Questioning Ricci: Time To Abandon The EEOC’s Four-Fifths Rule

By Steve Sailer

Last week, the Ricci reverse discrimination case came up before the Supreme Court for oral questioning. A lawyer representing the New Haven firemen—who are suing the city for refusing to promote them for the last half decade because zero blacks passed the 2003 promotional exams—was grilled by the liberal justices. The Obama Administration’s representative, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler , and a lawyer representing the city were roasted by the conservative justices.

New Haven’s attorney claimed that the city had strong evidence for discarding the test as invalid after finding out the results by race. But Justice Samuel Alito pointed out the preposterousness of that claim in a scalding rhetorical question:

"[The city] chose the company that framed the test, and then as soon as it saw the results, it decided it wasn’t going to go forward with the promotions. The company offered to validate the test. The City refused to pay for that, even though that was part of its contract with the company. And all it has is this testimony by a competitor, Mr. Hornick, who said—who hadn’t seen the test, and he said, I could do a better test—you should make the promotions based on this, but I could give you—I could draw up a better test, and by the way, here’s my business card if you want to hire me in the future.

“How’s that a strong basis in the evidence?" [Oral Argument transcript, PDF]

Nor was Chief Justice John Roberts impressed by New Haven’s claim that they had to junk the completed test results because of the danger of being sued for discrimination against blacks under the “disparate impact” interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. (Which is now, apparently, more important than the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment). He said:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: It seems to me an odd argument to say that you can violate the Constitution because you have to comply with the statute."

Deputy Solicitor General Ed Kneedler barely got a chance to open his mouth before Roberts scoffed at the Obama Administration’s sincerity on race:

"MR. KNEEDLER: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: This Court has long recognized that Title VII prohibits not only intentional discrimination but acts that are discriminatory in their operation.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: With respect to both blacks and whites, correct?

MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, can you assure me that the government’s position would be the same if this test—black applicants—firefighters scored highest on this test in disproportionate numbers, and the City said we don’t like that result, we think there should be more whites on the fire department, and so we’re going to throw the test out? The government of United States would adopt the same position?"

 

The last thing Obama wants is for the Supreme Court to issue a landmark, precedent-setting decision in the Ricci case. The public finds the courageous fireman plaintiffs to be sympathetic and the justice of their complaint to be commonsensical. Quotas could easily be scuppered based on this case.

Accordingly, the Administration is calling for the case to be remanded all the way back to a jury trial over whether the city acted with racial malice—i.e., Obama wants Ricci to go away, far away.

In reality, however, Ricci is not an unusual case with particularly complicated facts. It’s just business as usual in American society.

When President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, he chose, out of hundreds of job offers, to work for a Chicago law firm that specialized in suing over purported discrimination against blacks. For example, as I point out in America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance,” Obama made one of his rare court appearances to accuse Citibank of not giving enough mortgage money to minorities. The Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2007:

"Obama represented Calvin Roberson in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank, charging the bank systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods." [As Lawyer Obama Was Strong, Silent Type December 17, 2007 By Abdon M. Pallasch]

(By the way, how’s that working out for us these days?)

Most discrimination cases in recent decades have been based not on evidence of racial animus, but merely on statistics showing that minorities didn’t wind up with as many goodies as whites did.

The argument: assuming the races are equal in merit, there must be discrimination somewhere in the system. It’s simple logic!

Since nobody in public life dares point out the overwhelming social science evidence that non-Asian minorities tend to be, on average, less creditworthy, less intelligent, and less law-abiding without being smeared as a racist, this transparently bogus ploy has enjoyed massive success over the years.

Obama is committed to preserving the status quo, in which the deck is rigged against whites by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Four-Fifths Rule:

"A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (4/5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact, while a greater than four-fifths rate will generally not be regarded by Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact."

…In reality, however, Ricci is not an unusual case with particularly complicated facts. …It’s just business as usual in American society…

In other words, if 50 percent of whites pass the test, 40 percent or more of each minority group must pass the test

The burden of proof is on the employer to vindicate the selection process. This can be so expensive and uncertain that many employers just impose hiring and promotion quotas upon themselves.

This EEOC rule applies to private employers as well as government employers. You just hear more complaints from firemen because there are Civil Service laws that are supposed to prevent post-hoc fiddling. (And, perhaps, because firemen are braver than most people.)

Obama is likely aware that the Four-Fifths Rule is objectively ridiculous. On none of the major tests used by professional and graduates schools do blacks come close to scoring at a percentile 80% as high as whites. On the Graduate Record Exam-Verbal, black college graduates on average score only three-eighths as well as whites (i.e., at what would be the 18th percentile for whites). And that’s their best showing. On the Medical College Admission Test, blacks only reach the one-fifth level.

And yet you aren’t supposed to mention these facts in polite society. As a result, almost nobody thinks about them in a systematic fashion. That’s why the liberal Justices can get away with acting as if the Ricci results, in which blacks scored at the three-eighths level on the Lieutenant’s test (exactly like the GRE-V) and the one-fifth level on the Captain’s test (exactly like the MCAT) are some anomalous mystery which a “better test” could somehow make disappear.

In reality, there only two ways to consistently make the racial gap fit within the EEOC’s Four-Fifths Rule:

• Cheat. Don’t rely on written tests where the graders can’t tell the test-taker’s race. Put most of the weight on oral evaluations, and make sure to pick judges willing to play ball to have the racial balance come out right.

In New Haven, the written exam got 60 percent of the weight, and the oral 40 percent. The city stacked the deck by making the oral exam judges two-thirds minority, but that wasn’t enough.

• Make the test so easy that almost everybody passes. Chicago now gives tests that 85 percent pass (roughly 90 percent white and 80 percent black), then chooses randomly from this horde of not utterly incompetent applicants.

The liberal justices put much effort into asking hypothetical questions about what might be the far-reaching consequences of ruling that employers must always act in a racially neutral manner.

But there’s no need for a positive dictate from the Supreme Court about how employers should act in every situation.

The rotten core of the affirmative action racket in America is the ridiculous Four-Fifths Rule.

The Supreme Court famously drew upon social science research in Brown v. Board of Education. Granted, sociologist Kenneth B. Clark’s experiments with dolls were primitive and turned out to be largely fallacious. By 2009, however, the scientific evidence relevant to Ricci is now overwhelming that the EEOC’s Four-Fifths Rule is absurd.

“It seems to me … an odd argument to say…

that you can violate the Constitution because you have to comply with the statute…”

 

The Court should take the social science record into account and abolish the Four-Fifths Rule as corrupting and undermining of competence.

If we must have a quantitative guideline, a One-Fifth Rule, such as we find with the MCAT, would be far more reasonable.

What the Obama Administration may well be hoping for is 4-1-4 split decision, as in the notorious 1978 Bakke case, in which the man in the middle, Lewis Powell, ruled, in effect, that the University of California could continue using racial quotas as long as it called them “goals” instead. Justice Anthony Kennedy would be showered with “strange new respect” and be the toast of Georgetown if he could finagle a similar outcome.

I suspect Obama would be very happy if Kennedy could, say, assuage the public’s sense of fair play by giving Frank Ricci a promotion, just as Allan Bakke was eventually allowed into the UC Davis medical school, while keeping the overall affirmative action swindle intact for another generation.

Perhaps, though, Kennedy might surprise us.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

 

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/04/28/the-eeoc%e2%80%99s-four-fifths-rule/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/17/black-on-white-rape-murder-its-a-black-thing-you-wouldnt-understand/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/17/black-on-white-rape-murder-its-a-black-thing-you-wouldnt-understand/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:57:04 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=701

Ann Coulter Fans Didn’t Murder Anne Pressly—It Was The "Usual Suspect". But No One’s Apologizing

By Nicholas Stix

While reporting interracial murders and attempted murders carried out by black men against white women, I have noted a pattern involving certain aspects of the crime, the official response or lack thereof, and responses by different elements of the public.

Ex Con Eurtis Lavelle Vance

Extreme in it’s brutality… Police deny a racial motive…

can’t imagine what the motive might have been…

The murder typically is extreme in its brutality, with the killer inflicting the maximum in pain and humiliation on his victim. The authorities stonewall the public—unlike their reactions to deaths or assaults committed against blacks by whites, when they strive for a maximum in publicity and transparency. When they do speak, it is often to lie, adamantly denying that the crime was “racially motivated”—even though they have no problem calling (statistically rare) white-on-black murders “racially motivated”—and claiming either that the motive was "robbery" or that they can’t imagine what the motive might have been etc. etc.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media and their blogosphere comrades will mock and denounce  any whites who state the obvious as "racists," "white nationalists," "Nazis," etc.

Black-on-white torture murders of females invariably follow the rape and/or sodomy of the victim: The Wichita Massacre; the Knoxville Horror; the Columbia University rape-torture-attempted murder; the Winchester Atrocity (in which the gang-rape victim was the black wife of a white man). The sexual humiliation doubles the murderer’s pleasure.

Of course, black felons often rape black women they find in homes they are burgling, but they rarely torture and murder them. White felons act similarly with white women. White-on-black rape is virtually non-existent, and I can’t remember the last white-on-black rape-torture-murder. But black-on-white rape-torture-murder, burglary-rape-murder, and simple rape-murder are all the rage.

…her jaw, pulverized. Every bone in her face broken… raped and sodomized…“There was blood on the ceiling”…

Last fall, twenty-six-year-old Anne Pressly, the anchor on ABC affiliate KATV’s Daybreak show, was assaulted and mortally injured in her home in Little Rock’s affluent Pulaski Heights area, four blocks from the Little Rock Country Club. She was found unconscious on the morning of October 20th by her mother, Patti Cannady, and succumbed on October 25th.
According to one press report:

"Patti Cannady, visiting from out of town, went to her daughter’s Little Rock home because she didn’t answer a wake-up call and found the 26-year-old woman had been beaten beyond recognition. Every bone in her face had been broken, Cannady said.

