flash mobs” in a similar manner?

Yet, the racial aspect of the “flash mob” phenomenon is not seriously covered in the mainstream media. This is proof of systematic racial bias in reporting, and a failure of leadership across the board in our society. The mainstream media is in effect using a filtering process that downplays violence by blacks against whites. The result is that a significant social problem is not being addressed.

The media filtering process undermines society’s interest in safety. When the majority ethnic group is being attacked in potentially catastrophic racial group violence, the press has a duty to report the underlying facts. Flash mobs are the closest our nation has come to widespread racial strife in over 50 years. Flash mobs, if unaddressed, will evolve into further racist attacks against whites. By failing to report acts of ethnic violence, by any race, the press fails part of its role in our democracy. Moreover, if our legal, political, and academic leadership had more intellectual and moral integrity, the “flash mob” would be taken as seriously as “hate speech,” racial profiling, and other non-violent offenses against minority feelings.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/racial_violence_has_not_made_it_into_the_conversation_about_race.html