Do you know — and more important, do your Representatives and Senators know — that the just-passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill will unleash a tsunami or racial quotas on financial regulatory agencies and, inevitably, on the financial industry itself? Not if you rely on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their network news equivalents.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, a veritable one-woman truth squad on this issue, raised the alarm here, here, and here, and her warning was discussed by Andy McCarthy of National Review, Carl Horowitz on Townhall.com, and on several blogs — Hot Air, Professor Bainbridge, and my own Discriminations. But aside from an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month, not a peep from the mainstream press.
How odd, since this bill has been sold as necessary to prevent another financial meltdown and yet, insofar as that meltdown was precipitated by a burst housing bubble produced at least in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, et al. forcing lenders to offer mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, the new legislation threatens to institutionalize and magnify those very abuses. As Ms. Furchtgoff-Roth explained, Section 342 of the bill creates at least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” to ensure that “race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”
These distributed diversity czars will monitor
• The 10 Departmental Offices of the Department of the Treasury;
• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.;
• The Federal Housing Finance Agency;
• The 12 Federal Reserve regional banks;
• The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve;
• The National Credit Union Administration;
• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency;
• The Securities and Exchange Commission; and
• The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
They are instructed, according to Subsection (b), to “develop standards” for “equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity” of the agency’s employees and management, as well as “increased participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of the agency.” Emphasis added. That “and” reveals that for contemporary liberals non-discriminatory, colorblind equal opportunity is insufficient; it must be supplemented with– which in practice means replaced by — “racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.”
Subsection (c) requires the diversity police to “develop and implement standards and procedures to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the fair inclusion and utilization of minorities, women, and minority-owned and women-owned businesses in all business and activities of the agency at all levels.”
This quota tsunami was the brainchild of California Rep. Maxine Waters. As she proclaimed in a July 1 press release,
“I wrote this legislation to make sure that federal financial regulatory agencies ensure diversity in their hiring and promotion, as well as in their contracting, so that competent and qualified minorities and women and minority-, women- and small-businesses have a seat at the table” and to increase the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of each agency.
One expects this sort of race mongering from Maxine Waters and her Democratic colleagues, but Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins should be ashamed of themselves for supporting it.
As the Wall Street Journal noted in its editorial,
Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender. Isn’t the point of this financial reform supposed to be to make regulators better judges of systemic risks, which means focusing on financial safety and soundness? If the Waters provision passes, federal regulators will have to put racial and gender lending at the top of their watch list when they do their checks on the banks and hedge funds they are regulating.
Either the watchdogs in the mainstream press haven’t read the bill, or they don’t think the creation of a massive new government bureaucracy to impose “diversity” on financial institutions and transactions is newsworthy. Perhaps that’s because they think imposed “diversity” has worked so well everywhere else.
Perhaps if the mainstream media has bothered to report these nuances of the legislation instead of leaving it the new media, we could have avoided the passage of this bill in the first place.
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