“’Her jaw, pulverized so badly that the bone had come out of it. I actually thought that her throat, it possibly been cut, but that was possibly the first knockout punch. Her entire skull had numerous fractures from which she suffered a massive stroke.’

“Pressly died in a hospital five days later without regaining consciousness. Her left hand was broken, her mother said.

“’She fought for her life, she fought her attacker,’ Patti Cannady said."
[Parents: Slain anchorwoman was sexually assaulted, by Jon Gambrell, Associated Press/AT&T, December 1, 2008,]

In a December 1 interview with Today Show host Matt Lauer, Pressly’s father, "Guy Cannady, said that while the police theory is that Pressly interrupted a random robbery, he isn’t convinced of that." He argued, "It’s just unbelievable that a random robbery like this would involve the brutal slaying of Anne in this way.

 

…a robbery gone bad?"blunt force trauma" "They said there was evidence of sexual assault". …There just seems to be a lot more to the whole story…

"I actually thought that her throat, it possibly been cut, but that was possibly the first knockout punch."

Of course, black felons often rape black women they find in homes they are burgling, but they rarely torture and murder them. White felons act similarly with white women. White-on-black rape is virtually non-existent, and I can’t remember the last white-on-black rape-torture-murder. But black-on-white rape-torture-murder, burglary-rape-murder, and simple rape-murder are all the rage.

Anne Pressly

"It was confirmed with all scientific certainty that Mr. Vance is the DNA contributor of the suspect in Ms. Pressly’s murder."

There just seems to be a lot more to the whole story than just a robbery gone bad."
On the December 5 edition of ABC’s 20/20, Mrs. Cannady told reporter Jim Avila that when she found her daughter, “There was blood on the ceiling”.

Mrs. Cannady led 20/20’s news crew through her daughter’s small house, saying that circa 3 a.m., the rapist-killer had broken in through the back door into the kitchen, surprising her daughter in her bed.
Pressly’s killer “took her laptop computer, a credit card and little else.”

In lieu of identifying the crime’s interracial character, many media outlets, after having earlier published pictures of Anne Pressly, published pictures of black, 28-year-old defendant, Curtis Lavelle Vance.

But when the New York Times reported on Vance’s arrest in an unsigned article, it went beyond its 62-year-old tradition of shielding black criminals. It not only left out any mention or running any photographs indicating that Vance was black, but (in a display of the compassion for which it is so justly famous) positively gloated about the crime:

"The beating startled much of the state and horrified Ms. Pressly’s neighbors in the prestigious Pulaski Heights neighborhood, an enclave of old houses, and where residents considered themselves essentially exempt from violent crime. "[Arrest in Killing of a TV Anchor, by "The New York Times,"November 27, 2008.]
Bring the war home.

According to Little Rock PD Detective Tommy Hudson, the cause of death was "blunt force trauma" According to AP’s Gambrell, Detective Hudson wrote in a court affidavit: "It was confirmed with all scientific certainty that Mr. Vance is the DNA contributor of the suspect in Ms. Pressly’s murder."

Vance became a suspect in the murder when his girlfriend was allegedly caught selling numerous items stolen in a series of area burglaries to a pawnbroker. He then submitted to a DNA saliva swab test. It matched DNA found at the murder scene

.
Vance has denied he was in Little Rock on the day of the attack. He was initially charged with capital murder. His girlfriend has been charged with theft.

Following Vance’s arrest in the Pressly case, Little Rock PD spokesman, Lt. Terry Hastings, refused to confirm or deny whether she had been raped and/or sodomized. I left a message for Lt. Hastings’ unit November 28 but received no response. Even AP’s Gambrell had nothing to report on December 1.
The Little Rock PD’s reticence forced the victim’s parents to take matters into their own hands. On December 1, during their aforementioned Today Show interview, Guy and Patti Cannady announced that their daughter had indeed been raped prior to being murdered:

"They said there was evidence of sexual assault".

"‘This monster stole my daughter’s innocence,’ Patti Cannady said. ‘He took her life. He took her identity. He took our lives. Our lives have radically changed as a result of what’s happened to Anne.’" [Parents: Slain anchorwoman was sexually assaulted, USA Today, December 1, 2008]

The next day, December 2, Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas provided a non-response statement to all media inquiries. Chief Thomas "said that the department would not be addressing any rumors that have been cropping up about Pressly."

Since Vance’s arrest, he has also been named as the suspect in the April rape of a school teacher in East Arkansas, and in several burglaries in Marianna, the predominantly 74.1 percent) black(town of 4,425 residents where he resides, approximately 90 miles east of Little Rock.

Media reports about the April rape in Marianna would say only that the victim was a schoolteacher, while suppressing her race and ethnicity. But that victim revealed herself, speaking to 20/20’s Jim Avila on the aforementioned show, as Kristen Edwards. She has pale white skin, and strawberry blonde or red hair.

Miss Edwards reported that as she was getting ready to go to work before dawn, her attacker, who had already broken in, was hiding in her living room. He jumped her from behind, forcing her face first into her couch, raping her from behind, so that she could not see his face, all the while threatening to kill her if she cried out, or tried to look at him.

Edwards said: “When I found out there was a connection between my case and Anne Pressly’s case … I just broke down…. Knowing that the person who attacked me was capable of so much more. As bad as it was, it could have been so much worse.”
Pressly’s mother’s revelations eventually broke through the stonewall. Lt. Terry Hastings suddenly found his tongue, though he is still clinging to the robbery theory. On December 5 he acknowledged to 20/20 :

"There was sexual assault in both cases, so it’s similar in crime. We believe that this individual’s goal probably was robbery. That’s what he had in mind. "
It’s “similar in crime”, alright. It now looks as though the Pressly case was no fluke.
The Little Rock PD says that while Vance denies having harmed Edwards or Pressly, “he did admit to being at Pressly’s home”.

Lt. Hastings told 20/20: “We believe he probably saw her in the neighborhood, maybe getting gas, maybe doing something else, and followed her, and attacked her. He denied being involved in it in any way, but his DNA told us otherwise.”

Detectives working the Pressly case recovered Vance’s “sperm, blood and his skin, taken from beneath Pressly’s fingernails,” and were able to match it with the rapist’s DNA from the Edwards case.

Once the media released Vance’s photograph, other people from Marianna, where Vance had allegedly raped Kristen Edwards, came forward to tell 20/20 of Vance’s stalking of other local white women, though they never put it in such blunt terms. Faith Stiles told of twice seeing him stalking her outside of her house.

Faith Stiles: “My neighbor across the street called me and said, ‘You’ve got to get downstairs now. That guy’s back in your yard, and we’ve called the police.’”
Jim Avila: “Her husband faced him down in their carport.”
Rob Stiles: “And this is where I saw him. And I had the set of keys in my hand, so I pushed the alarm on the trunk, and set the alarm off, scared him, and he ran and opened the neighbor’s gate right there.”

Lori Garner, a personal trainer at the Pro Fitness club in Pressly’s Pulaski Heights neighborhood, reported seeing a man whom she and a client are now sure was Vance stalking the gym three times during the pre-dawn hours. Twice, Garner was accompanied by the client. The last time, in September, the man was crouching outside of the gym exposing himself. But they never called the police.

If the reports are true and the charges hold up, my conclusion is that Curtis Lavelle Vance apparently is only interested in raping and murdering white women, with robbery an afterthought.

In an earlier time, such bravado on the part of black felons in white neighborhoods was the exception. But after some 45 years of authorities and the MSM terrorizing whites in the name of “civil rights,” it is the rule. No matter how many white females are raped and/or murdered, whites fear being treated like "racists” by police and reporters if they demand action against black strangers acting suspiciously in neighborhoods where they have no legitimate business.

Early this year, prosecutors made Chief Thomas’ stonewalling moot. On January 15, they charged Curtis Lavelle Vance with rape and capital murder. Vance pleaded not guilty, insisted that the authorities had the wrong man, and that they had illegally obtained his DNA. (But if the former is true, the latter should be a moot point, no?). [Defendant in death of TV anchor contests DNA evidence, By Jon Gambrell, The Associated Press, January 18, 2009]

Of course, by then, the national media had moved on.

Back when newspapers thrived, one of the reasons they did was their thorough coverage of crime—particularly gruesome murders and sex crimes. PC journalists’ decision that the public has no right to know about interracial crime has played a large role in the decline of the American newspaper.
Of course, we now have the internet afterword. Political Correctness didn’t stop people from speculating at blogs, Web sites, and through e-mails.

Racial realists have few illusions about race and crime. But in what is developing into a conservative cliché, early on I received rumors (unconfirmed) claiming that Miss Pressly had been genitally mutilated.

The other side of the aisle had their own obsessions. Leftwing bloggers and commenters refused to state the obvious, and condemned anyone who did, but they had no compunctions about other speculations. The number one suspect cited by Daily Kos blogger "relikx" and by commenters there and elsewhere: fans of conservative writer-humorist, Ann Coulter.

Thus spake "relikx,"

"Police have no motive and think the ABC morning newswoman may have been attacked during a ‘robbery attempt,’ but the political climate and her role as the conservative columnist in the controversial movie raises many questions about whether Anne was purposely targeted.
“I’m sorry for the short diary but there really isn’t too much more to add to this except that I hope everyone keeps Anne in their thoughts and prayers.

“It is far too early to speculate as to why this senseless violence occurred. It would be inappropriate to connect conspiratorial dots but then again there’s something that seems strange about this. "[W's "Ann Coulter" actress beaten in home attack, by "relikx," Daily Kos, October 20, 2008.]

It seems that Pressly had a 30-second role playing Ann Coulter (though not using Coulter’s name) in Oliver Stone’s recent propaganda vehicle, W , that supposedly made Coulter look bad. The phrase, "the political climate" refers, as commenters made explicit, to (imaginary) hate crimes committed by Republicans.

At True Crime Report, leftist commenters discussing the Pressley murder argued that fans of Coulter or Rush Limbaugh might have done it, seeing as how right-wingers—emphasizing Republican milquetoast Sean Hannity—all sound like "Nazis", and are constantly inciting their followers to commit "hate crimes".

