Ex-Prime Minister’s Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, Carol Thatcher, has been fired by the BBC for referring, on the BBC’s premises but not on air to a “French” tennis player as a “golliwog”. (A golliwog is a toy doll formerly popular with British children, but almost unknown in the US.)

The Corporation has defended itself in near-hysterical terms:Thatcher was sacked for refusing to apologise for ‘racist’ remark, BBC says, By Jerome Taylor,The Independent, February 6, 2009.

Given the BBC’s behavior in other cases, they are open to the charge of vindictiveness to the Thatcher family.

Hat Tip The Irish Savant, which has provided pictorial evidence that Carol Thatcher was objectively correct, (see tennis player Gael Monfils right,and an 1896 picture of the original, left) and accurately remarked

the key point is that this was said in a private conversation. Yes, a private conversation that was reported to the Diversity Big Brother. So we’ve now reached the stage where, a la Soviet Russia or East Germany, your private conversations can lose you your job… what we’re seeing here is not ‘liberalism’, rather a new and insidious totalitarianism.

A feature of the numerous British accounts of this event is the enthusiasm with which various minority members cheer on this repression. And why not? Their cultures did see struggles for ethnic dominance–but never knew freedom of speech.

Nor will the English-speaking world if the stampede to multi-culturism continues.

Bill Gates’s 2009 annual letter on what the Gates Foundation is up to says:

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.

I don’t know the full history of the “small learning communities” fad, but one important proponent was Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist and extremely distant acquaintance of President Obama, who set up the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago in 1991 with his sidekick, Mike Klonsky.

Ayers, with others, then put together a proposal that got $50 million (plus matching contributions) for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge out of Old Man Annenberg, a famous GOP donor. Barack Obama was recruited in 1995 to become Chairman of the Board of Ayers’s baby, which gave handouts to “community organizations” to help them relate to the Chicago public schools. Years later, a quantitative study found that the Obama-Ayers plan had done nothing for test scores (but it had done a lot for the Obama brand name among the activists who got the moolah).

Indeed, Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop and Obama’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge had the same mailing address from 1995 to 1999: 115 S. Sangamon St., Third Floor. Whether Ayers’s Small Schools Workshop and Obama’s Chicago Annenberg Challenger operated out of the same office or whether they had separate offices across the hall from each other is unknown. Obama’s outfit gave over $1 million dollars to Ayer’s outfit, which presumably made things matey on the elevator each day.

What’s the relationship between Bill Ayers and the Gates Foundation? The first Google entry I came up with was a 2001 article entitled “Can ‘Small Schools’ Save Berkeley High?’ In it, a school administrator named Rick Ayers was quoted as saying:

“In the transition, we’re gonna have a half-million dollars from the feds and close to a million from the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation–that’s what we’re asking for,” Ayers says. “But a million and a half isn’t a hell of a lot of money , and you don’t want to prop up a program on just that. But that money will put teachers into a position to lead these changes. We have to demonstrate that we can do the Small Learning Communities with the budget that we have. It isn’t just small schools; I wish it were.”

I said to myself, “I betcha Rick Ayers is Bill Ayers’s brother.” (more…)

 Parapundit points me toward this AP article: “Financial burden of homeownership spread unequally” by Alan Zibel that provides a lot of good statistics, but, of course, fails to tabulate the foreclosure rate by ethnicity. Still, it’s worth reading:

WASHINGTON (AP) — … Inequality in America has traditionally followed familiar patterns of race, age and education. Those long-standing gaps have been magnified by the real estate boom and now the historic bust, according to an Associated Press analysis of 2007 Census Bureau data.

While minorities have made significant gains in wealth and home ownership since 1990, “things are going into reverse gear,” and now the homeownership rate for blacks and Hispanics is falling, said Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth distribution.

Nearly 9.5 million households, or nearly one out of every five of the nearly 52 million homeowners with a mortgage, spend 38 percent or more of their pretax income on their mortgage payment, property taxes and insurance, the AP’s analysis found.

The traditional standard was don’t go over 30% of your income, so 38% is a high standard.

Now this is only looking at homeowners with a mortgage, so it ignores every homeowner who has paid off his mortgage (a group, I would imagine, that is overwhelmingly white). (more…)

 Now that people are starting to realize that America’s economy has long-term problems that won’t be solved just by throwing money at it in the short-term, it’s time to start thinking about how the economy could become more efficient. We just can’t afford all the luxuries that we thought we could when cruddy houses in California were averaging a half-mil each.

One obvious approach to making the economy work better is to take a skeptical look at the many ways “community organizers” exploit wealth-creators. PolicyLink, a leftist thinktank, has conveniently collected 27 strategies in its “Equitable Development Toolkit,” with in-depth How-To Guides. Half of them sounded okay, at least on the surface (e.g., fighting asthma), but at least 13 look like ploys by which ethnic activists get cut in on a piece of the action:

Minority Contracting 
Ensures that healthy local businesses owned by people of color are a basic component of strong, sustainable communities. These businesses generate job opportunities for residents, and keep money circulating within the neighborhood. This tool reviews major approaches for achieving parity for minority-owned businesses. 

Local Hiring Strategies 
An array of strategies that connect economically marginalized communities to regional job opportunities. For example, linkage programs can require that a percentage of jobs created by a commercial development go to local residents. Other programs link urban core and inner-ring suburban residents to employment opportunities around the region. Building such economic opportunity helps residents remain in their communities.