Note that this was already these people’s state of mind before the presidential election. Their fevered rantings recall the way Bill Clinton blamed "division” on the airwaves—i.e.  conservative talk radio—for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Note too that these posters are people who support stealing elections through massive voter fraud, yet who sought to railroad Ann Coulter on phony "voting fraud" charges.

Since Curtis Lavelle Vance’s arrest, the leftwing bloggers have not seen fit to revisit or regret their speculations about Ann Coulter.

That’s "old news," it’s "time to move on".
And besides, why regret having smeared Coulter, when that was the whole point of their blogs?
After all, what do they care about Anne Pressly?

(A tip ‘o’ the hat to Larry Auster, who does care.)

Nicholas Stix [email him] lives in New York City, which he views from the perspective of its public transport system, experienced in his career as an educator. His weekly column appears at Men’s News Daily and many other Web sites. He has also written for Middle American News, the New YorkDaily News, New York Post, Newsday, Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty and the Weekly Standard. He maintains two blogs: A Different Drummer an

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/17/black-on-white-rape-murder-its-a-black-thing-you-wouldnt-understand/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/08/when-faimly-values-cross-the-boarder/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/08/when-faimly-values-cross-the-boarder/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:21:33 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=684

Legalize Drugs?—Or See Mexico Become Afghanistan South?

 

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010.

But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border?

Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea have come home, there will be a U.S. army on the Mexican border. For this is where the fate of our republic will be decided, as the fate of Europe will be decided by the millions streaming north from the Maghreb and Middle East, sub-Sahara and South Asia.

Last year, 6,000 Mexicans died in drug-related killings in a war where the tactics are massacre, murder, kidnapping and beheading.

President Felipe Calderon has ordered another 5,000 troops and 1,000 police to the border. Primary target: Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

“…Corruption

throughout Mexico’s

public institutions

remains a key impediment…”

But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border?

I'll spill your guts out all over your shoes

Some 2,500 federal troops are already in Juarez, where in 2008 there were 1,600 drug-related murders. Gun battles occur every day. . [100,000 foot soldiers in Mexican cartels | Numbers rival country's army, By Sarah Carter]

 

The chief of police of Juarez just resigned after a cartel threatened to kill an officer every 48 hours if he did not. To prove its seriousness, the cartel murdered four cops, including the chief’s deputy. Last year, 50 police officers in Juarez were murdered.

 

"The decision I am taking is one of life over death," said Chief Roberto Oduna. The chief would seem to have a point. In January, his predecessor’s head was found in an ice cooler outside a police station. The mayor keeps his family in El Paso, TX, as they have been threatened with decapitation.

 

Friday, the State Department declared, "Corruption throughout Mexico’s public institutions remains a key impediment to curtailing the power of the drug cartels." Calderon retorts that, while the murders may be committed in Mexico, the cash and guns come from the United States.

 

With oil revenue down since the price dropped $100 a barrel, and remittances down from Mexican workers in the United States as the U.S. economy tanks, tourism, too, has begun to die. Beheadings in and around Acapulco have not helped. Warnings have been issued to U.S. college kids to avoid Mexico on spring break, as kidnappings for ransom are rampant. Restaurants and bars in Juarez that catered to folks from El Paso and soldiers from Fort Bliss are shutting down

Family values crossing our boarders ...

…last year 6,000 Mexicans died in drug-related killings in a war where the tactics are …massacre, murder, kidnapping and beheading….

Nationally, 45,000 army troops and police are committed to this war that Mexico is not winning. For, according to the March 3 Washington Times, the Pentagon now estimates the cartels field more than 100,000 foot soldiers…

America go to hell!

 

 

In February, in the resort town of Cancun, a retired army general sent to create elite anti-crime unit was kidnapped, tortured and shot. Mexican troops raided Cancun’s police headquarters and arrested the chief and dozens of his officers in connection with the murder.

 

Add a collapsing global economy to a losing war with drug cartels, and Mexico is at grave risk of becoming a failed state, a narco-state, with a 2,000-mile border with the United States.

There are two sure ways to end this war swiftly: Milton’s way and Mao’s way.

 Mao Zedong’s communists killed users and suppliers alike, as social parasites. Milton Friedman’s way is to decriminalize drugs and call off the war.

When Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1972, Milton, writing in Newsweek, objected on ethical grounds:

“On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.”

"Am I my brother’s keeper?’" asked Milton, answering, "No."

Americans are never going to adopt the Maoist solution. For the users of drugs are all too often classmates, colleagues, friends, even family. Indeed, our last three presidents did not deny using drugs.

“The decision…

I am taking

is one of life over death”…

In February, in the resort town of Cancun, a retired army general sent to create elite anti-crime unit was kidnapped, tortured and shot. Mexican troops raided Cancun’s police headquarters and arrested the chief and dozens of his officers in connection with the murder.

Once, a Christian America outlawed and punished homosexuality, abortion, alcohol, loan-sharking and gambling, all as criminal vice. Now, homosexuality and abortion are constitutional rights. Gambling and booze are a rich source of government revenue. And loan-sharking is done by credit-card companies, and not just the Corleones

Will we raise the white flag in the drug war, as well?

Which is the greater evil? Legalized narcotics for America’s young or a failed state of 110,000 million on our southern border?

 

Some choice… Some country we’ve become.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/03/08/when-faimly-values-cross-the-boarder/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/02/28/the-minority-mortgage-meltdown-what-really-happened-at-wamu/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/02/28/the-minority-mortgage-meltdown-what-really-happened-at-wamu/#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:45:50 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=675

The Minority Mortgage Meltdown: How The Community Reinvestment Act Fits In

By Steve Sailer

The mortgage fiasco devastating America’s big banks has many causes, but perhaps the least understood is the complex impact of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). There has been some hoopla over the CRA in recent months, but nobody seems to have noticed the subtle way the CRA actually exacerbated the disaster.

I’ll demonstrate using the meteoric rise and fall of Washington Mutual, Inc. (WaMu). Under CEO Kerry Killinger’s direction, WaMu went from being an obscure Seattle outfit to the sixth biggest bank in America.

So WaMu wasn’t quite the biggest bank—but it may well have been the silliest. When a mariachi singer in California claimed a six-figure income on his mortgage application, for example, WaMu accepted a picture of him in his mariachi outfit as the sole documentation of his income.

The bank’s slogan was “The Power of Yes”. You know, as in “Yes, We Can”.

Then, during last year’s 1930s-style bank run, the government seized WaMu last September 25 and sold its remnants to JP Morgan Chase for less than $2 billion. The Federal Reserve later outright gave $25 billion to the purchaser, in part for taking this stinker off the government’s hands.

Back in the summer of 2008, I pointed out that affirmative action likely had something to do with the horrific default rates on subprime mortgages. That became a modestly popular argument during the recent election campaign. Republicans would attempt to counter Democrats’ claim that the mortgage meltdown was caused by "greed" by pointing toward the Community Reinvestment Act.

After being strengthened under the elder Bush (n.b.!) and Clinton Administrations, the CRB was exploited by "community organizers", like President Barack Obama’s old ally ACORN, to shake down banks wanting government permission to buy others banks. In return for not protesting the merger, the racial activists would demand promises of more loans to minorities with doubtful credit.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition boasted about the early 1990s change in the CRA from toothless to lucrative:

 

 

this old Washington Mutual press release on Eric Falkenstein’s Falkenblog dating back to WaMu’s $5.2 billion purchase of New York City’s Dime Bank:

“SEATTLE, Dec 21, 2001 … In connection with its merger with Dime [Bank], Washington Mutual recently established a ten-year, $375 billion community commitment which targets funding to low- and moderate-income borrowers, and minority borrowers … One of the largest community commitments of its kind, the ten-year pledge will be implemented with the assistance and support of a variety of non-profit community partners.”

On WaMu’s still-existent website, the bank explains that $375 billion pledge:

“These funds will provide loans and other financial support to communities consisting predominantly of people of color, to residents of low- to moderate-income (LMI) census tracts, and to people whose income is below 80 percent of median income. We will strive to create products and programs that increase our market share in low income and diverse communities, with a long-term goal of making our market share in these communities more closely mirror our market share overall. Using our Year 2000 production as a baseline, we have set our goal to double the number of loans made to borrowers of color by the end of the first year of this commitment. Thereafter, we will increase the number of loans made in these communities as quickly as possible.”

Not surprisingly, WaMu won the 2003 CRA Community Impact Award.

We now know that subprime foreclosures are centered among exactly the kind of people targeted in WaMu’s CRA agreement with racial activists. During the Housing Bubble of 2004-2007, minorities accounted for twice as many subprime dollars borrowed per capita than did whites. And the new report by the Boston Fed shows that, at least in Massachusetts, minorities defaulted on subprime loans at twice the white rate. All this suggests that minorities accounted for approaching two-thirds of subprime mortgage dollars lost.

WaMu’s strategy…

…And yet there’s a more subtle point about the impact of the CRA’s vetoover bank acquisitions …the selection effect on who gets to get big…

…was lending to deadbeats; the more minority the better. For years, WaMu ran a series of TV commercials where one cool black guy in a blue WaMu shirt, an actor who looked like a cross between Barack Obama and Don Cheadle, would humiliate dozens of old white bankers in suits.

WaMu’s message to people of no color

Most advertisers would have put one
token minority banker in the crowd of pompous empty suits.
But WaMu didn’t bother. They wanted to get their message
across.

For the GOP, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was a more convenient example of government interference in the mortgage markets than, say, George W. Bush’s 2002-2004 holy war on down payments in his effort to boost minority home ownership. That’s because the CRA was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President.

Of course, the GOP’s claims about the CRA’s centrality in the mortgage meltdown were obviously partisan. And more skepticism about the importance of the CRA seemed plausible, along these lines:

 

"How could the government hold a gun to the financial institutions’ heads and force them to make hundreds of billions in stupid loans? Sure, giving out $375 million in stupid loans to get the government off your back, that would make sense. $3.75 billion, maybe. $37.5 billion, conceivably. But $375 billion, no way. Nobody would promise to give away $375 billion to dubious borrowers unless they thought it was a great idea. They’d leave the industry before they’d promise to hand out $375 billion to people whom they doubted would pay it back.”

 

In general, the government and its associated racket-runners can extort mid-level amounts of affirmative action booty. But when the demands get too great, businesses exit in one way or another. (Often with bad effects on general welfare, of course).

Obviously, it’s a massive exaggeration to say the government and the ACORN clones forced WaMu to lend to likely deadbeats. Nobody promises to loan out $375 billion to low and moderate income and minority borrowers unless they actually want to lend out to low and moderate income and minority borrowers something approaching $375 billion.

Moreover, Washington Mutual sure didn’t act reluctant. They were positively exuberant about pouring money into the hands of minorities with weak histories of paying off debts. The relatively small number of big financial institutions that did a major fraction of subprime lending really seem to have drunk the same Kool-Aid as ACORN, Congress, Clinton, and Bush. They actually thought they were going to get rich off no-money-down, $400,000 loans to high school dropouts.

And they did, for a few years. CEO Killinger “earned” $88 million from 2001-2007.

WaMu’s strategy was lending to deadbeats—the more minority the better. For years, WaMu ran a series of TV commercials where one cool black guy in a blue WaMu shirt, an actor who looked like a cross between Barack Obama and Don Cheadle, would humiliate dozens of old white bankers in suits.

Most advertisers would have put one token minority banker in the crowd of pompous empty suits. But WaMu didn’t bother. They wanted to get their message across.

So it would seem that WaMu didn’t need the CRA to blows billions.

And yet … there’s a more subtle point that I, and seemingly everybody else, missed in thinking about the impact of the CRA’s veto over bank acquisitions: the selection effect on who gets to get big.

Before I explain that, let’s back up and think about the big bank-bad bank paradox more generally.

We naturally assume that big banks are safer storehouses for our money than flimsy little banks. It’s the basic probability theory of “gambler’s ruin”—the more money an institution has, the less likely the chance of running out of money. That’s why a casino would still win even if it gave gamblers a fair shake (e.g., no zeros on the roulette wheel): the gamblers would be more likely to run out of money before the casino did.

For this reason, banks have traditionally employed the wiles of architects to make them look as reassuringly massive as possible. When I moved to Chicago in 1982, for instance, I always enjoyed visiting my cousin at work because I had to pass through perhaps the most imposing interior space in the city: the stupendous second floor lobby of the Continental Illinois bank building on La Salle, next to the Board of Trade.

…the racial activists

demand promises

of more loans to minorities

with doubtful credit…

After being strengthened under the elder Bush (n.b.!) and Clinton Administrations, the CRB was exploited by “community organizers”, like President Barack Obama’s old ally ACORN, to shake down banks wanting government permission to buy others banks. In return for not protesting the merger, the racial activists would demand promises of more loans to minorities with doubtful credit.

And yet, big banks aren’t always as trustworthy as they might look. An aggressive strategy had made Continental Illinois the largest commercial and industrial lender in America—until it went broke in May 1984, requiring the biggest FDIC bailout of depositors in American history…up to that point, of course.

Today, the old Continental Illinois building at 231 S. La Salle St. is owned by Bank of America, one of the new four Red Ink Supergiants of American banking along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. Nonetheless, B of A—and perhaps some of its colossal colleagues—may follow Continental Illinois into nonexistence if the federal government ever tires of bailouts. The problem, of course, is countless (at present, literally)bad mortgages made during the late Housing Bubble.

Why do big banks tend to be bad banks?

First, one obvious reason is the “too big to fail” theory that the feds applied to Continental Illinois. The government bailed out bondholders and kept the shell of Continental Illinois limping along for a decade until Bank of America bought it. So, managements and creditors assume there is safety in size, even though the law of diminishing marginal returns says the opposite: the more loans you make, the more likely you’ll make bad ones because you’ll be less selective.

Second, there’s a natural tendency during economic good times for the most recklessly optimistic managements to grow fastest. They borrow the most money and buy the most competitors. (At least until the bad times roll around again, when the skeptics can pick up the wreckage for a song.)

In many industries, however, skill puts a restraint on growth through confidence and luck. For example, Ford Motor Co. became the biggest car company in the world in the first quarter of the 20th Century not because Henry Ford was the biggest risk-taker, but because he was the best car-maker (e.g., he invented the moving assembly line). Similarly, Intel is the top chip maker largely because it’s good at making CPU chips.

 

In finance, in contrast, sheer boldness appears to play a relatively larger role.

Third, the high CEO compensation of recent decades has encouraged a get-rich-quick attitude.

Say a 45-year-old gets appointed CEO of a small bank, with a salary of $1 million per year. He could carefully steward his stockholders’ investments, and continue to make roughly $1 million per year until he enters a comfortable but not lavish retirement in 20 years.

Or, he could try to grow the bank fast via risky bets. If he could increase the size radically, he would show the Board that CEOs of banks that big usually get paid $10 million per year. Even if the bank blows up two years later, he’d still have earned $20 million in those two years, as much as he’d earn in 20 years of prudent management of his bank at its current size.

So why not gamble? What’s the worst that could happen to his net worth?

Finally, the executives of big banks are, by necessity, farther removed from what’s happening on the street. In 2006, WaMu moved into the 42-story WaMu Center skyscraper in downtown Seattle—a long way from Southern California, where Killinger’s minions were making so many fraudulent loans.

Knowing all the biases favoring risky business, you might expect the government to prudently lean against the tendency of ambitious mortgage lenders to hand out too much money to bad credit risks. Yet, in the name of increasing minority and low-income home ownership, the government did exactly the opposite: since the early 1990s, it has relentlessly pushed for more risky mortgage lending—with the catastrophic results we see all around us.

How did the Community Reinvestment Act worsen imprudent lending to minorities?

It’s not a popular question even to ask. “I want to give you my verdict on CRA: NOT guilty”, said FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair:

“And ‘Let me ask you. Where in the CRA does it say to make loans to people who can’t afford to repay? Nowhere.’ The facts are simple, Bair said. The lending practices that are causing problems today were driven by a desire for more market share and revenue growth, not because the government encouraged certain lending practices.” (FDIC’s Bair Sets to Shatter CRA “Myth”, by Kelly Curran, HousingWire.com, December 5, 2008.)

Okay–but how does a bank get more market share and revenue growth?

One major way: by buying other banks. And to do that, you have to pass through the CRA gauntlet. If you aren’t willing to lend to people the government wanted you to lend to, then you were out of luck at mergers and acquisitions game.

So, the CRA implicitly selected for Kool-Aid Drinkers, such as WaMu’s Killinger. They’re the ones whom the government allows to build empires. (Unfortunately, their houses turned out to be built on sand.)

I missed understanding the impact of the CRA because I kept asking myself: “How could the CRA force a banker who thinks lending more to minorities is a bad idea to lend more to minorities?” I kept trying to imagine the CRA’s effect on the already crazy-stupid WaMu, and how that couldn’t have been all that significant.

But I should have been thinking about the other side of the coin: all the sane-smart banks that didn’t get to get big like WaMu did because the government rigged the acquisition process so that crazy-stupid banks were more likely to get merger approval. WaMu got permission from the government to make 29 acquisitions from 1990 onward. A smart-sane bank wouldn’t.

That WaMu sincerely believed that it was going to make a fortune handing big mortgages to mariachi singers, illegal immigrants, and Department of Motor Vehicle clerks etc. etc. seems clear. After all, WaMu not only originated about one out of every eight mortgages in the U.S., but it also held on to a fair number of them instead of securitizing them and dumping them on Wall Street.

WaMu explained its minority-oriented strategy over and over again. Robert O’Connor wrote in Mortgage Banking, October 2003:

“Craig Davis, president of Washington Mutual’s Home Loans & Insurance Services Group, says that the high rate of homeownership in the United States–currently about 68 percent–can mask very low rates among immigrants and minorities. He argues that encouraging ownership among these groups is both good for Washington Mutual and good for the country. ‘Affordable housing and lending is front and center in terms of our strategy,’ Davis says.

“… Porter says that Washington Mutual takes the CRA very seriously. But he adds the bank regards the CRA as a floor rather than a ceiling. He says the company, and its employees, want to surpass the regulatory standard for institutions to meet the credit needs of their communities. Porter points out, for instance, that the bank’s $375-billion, 10-year lending commitment was not necessarily dictated by the CRA. ‘It was good from the company’s perspective,’ he says. ‘It was good from the community perspective, and it actually gives us a higher bar that we want to achieve.’ …

“Despite the strength of its portfolio operation, Washington Mutual is also committed to the secondary market. Early this year, it entered into a five-year strategic alliance with Fannie Mae Fannie Mae: to encourage home-buying among a number of groups, including immigrants, minorities, first-time buyers first-time buyer  first-time buyer and people with low and moderate incomes. The goal is to generate $85 billion in mortgage lending.”

And here’s a 2003 WaMu press release that sounds like Dave Barry wrote it:

“Helping to build strong, vibrant communities wherever Washington Mutual does business is integral to the company’s long-term strategy. The Community and External Affairs Division oversees all community investment and development activities to ensure that Washington Mutual fulfills its community goals in the most strategic way possible.”

 

Why was WaMu, with its derisible strategy, able to buy out so many big lenders? To understand it, think about it the other way around: why didn’t more prudent financial institutions outbid WaMu for acquisitions?

Say there are two banks, WaMu and Scrooge-Potter BanCorp. The latter is owned by Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Mister Potter of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. While WaMu is beloved for lending to anybody with a pulse, Scrooge-Potter BanCorp is widely loathed for taking a dim view of lending money to likely deadbeats.

They both would like to buy George Bailey’s Bailey Building and Loan Association. ACORN and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition announce they will protest vociferously against regulatory approval of the merger unless the winner pledges to make $50 billion in minority and low income loans.

Affirmative action

likely had something

to do with the

horrific default rates on subprime mortgages…

The mortgage fiasco devastating America’s big banks has many causes, but perhaps the least understood is the complex impact of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). There has been some hoopla over the CRA in recent months, but nobody seems to have noticed the subtle way the CRA actually exacerbated the disaster.

Reprations in the form of loans you don’t have to pay back?

Fearing a debacle of defaults, Scrooge-Potter BanCorp issues a two-word press release: “Bah, humbug”. And it drops out of the bidding.

WaMu announces: “Well, heck, we’ll promise to lend $55 billion.”

In fact, because Scrooge-Potter realized its quest was hopeless, WaMu got Bailey Building and Loan for less than it would have paid if the government wasn’t biased in favor of imprudent bankers. This gives WaMu more money to pursue more targets.

Lather, rinse, and repeat. The CRA means that WaMu gets big while Scrooge-Potter stays small.

Consider the indirect effects on Scrooge-Potter BanCorp. Who would want to go to work for a bank that can’t make acquisitions because it won’t play nice with the government on CRA? Scrooge-Potter can’t buy anybody, it can only be bought. So, how’s your job security at Scrooge-Potter looking? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go work for WaMu instead?

The CRA drives the climate of opinion in the entire mortgage industry. If you wanted to be able to buy other banks, you had to play ball.

Practically everybody did. Out of the thousands of banks with federal CRA Performance Evaluations, 496 got the highest rating of Outstanding, while only five dared to be in “Substantial Noncompliance”.

The biggest noncomplier: First Bank of Beverly Hills. It had the kind of business strategy that you’d expect from a bank with that name: take in deposits from rich people and make loans to big real estate developers outside Los Angeles. Sensing the popping of the Housing Bubble coming, it was pulling it its horns when the government evaluated it. The feds didn’t like that. (You can read the government’s report and see if you can find anything shameful about how FBBH did business. I can’t.)

Over time, the madness infects the entire culture of finance, as the government labels the prudent bankers automatic losers in the great game of acquisitions.

WaMu’s 2001 purchase of Dime Bank may have been its crowning excess. But in the history of the downfall of the American economy, it wasn’t as important as WaMu’s 1990s move into California. WaMu and California went together like a match and dynamite.

In 1997, WaMu was the second biggest thrift. When the biggest thrift, Home Savings of America (owned by H.F. Ahmanson and Co. of Irvine, CA), attempted a hostile takeover of its Southern California rival, the number three thrift, Great Western, WaMu entered as a white knight. This set off a CRA bidding war. The two competed to see who could promise the most lending to the politically favored.

The Seattle Times headline on April 10, 1997 read “Wamu Loan Plan Trumps Rival—$75 Billion Inner-City Proposal Eclipses Ahmanson Bid.” Reporter Don Lee wrote:

“In the largest inner-city loan program ever proposed by a U.S. banking institution, Washington Mutual said today it will lend $75 billion to mostly lower-income and minority borrowers over 10 years if it successfully acquires Great Western Financial. Washington Mutual said the majority of those mortgages, consumer and small-business loans would be made in California. The proposal eclipses a $70 billion community reinvestment commitment made three weeks ago by Home Savings of America.”

After winning Great Western, Washington Mutual then bid for Home Savings itself in 1998, upping its Community Reinvestment ante to $120 billion. Leftist thinktank PolicyLink reported:

“In the wake of its takeover of H.F. Ahmanson’s Home Savings of America, Washington Mutual signed a $120 billion CRA agreement with the California Reinvestment Committee (CRC), the Greenlining Institute, the Washington Reinvestment Alliance, and other community groups.”[Community Reinvestment Act—Tool in Action, no date]

 

 Grabbing Home Savings made WaMu the nation’s number one lender of adjustable-rate mortgages. Even more ominous, WaMu was now heavily concentrated in California, a state where the combination of nice weather, environmental restrictions on housing development, and a huge influx of immigrants combined to make home prices absurdly volatile in the next decade.

Then, when WaMu bought Dime Bank in 2001, it made a binding promise to lend for Community Reinvestment Act credit $375 billion. Sure, why not?

The only problem is that $375 billion here, $375 billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.

The question is, how can Barack Obama, a former community organizer and a charter member of the socialist, interventionist, Big Government Left, get us out of this mess?

Answer—he can’t. He can only get us in deeper.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/02/28/the-minority-mortgage-meltdown-what-really-happened-at-wamu/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/24/praise-for-lee-and-jackson/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/24/praise-for-lee-and-jackson/#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:51:40 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=591 January 24, 2009 By Chuck Baldwin January is often referred to as "Generals Month" since no less than four famous Confederate Generals claimed [...]]]>

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson

January 24, 2009

By
Chuck Baldwin

January is often referred to as "Generals Month" since no less than four famous Confederate Generals claimed January as their birth month: James Longstreet (Jan. 8, 1821), Robert E. Lee (Jan. 19, 1807), Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall"Jackson(Jan. 21, 1824), and George Pickett (Jan. 28, 1825). Two of these men, Lee and Jackson, are particularly noteworthy.

Without question, Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson were two of the greatest military leaders of all time. Even more, many military historians regard the Lee and Jackson tandem as perhaps the greatest battlefield duo in the history of warfare. If Jacksonhad survived the battle of Chancellorsville, it is very possible that the South would have prevailed atGettysburg and perhaps would even have won the War Between the States.

…two of the greatest military leaders of all
time…Confederate Generals…Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson two of the finest Christian gentlemen…

Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson were two of the finest Christian gentlemen this country has ever produced. Both their character and their conduct were beyond reproach.

In fact, it was Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British armies in the early twentieth century, who said, "In my opinion, Stonewall Jackson was one of the greatest natural military geniuses the world ever saw. I will go even further than that–as a campaigner in the field, he never had a superior. In some respects, I doubt whether he ever had an equal."

While the strategies and circumstances of the War of Northern Aggression can (and will) be debated by professionals and laymen alike, one fact is undeniable: Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson were two of the finest Christian gentlemen this country has ever produced. Both their character and their conduct were beyond reproach.

Unlike his northern counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, General Lee never sanctioned or condoned slavery. Upon inheriting slaves from his deceased father-in-law, Lee immediately freed them. And according to historians, Jackson enjoyed a familial relationship with those few slaves that were in his home. In addition, unlike Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant, there is no record of either Lee or Jackson ever speaking disparagingly of the black race.

…Lincoln ’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves of the North

…Grant’s excuse for not freeing his slaves was that…

"good help is so hard to come by these days."…

As those who are familiar with
history know, General Grant and his wife held personal
slaves before and during the War Between the States,
and, contrary to popular opinion, even Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation did not free the slaves of the North. They
were not freed until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed
after the conclusion of the war. Grant’s excuse for not
freeing his slaves was that "good help is so hard to come by these days."

Furthermore, it is well established
thatJacksonregularly conducted a Sunday School
class for black children. This was a ministry he took
very seriously. As a result, he was dearly loved and
appreciated by the children and their parents.

In addition, both Jackson and Lee
emphatically supported the abolition of slavery. In
fact, Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." He also said "the best men in the South" opposed it and welcomed its demise. Jackson
said he wished to see "the shackles
struck from every slave."

To think that Lee and Jackson (and
the vast majority of Confederate soldiers) would fight
and die to preserve an institution they considered evil
and abhorrent–and that they were already working to
dismantle–is the height of absurdity. It is equally
repugnant to impugn and denigrate the memory of these
remarkable Christian gentlemen.

In fact, after refusing Abraham
Lincoln’s offer to command the Union Army in 1861,
Robert E. Lee wrote to his sister on April 20 of that
year to explain his decision. In the letter he wrote, "With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to
raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the
army and save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed . . ."

Lee’s decision to resign his commission with the Union Army must have been the most difficult decision of his life. Remember that Lee’s direct ancestors had fought in

America’s War For Independence. His father, "Light Horse Harry" Henry Lee, was a Revolutionary War hero, Governor of Virginia, and member of Congress. In addition, members of his family were signatories to the Declaration of Independence.

Remember, too, that not only did Robert E. Lee graduate fromWest Point"at the head of his class" (according to Benjamin Hallowell), he is yet today one of only six cadets to graduate from that prestigious academy without a single demerit.

However, Lee knew that Lincoln’s decision to invade the South in order to prevent its secession was both immoral and unconstitutional. As a man of honor and integrity, the only thing Lee could do was that which his father had done: fight for freedom and independence. And that is exactly what he did.

…men of honor and moral backbone.

…As a man of honor and
integrity, the only thing Lee could do was… fight for freedom and independence…And that is exactly what he did.

Instead of allowing a politically correct culture to sully the memory of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson, all Americans should hold them in a place of highest honor and respect. Anything less is a disservice to history and a disgrace to the principles of truth and integrity.

Accordingly, it was more than appropriate that the late President Gerald Ford, on August 5, 1975, signed Senate Joint Resolution 23, "restoring posthumously the long overdue, full rights of citizenship to General Robert E. Lee."

According to President Ford, "This legislation
corrects a 110-year oversight of American history." He further said, "General Lee’s character has been an example to
succeeding generations . . ."

The significance of the lives of Generals Lee and Jackson cannot be overvalued. While the character and influence of most of us will barely be remembered two hundred days after our departure, the sterling character of these men has endured for two hundred years.

What a shame that so many ofAmerica’s youth are being robbed of knowing and studying the virtue and integrity of the great General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

Dr. Chuck Baldwin is the
pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola,
Florida. He hosts a weekly radio show. His
website is here.

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/24/praise-for-lee-and-jackson/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/18/our-african-american-president/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/18/our-african-american-president/#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:32:35 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=369




I know many of you have heard of the controversy concerning the citizenship status of Barack Hussein Obama II. You may have seen his Hawaiian birth certificate that has be placed before us as absolute proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is in fact an American.

I will present in this article information that you can verify via third party documentation. You will be able to make up your own mind.

First the birth certificate that has been presented to us by Obama is what the State Department referrers to as a “Short abstract version of a birth certificate”. This birth certificate is missing vital information. First is the signature of doctor who delivered him and the name of the hospital that cared for him. If you wanted to get a passport you could have problems with the birth certificate that Obama has presented because you cannot prove you were born in the USA with that birth certificate.



Obama's Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth

…Obama cannot prove his citizenship.

…he will hold a public office.

…the public has a right to know…

Our Immigrant Outlaw president…

Sometimes Americans are born at home, in the car, on an Indian reservation and were not attended to by a doctor or hospital. In this case you birth certificate needs to reference sworn affidavits to an individual’s witness of your birth. This at one time happened a lot but not as much as it once did.

You can get a passport with a “Short abstract version of a birth certificate” but if there is any question as to where you were born the State Department can and does from time to time request the source documents which disclose the signature of your doctor and the name of the hospital of your birth or the affidavits to your birth that will prove your American citizenship.

Mr. Obama has no reference on his birth certificate to his source documents. He will hold a public office and we have a right to see those documents. Citizenship is a requirement of the office of the president. He has no right to his so called “privacy” in this matter. Truth is we will never see them. In the same way we will never see the sealed documents on Martin Luther King because the data is so embarrassing it would unravel the power held by the leaders of civil rights aristocracy

My father was stationed in Hawaii at Schofield Barracks from 1960 – 1964. My sister was born there. This is a picture of her birth certificate. This is what Obama’s birth certificate should look like. Note that a doctors signature and hospital are both present. I agree that a private citizen should not have to open their medical records to the public. Mr. Obama will hold a public office and we have a right to that information to verify that he is in fact a legal US citizen.

Full disclosure Hawaiian birth certificate 1962

Mr. Obama could in a moment dispel all the controversy surrounding this issue by simply stating who his doctor was and what hospital he was born in. The problem is, for whatever reason, he cannot do so because he has no source documents and therefore cannot prove his citizenship.

The state of Hawaii routinely issues Hawaiian birth certificates to people born in foreign countries and who in no way could ever be an American. On the long form (see my sister’s above) of the Hawaiian birth certificate section 7c provides for Hawaiian citizenship even if you were born in a foreign country.

The state of Hawaii itself will not accept its own birth certificate as proof of citizenship because it knows the system if saturated with errors.

This from Hawaii’s official Department of Health Vital Records web page:

A) Amended certificates of birth may be prepared and filed with the Department of Health, as provided by law, for 1) a person born in Hawaii who already has a birth certificate filed with the Department of Health or 2) a person born in a foreign country“ (applies to adopted children).

1. B. A parent may register an in-state birth in lieu of certification by a hospital of birth under HRS 338-5.

C. Hawaiian law expressly provides for registration of out-of-state births under HRS 338-17.8. A foreign birth presumably would have been recorded by the American consular of the country of birth, and presumably that would be reflected on the Hawaiian birth certificate.

D. Hawaiian law, however, expressly acknowledges that its system is subject to error. See, for example, HRS 338-17.

E. Hawaiian law expressly provides for verification in lieu of certified copy of a birth certificate under HRS 338-14.3.

F. Even the Hawaii Department of Home Lands does not accept a certified copy of a birth certificate as conclusive evidence for its homestead program. From its web site: “In order to process your application, DHHL utilizes information that is found only on the original Certificate of Live Birth, which is either black or green. This is a more complete record of your birth than the Certification of Live Birth (a computer-generated printout). Submitting the original Certificate of Live Birth will save you time and money since the computer-generated Certification requires additional verification by DHHL.”

…the state of Hawaii itself will not accept its own birth certificate as proof of citizenship…

Obama cannot prove his citizenship if asked for the source documents. If he was actually born in Hawaii it matters not. As I stated before he holds a public office and we have a right to see those source documents. If he can be proven not qualified to hold the office of the president he can under the rule of law be removed. The problem however is that Africans in American would put to flame many American cities. Remember when Africans put 300 cities in France under the torch?? The rule of law applies only to people of no color.

We have had illegal alien outlaws voting in our elections now for 30+ years. Now an imposter, a usurper, an alien outlaw will sit in the office of the president but outrage will only be directed at those who point it out. This is poetic justice for McCain who with the traitor Ted Kennedy passed the McCain-Kennedy Immigration Bill that made all of this not only possible but reality.

The Constitution of the united States and the Bill of Rights are largely a joke at this point. On January 20, 2009 we will begin our labor under the shadow of Afro-Marxism. I will be called a racist for saying this but 20 years in a church that spewed and vomited vile racism on a daily basis now qualifies you to be president??? Yes it does… if you are a person of color.

James Coats

]]> http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/18/our-african-american-president/feed/ 0 http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/11/hispanic-values-crossing-the-boarder/ http://whidbeynewspost.com/2009/01/11/hispanic-values-crossing-the-boarder/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:40:43 +0000 http://whidbeynewspost.com/?p=551

Importing Domestic Violence: The Hispanic Connection

By Carl F. Horowitz

There is no word for "compromise" in Spanish, nor is there a Spanish word that captures the full meaning of the English word "dissent".

There is nothing new about physical abuse, or threats of it, in a sexual relationship. Primitive conflict-resolution techniques can wind up trumping even the most fevered declarations of love.

(Nor is the commission of abusive acts unique to men. Respected researchers such as Donald Dutton, Richard Felson, Richard Gelles, Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Straus  have shown that women commit unprovoked acts of violence against their male partners at least as often as vice versa.)

But the incidence of violence doesn’t just vary by personal situation. It also varies by culture. And the politically incorrect truth is that Hispanic cultures have a high propensity of substituting criminal violence for verbal facility as a way of settling disputes.

As Tufts University’s Lawrence Harrison observes: “There is no word for ‘compromise’ in Spanish, nor is there a Spanish word that captures the full meaning of the English word ‘dissent.’” This is both a cause and effect of attitudes acquired early in life.

The key to combating abuse is education, according to Liz Claiborne’s then-CEO Paul R. Charron. He called for more widespread adoption of Love Is Not Abuse, a model curriculum that the company developed in 1991 and now distributes to middle- and high-school students at over 350 schools across the U.S.

Needless to say, the fact that for several decades immigration policy has been inadvertently importing such attitudes was off the table.

But abuse is learned behavior. And learning doesn’t take place in a vacuum. In much of Hispanic culture, intimidation—not just self-defense—by males is considered honorable and thus “normal”. It’s a worldview passed on from one generation to the next.

And it crosses borders, too. Put simply, we are not all equally at risk

One day in September 2005, Lindsay’s mother, concerned when her daughter didn’t answer the phone, called police. The cops visited the Martinez residence, believing Lindsay could be there in hopes of giving the relationship one last chance.

The first state to adopt such a program was Texas in 2007. Again, it’s not hard to find Hispanic reasons. Let’s hope students there won’t grow up to be like Antonio Perez or Marcus Abrego.

Mr. Perez, a San Antonio resident, on February 11, 2007 fatally shot his wife, Teena, in the chest, and then killed himself with a bullet to his head.

A week later, Mr. Abrego, also of San Antonio, upset with something or other, dragged his girlfriend, Dolores Bibiano, up a flight of stairs, beat her, broke her spinal column, and left her for dead behind a wooden fence at the couple’s apartment. Paralyzed from the waist down, she has a slim prospect of recovery. The pair had three children, all of whom witnessed the attack. Abrego currently is awaiting trial at an unspecified date.

But it’s time to raise—forcefully and frankly– the strong possibility that certain ethnic groups have more trouble than others in adapting to our behavioral code. Empirical research beyond the horror anecdotes makes a case that, on average, Hispanics as a whole are less capable than non-Hispanic whites in handling disagreements within a sexual relationship.

• Raul Caetano and Craig Field of the University of Texas’s School of Public Health found that Hispanic (and black) couples exhibited three times the frequency of male-on-female violence and twice the frequency of female-on-male violence than did white couples. [Longitudinal model predicting mutual partner violence among White, Black, and Hispanic couples in the United States general population. Violence and victims 2005;20(5):499-511.]
• In a separate study, Dr. Caetano, John Schafer of the University of Cincinnati and Carol Cunradi of the Prevention Research Center at Berkeley, California found that black, Hispanic, and white couples reported violent incidents within the previous 12 months at respective levels of 23 percent, 17 percent and 11.5 percent. [Alcohol-Related Intimate Partner Violence among White, Black, and Hispanic Couples in the United States.]

(What these studies say about blacks is a subject for a separate article).

• In 2005, the University of South Carolina’s College of Nursing released the results of a survey of more than 300 Hispanic women across South Carolina. Fully 70 percent of the respondents had experienced domestic abuse during the previous year.

About three-fourths of these women did not report incidents, citing at least one of the following reasons: embarrassment; lack of fluency in English; fear of losing children; fear of losing income; and fear of deportation.

About that last one—in about a third of all cases, women believed that talking to police and/or health care providers would result in their removal from the U.S.

“They don’t want shelters”, she remarked. “They want to learn English. They want transportation and legal help”. Another researcher, Irma Santana, former director of South Carolina’s Hispanic Outreach, complained: “Women are not being educated…Health providers should be educating the Hispanic community that domestic violence is not permissible. It’s a crime here”. [South Carolina study: domestic violence prevalent among Hispanics, May 5, 2005]

Tena Hunt, one of the study’s principal investigators, admitted that around 95 percent of the women surveyed were “undocumented” (PC-speak for illegal). Yet that finding didn’t seem to trouble her nearly as much as the supposed inadequacy of social services targeted to their needs.

Apparently, neither Ms. Hunt nor Ms. Santana can bring themselves to understand that 95 percent of these women had also committed a crime simply by being in the U.S.

But that’s no surprise. Social services agencies and research groups are fairly stuffed with mass-immigration boosters who operate on the assumption that America has a duty to address pathologies among immigrants already here, regardless of legal status or even ability to assimilate. Immigration, by implication, is a right. 

The National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, better known as “Alianza”, is the lead organization in this area. Here, too, one finds the paradox: oppose the pathology, but not the people who inflict it.

At an April 26, 2005 luncheon at Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green, various speakers spoke of the need for Hispanic men to take a stand for healthy family environments. The ramped-up multimedia campaign, in its own words, “celebrates Latino values of community, family, passion, and compassion”, and “shows why domestic violence DOESN’T fit in Latino communities”.

But if Latinos are supposedly so steeped in warm communal values, why do they so often behave in diametrically opposite ways? Alianza doesn’t seem interested in addressing this contradiction.

What Alianza does seem interested in is expanding Latino-oriented social service delivery in this country.

On October 1, 2008, to kick off Domestic Violence Month, the group called for additional funds for women’s shelters. It claimed: “Several factors, including discrimination and lack of bilingual/bicultural staff, have led to an underutilization of shelters and other domestic violence services by Latinas/os affected by domestic violence”.

This appeal, steeped in the clinical language of gender-neutral egalitarianism, implies that the main roadblock to reform is American policy—not Hispanic folkways. If only we Americans can be made to understand these folkways, goes the argument, the assimilation process would go much more smoothly.

A niche industry thus has arisen to connect Anglo and Hispanic cultures. Hispanic Research Inc., an East Brunswick, N.J.-based marketing firm, for example, offers these pearls of wisdom on its website (www.hispanic-research.com):

• "Hispanics tend to be conservative/traditional in their cultural lifestyle. The men’s “machismo” clearly separates the Latino male from his Anglo counterparts. The female also plays a very different role from that of the Anglo female. These traits are especially evident in new immigrants."
• "Most Hispanics exhibit a similar longing and nostalgia for their country of origin. "

But why don’t Hispanic immigrants, at least those possessed of a machismo sensibility, express their longing by, well, returning home?

Even more to the point, why did they come here in the first place?

Apparently, these are not polite questions to ask at the dinner table—at least not to company founder Ricardo Lopez.

Immigration enthusiasts argue that, rather than close the gates to newcomers, we should invest more in education and other areas to promote assimilation and hence discourage domestic abuse among immigrants already here.

Yet, even without the likes of MALDEF and the National Council of La Raza promoting their noxious brew of ethnic triumphalism and separatism, these types of preventative measures work more easily in theory than in practice.

Susan Mattson and Ester Rodriguez of Arizona State University’s College of Nursing, for example, have concluded from their research on Hispanic immigrants that it is precisely in situations where one partner assimilates and the other doesn’t that the capacity for violence is greatest. The male in particular becomes prone to violence if his partner becomes aware of her legal rights and sheds the born-to-suffer fatalism of the old culture.[Intimate Partner Violence in the Latino Community and Its Effect on Children, ]

Joanne Klevens of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admits: “Role strain, especially as a result of immigration and acculturation, might be unique to Latinos, and its importance, and the importance of male dominance among Latinas experiencing IPV [intimate partner violence], deserve more research”.[An Overview of Intimate Partner Violence Among Latinos, Klevens VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN.2007; 13: 111-122]

Let’s put this less euphemistically: America is importing domestic abuse

Education and outreach programs might mitigate some immigrant dysfunctional behavior. But greater selectivity in whom we admit to this country will accomplish this goal faster and better.

Ingrained patterns of belief and behavior don’t simply dissipate by crossing someone else’s border.

Just ask the parents of Lindsay Ann Burke.

Carl F. Horowitz (email him) is director of the Organized Labor Accountability Project of the National Legal and Policy Center in Falls Church, Va. He has a Ph.D. in urban planning and policy development.

For some curious reason, immigrants of all stripes are lauded by America’s elite for their exemplary family values. But huddling in high-density hovels should not be mistaken for loving relationships or psychologically healthy lifestyles. There is plenty of dysfunction in those communities of diversitude, from continuing high levels of Hispanic teen and unmarried pregnancy to numerous cases of familial mass murder. Intrafamily killing deserves our attention, because it reveals the underside of immigrant communities in a way that little else can.

When an American mother like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith kills her children, the news coverage is plentiful and angry. But when a dim immigrant mom murders her kids, no one in the media seems to care.

Why is that? The dead children of foreigners are just as innocent as American youngsters.

Apparently the big brains in the editorial offices become squeamish when the sordid details of immigrant life don’t conform to the happy-face template—diverse Horatio Algers making their way up the sparkly ladder of success.

Achieving the American Dream is alive and well on paper—but less so in real life.

Following is an incomplete but representative list of unhappy immigrant parents who have murdered their children.

Last October, Said Biyad, a Bantu refugee from Somalia, killed his four children in Louisville and attacked his estranged wife with a blunt object, and then turned himself in to police. He slashed the throats of the children, aged 2 to 8, because his wife disrespected him he said. Prosecutors say they intend to seek the death penalty.

Recent news in the case has been the difficulty in finding a court interpreter who speaks Bantu.

USA Today declared that Bantus are “not latter day cavemen” and then built a convincing case that they are:

Hmong are a rudimentary agricultural people. Their written language was devised only in 1953. One shocking statistic from the 2000 Census is that “Over half of Hmong-American women … have had no formal education at all.” The same report found that Hmong living in the US “had the lowest average per-person income of any ethnic group described by the 2000 Census: $6,613.” But Hmong refugees often continue to have enormous families in this country, sometimes polygamous ones.

Ukrainian Nikolay Soltys killed several members of his family in the Sacramento area on August 20, 2001. He stabbed his pregnant wife first, then went to his aunt and uncle’s house a few miles away and killed them and two nine-year-old cousins. After that, Soltys went to his mother’s house and picked up his three-year-old son Sergey, whom he murdered the next day.

After a 10-day nationwide manhunt, during which the 27-year-old Ukrainian immigrant was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, he was captured in his mother’s back yard in Sacramento. The police search was made more difficult by the Ukrainians’ cultural mistrust of law enforcement and the inability of many to speak English. In February of the next year, Soltys managed to commit suicide in his jail cell.

At the time of his murder rampage, Soltys was unemployed and living on welfare. He had hoped to open an auto repair shop or become a paramedic but his failure to learn English made any career advancement impossible.

Because of the high-profile search for a dangerous and unpredictable mass murderer, the MSM paid attention. And when one listened carefully, there was mention that 75,000 Russians and Ukrainians were living in the Sacramento area.

Who knew?

In addition, it was noted that Soltys had a record of domestic violence in Ukraine and was too mentally unstable to enter the military there. But no one with a byline asked how such an undesirable character could be admitted to the U.S.

Jihad Hassan Moukalled was a Lebanese immigrant living near Detroit who had a serious gambling problem. By November 2000, he had pulled $500,000 from his printing business to cover his gambling debts and had run up large credit card bills also. Before shooting himself, he killed his three young children and wife. Evidently, he felt they couldn’t manage to live without him.

In a Grand Rapids Press article no longer online, “Immigrant gamblers have few support groups” [Dec 17, 2000, Pay Archive], local Lebanese complained that America did not offer culturally appropriate psychological help for gambling addicts. “I wish someone would help us,” said Rosemary Antone of the Chaldean American Ladies of Charity.

India immigrant Laxma Reddy shot and killed his wife Uma, his 13-year-old daughter and father-in-law as they slept in their beds in Brookline, Massachusetts in March 1997. Reddy had a medical degree from an Indian university and had left in the middle of his residency in a Cleveland hospital, apparently not able to make the adjustment to practicing medicine in the US. He had not been in contact with his family for several weeks prior to the murders. He was shot dead a few days later when he pulled a gun on a police officer in Elko, Nevada, during an unrelated traffic stop.

In Maryland there is still some mystery about the March killing of the four Rodriguez children, since the mother Deysi Benitez remains missing. They were found dead in their home along with the father Pedro Rodriguez who had hanged himself. The police now believe Pedro killed the kids.

Whatever the details of the crime, there is no doubt the family was in over their heads financially. The couple purchased a $195,000 townhouse in 2005 they could ill afford. He worked in a factory, she in a restaurant. Pedro, a Salvadoran beneficiary of TPS (”Temporary” Protected Status) was arrested for shoplifting kids’ clothing. He lost his job several days before the murders.

Deysi Benitez was born in a mountain village of El Salvador. She “was pregnant at 15, had only a third-grade education and could barely read Spanish, let alone English,” according to the Associated Press ["Missing mother of dead kids lacked the skills to build her dream" AP, March 31, 2007]

Passionately wanting the American Dream of a middle class life doesn’t mean that everyone can achieve it. Skills and knowledge become more necessary to making money. A century ago, an immigrant could more easily get an unskilled job that would support a family. In today’s global exploitation economy, a foreign family has to work several jobs just to survive. Any bump along the road, be it financial pressures or an emotional explosion, can precipitate violence from accumulated stress.

We see the sociological blowback in the huge gang problem among immigrants. In fact, if you wanted to create gangs, you would welcome families whose cultural backgrounds make them totally unprepared to deal with a society where a high degree of literacy is required. The parents struggle with survival issues of learning the language and earning enough money. The kids struggle with school, where they try to fit in but are torn by being neither fish nor fowl. The 1.5 generation lives in a cultural no-man’s land, where they receive mixed messages about whether to identify with their ethnicity or to their family’s new home. Gangs, even violent ones, provide a community of shared outlook and experiences.

It is cruel, not to mention foolish public policy, to welcome millions of uneducated people from the Third World who are unprepared for life in a complex technological society. It is hard to live in a strange country where you don’t speak the language and live in a limited cocoon with others of your tribe, alienated from the mainstream community. Multicultural cheerleaders like to downplay how difficult immigration can be under the best of circumstances. But many immigrant crimes have some basis in the interior culture clash and the ongoing stress of social maladjustment.

Less cheerleading for the multicultural delusion and more honesty from the MSM about diversity’s downside would be welcome. Less sentimental, more honest reporting about the real immigrant experience might even save some lives down the road.

Brenda Walker lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Recent events have convinced her that the Second Amendment should apply to citizens only.

The “Diversity Recession”

By Steve Sailer

Why did the

housing market turn into America’s economic
cancer—growing out of control before recently

killing economic growth?

It’s is a difficult question to answer—but not because
there is a shortage of reasons. Instead, all the causes
are interconnected——just as

all the players in the game, from the top of society
to the bottom, egged each other on.

The housing disaster is not an isolated incident.
Instead, it is intimately interwoven with most of the
destructive trends in our society:

non-traditional mass immigration, growing

economic inequality,

multiculturalism,

globalization, and the

decline of community and traditional standards of
behavior.

The economic logic of the

Bush Decade turned out to be wholly circular and
thus is now collapsing in on itself.

Yet that makes it difficult for the analyst to find a
starting point.

Trying to think about the

mortgage meltdown is reminiscent of the infinitely
recursive children’s song

Yon Yonson, which was memorably featured in Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five:

"My
name is Yon Yonson / I live in Wisconsin / I work in a
lumber mill there / The people I meet / When I walk down
the street / They ask me my name and I say: / My name is
Yon Yonson / I live in Wisconsin…"

Similarly, in trying to explain this decade’s
socioeconomic logic, you end up with thought processes
like this:

Q.
Why did we need

so many illegal immigrants?

A. To
build all those McMansions out in the

distant exurbs.

Q.
Yes, but why did so many Americans want

to move to the exurbs?

A. To

escape all the illegal aliens flooding their
neighborhoods and schools.

Q.
Okay, so then why did we need so many illegal aliens?

A. To
build all those

McMansions out in the distant exurbs.

Everything just spins around and around, like those
chrome wheel rims, those insanely expensive hubcaps that
were the signature useless extravagance of this decade.
Neely Tucker wrote in the

Washington Post in 2005:

"Today rims are a $3.1 billion industry that stands at
the revolving heart of two American obsessions:
automobiles and finding ever more expensive ways to buy
things you already have and don’t need."

Some economist should calculate what proportion of all
the money spent on blinged-out rims came out of home
equity loans taken out on houses bubbling up in nominal
value.

Similarly, it’s hard for most people to grasp the
interrelatedness of

multiculturalism and greed in fostering the housing
bubble. "Diversity" gave the big guys an excuse
for doing what they had always wanted to do: debauch
credit standards and take the money and run, leaving the
mess to be cleaned up by taxpayers (through direct
bailouts) and savers (through Fed-created inflation
eating away their capital).

To
find a starting place in understanding how America’s
interested elites conspired across lines of race, party,
and class to defraud savers and taxpayers, let’s just
pick one name in the news:

Richard F. Syron, the CEO of Freddie Mac, a
"Government Sponsored Enterprise" that guarantees
almost $2 trillion in mortgages.

Freddie Mac

and its "rival" Fannie Mae are able to borrow
at lower interest rates than other publicly-traded
private firms because it has always been hinted that, if
they messed up, the U.S. taxpayers would bail them out
on the grounds that they were

"too big to fail."

The privilege of borrowing at below market interest
rates while lending at market interest rates is a
license to print money (until the inevitable
catastrophe, of course). In return for this license,
naturally, politicians ask Freddie and Fannie to pay off
their supporters with

loans they couldn’t get on their merits.

Because Congress controls the Fannie and Freddie, the

GSEs in turn have long controlled Congress, easily
fending off the handful of politicians prudent enough to
point out that they were on the treadmill to
destruction. Fannie and Freddie spend a fortune on

lobbying, as well as on

foundations that hand out grants, typically to

charities and pressure groups with ties to the Left.

Freddie Mac is one of those fortunate kind of entities
where the taxpayers are "implicitly" on the hook
for losses, but the bosses get paid like

private moguls rather than like

civil servants. (Heads I win, tails you lose.) Mr.
Syron, the former president of the Boston Federal
Reserve bank, has pocketed $38 million since
taking over Freddie Mac a half decade ago.

Last Monday, August 6, 2008, Charles Duhigg of the
New York Times reported

At Freddie Mac, Chief Discarded Warning Signs:

"The
chief executive of the mortgage giant

Freddie Mac rejected internal warnings that could
have protected the company from some of the financial
crises now engulfing it, according to more than two
dozen current and former high-ranking executives and
others. That chief executive, Richard F. Syron, in 2004
received a memo from Freddie Mac’s chief risk officer
warning him that the firm was financing questionable
loans that threatened its financial health."

Later last week, Freddie Mac announced a quarterly loss
of

$821 million—triple Wall Street’s expectation. (The
next day, Freddie’s larger "rival" Fannie Mae
announced a $2.3 billion quarterly loss.)

Syron struck back against his critics in the pages of
the Boston Globe, saying he was just following
orders:

“Syron yesterday defended his loan decisions, arguing
that Freddie needed to take additional risk to meet its
government mandate to provide affordable housing.
Although a private company, Freddie Mac was created by
Congress to expand mortgage credit and home ownership.
‘If you’re going to take aid to low-income families
seriously, then you’re going to make riskier loans,’
Syron said in an interview yesterday. ‘We have goals to
meet.’ “
[Syron's
side of the story, By Robert Gavin, August 6,
2008]

Indeed, the quotas for Freddie’s mortgages reserved for
"underserved
areas," (which are officially defined as
"low-income census tracts or in low- or middle-income
census tracts with high minority populations"), have
been raised from 21 percent during the Clinton
Administration to 39 percent during the Bush
Administration.

Syron prides himself that he was more dedicated to
"affordable housing" than to prudence with the
taxpayers’ money. When he arrived in 2003, Syron put an
end to Freddie’s habit of cooking the books in order to
be more cautious than Congress wanted:

"In
addition, Freddie’s commitment to affordable housing had
declined to the point it employed gimmicks to meet
congressional goals. For example, said Syron, Freddie
would essentially rent loans to meet affordable housing
goals, buying them from lenders to carry on the books at
year end, then selling them back. Syron ended that
practice and re-emphasized the

housing mission."

What could possibly go wrong with lending money to
people who wouldn’t qualify for credit without the
government leaning on the lenders? I mean, besides all
the trillions in stimulation making "affordable
housing" unaffordable without trick mortgages
concocted around the assumption that home prices can
only go up?

But don’t blame Syron for the bubble!

"Syron added the cause of Freddie’s problems isn’t those
loans, but a deep and extended housing downturn,
spreading into the broad mortgage market. US home prices
are falling for the first time since the Great
Depression, and the economy is weakening, affecting even
creditworthy borrowers."

Right … of course, housing prices wouldn’t be falling so
fast now, especially in the "affordable" tier, if
the

whole house of cards hadn’t been built up so wildly
on Syron’s watch.

The circular insanity of it all was obvious even to a
commenter on the

Calculated Risk blog who calls himself

Currently Smoking Cannabis:

"But
to meet affordable housing goals, Freddie had to engage
in activities that helped push house prices higher, and
thus more unaffordable? And the more their numbers
indicated that Freddie was dedicated to affordable
housing, the more housing was allowed to balloon
artificially?

"Am I way off the mark or is this as crazy as it sounds?
…. Gives you something to tell the people you are
doing for their benefit, while achieving the exact
opposite."

Why was Syron chosen to be CEO of Freddie Mac, anyway?
Well, one reason was that he was a hero to the Great and
the Good in the early 1990s for unmasking a terrible
societal scourge:

lending discrimination.

The
Globe’s
Gavin
credulously recounts:

"Syron
encouraged the Boston Fed’s research department to wade
into important, but contentious public policy issues.
Perhaps best known was its study of lending
discrimination, [Mortgage
lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA data
(Working Paper 92-7|PDF)]
which found race, not lending risks, driving loan
decisions."

This study was hugely popular and influential with all
the right people:

"Joseph
P. Kennedy II, then a Massachusetts congressman,
said the study helped change lending practices and
expand credit to minority and

poor neighborhoods."

Unfortunately, it was based on

economic illiteracy. As Gary Becker’s

Ph.D. thesis (based on a suggestion by his adviser,
Milton Friedman) pointed out, if firms were

irrationally discriminating against minorities, it
would be

profitable for nondiscriminators to enter the market
and cash in.

In
reality, as Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer wrote in


Forbes on January 4, 1993, whites and minorities
had the same default rate back then—demonstrating
that

"[t]he
market, in short, worked. The mortgage lenders somehow
weeded out the extra credit risks among minorities, down
to the, point where white and minority defaults were at
an equal, apparently acceptable, rate."

Today, of course, minorities have higher default
rates than whites—due in large part to the

quotas whose justification traces back to the stupid
study Syron sponsored.

Now, even Syron has noticed what he hath wrought,
saying, according to a March 12, 2008 Bloomberg News
article entitled

Rules Let Too Many Poor People Buy Houses, Syron Says:

"It’s
‘perverse’ that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two
biggest providers of money for U.S. home loans, have
been encouraged ‘to put people into homes that they end
up losing."

Syron, however, is apparently in no danger of losing his
$38 million compensation.

Funny how that works.

An extraordinary event took place in front of Oak Harbor Wal-Mart early Wednesday evening. A two legged “thief”, by most accounts, grabbed the Salvation Army donation kettle and ran like a gazelle to his, her or its freedom no doubt to finish their Christmas shopping.

The kettle was estimated to be valued at about $40.00. There was one witness to the incident but the description of the “thief” was “vague”. This as reported by the Whidbey News Times.

I filed for a report from the Oak Harbor Police Department and was given a redacted report that disclosed the Red Bucket was valued at $40.00, the lock on the bucket was valued at $16.00 and that an estimated $200.00 in cash was in the red bucket.

I asked the Oak Harbor Police for the name of the eyewitness and was denied that information. I asked was the “thief” man, woman, tall, short, fat, thin, white, black, red, yellow, young, middle aged or old. I was told the crime is under investigation and that they could not comment on the crime.

I contacted Wal-Mart (some would call it China-Mart) and I was told they knew nothing and had given all their surveillance tapes to the OHPD.

I contacted the Salvation Army and was told they could not comment on the event. I am puzzled by all this. How do you solve a crime in this manner?

The three main ways in which every crime is solved is by: 1) Community involvement, 2) Criminals rating each other out and 3) Old fashioned flat footed hard nosed police work.

More to follow on this event…