(more…)

A reader makes an optimistic suggestion:

An idea:

Roughly put, one could say that the country went thru a huge crime crisis when we decided to overhaul the old oppressive criminal system, with its loitering laws, paucity of protections for the indigent, and broad latitude for the police to bust heads and search n seize those whom they pleased, in the name of Racial Justice. Certainly the old order had caused untold injustices and oppressions, and so we determined we were better than that. But the old order also incorporated a deep truth, that blacks and or the poor were much more criminal than whites and or the middle class, and that you really can often tell a bad guy by looking at him. And so the old system worked, as defined by containing crime.

But when we dismantled to old order, and questioned all its premises, and made Miranda rights and experimented with the mindless optimism of giving convicted murderers weekend furloughs, etc etc, we experienced a huge flowering of crime. We eventually crawled part way back, while retaining our moral disdain for the old system, and retaining a demureness about admitting out loud that blacks are more criminal per capita. But we quietly instituted race neutral tough on crime policies that were partly as effective as the old race conscious police tactics, and got over our embarrassment about the resulting prison population disparities. Not all the way back mind you, not even half way, but better than the worst of it, movies no longer predict a Manhattan solely fit for a penal colony.

(more…)

I’ve concluded that the recent hits from the New York TImes and SPLC had to be coordinated. The NYT editorial sounded as if it had been ghostwritten by an SPLCer. So I set about looking for the middleman. Politically, any number of board members fit the bill: Francis X. Clines, Robert B. Semple Jr., (deputy op-ed editor David Shipley is certainly capable of such a piece, but is he permitted to write editorials?). For reasons that should become obvious, here’s my candidate:

ADAM COHEN, Assistant Editor

Adam Cohen is a lawyer and author, with a particular interest in legal issues, politics and technology. Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was a senior writer at Time, where he wrote about the Supreme Court, Internet privacy and the Microsoft antitrust case, among other topics.

Prior to entering journalism, he was an education-reform lawyer, and a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He is the author of “The Perfect Store: Inside eBay” and co-author of “American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.” A native of Manhattan, he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

hat doesn’t necessarily mean that Cohen wrote the piece, though he well could have, but he was very likely involved in arranging it.

Peter Brimelow will be a guest on The Ron Smith Show on Friday, February 6. The program airs on WBAL AM 1090 in Baltimore. Peter will be on from 4:15 to 4:45 p.m. to discuss “the problems caused by immigration.” Listen to the show online here.

So the Obama Administration has taken a bold stride back into the 70s with a cap on Executive compensation: Obama to restrict pay of bailout firms’ execs Carolyn Said SFGate.com Wednesday February 4th 2009

Of course, like everything coming out of Washington, the move is totally dishonest:

The pay cap applies only to companies that receive “exceptional assistance” in the future, meaning bailouts negotiated just for them, such as those already given to Bank of America and Citigroup. The new restrictions do not apply retroactively to those firms or to other companies that already received bailout money…The $500,000 cap is not required at companies that receive other bailout money, known by the catchy moniker Generally Available Capital Access Programs.

My own view is that Obama is too much a beneficiary of plutocrats for much real to be done in this direction

Nevertheless, the move is certain to be very popular (even on the presumably capitalistic MarketWatch website the poll they have is currently 75% in favor!). So there is a real danger that public response will encourage more ventures back into the spiteful economic illiteracy of 30 years ago.

(As usual, Wall Street’s defenders are inept. The danger in this policy is not that senior managers will leave, but that they will stay - and do nothing. In Banks, that means take no risk. The Administration is further cowing an already frightened industry.)

This piece of demagogic stupidity raises a crucial issue: does Obama know any economics? Since the Obama campaign kept His Majesty’s academic records secret, the best source on this is Steve Sailer’s America’s Half Blood Prince.

There is no evidence that Obama has ever actually studied economics (his degree was in Political Science). There is no record of any insight into or knowledge of the process of wealth creation (there is all too much of interest in redistribution). He did work in 1983-5 for what he described in his autobiography as

a consulting house to multinational corporations

But Sailer finds this a serious misrepresentation:

even though Wall Street was booming in 1983,
Obama wound up in a job much crummier than he makes it
sound in Dreams. He was actually a copy editor at a scruffy, lowpaying
newsletter shop, Business International. One of his coworkers,
Dan Armstrong, blogged:

I‘m a big fan of Barack Obama … But after reading his
autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some
serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in
the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him… I certainly know what he did there,
and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his
book....

(AHBP P124)

It is clear that Obama imbibed a lot of subjective attitude about economic issues from his hard-core leftist mother (whose dissertation thesis was about “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia”). From Dreams:

I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now
making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat
along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of
wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on
Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers
ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have
closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower
wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter
discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no
longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve
their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they
remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are
now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove
have been replaced by more durable plastics.

(AHBP P 125)

(Sailer remarks

If only Andrew Carnegie hadn’t put all those strapping
African-American peasant blacksmiths out of business …)

This kind of touchy-feeliness about economics will be familiar to anyone who has a memory of student Marxists. Obama indeed does. Speaking of his two years at Occidental College he recalls:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends
carefully. The more politically active black students. The
foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and
structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We
smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the
dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon,
Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

(AHBP, P119)

There is a possibly important clue about Obama’s economic comprehension. Sailer writes

I would guess that Obama did well on the SAT Verbal
subtest. Today, with the easier scoring system adopted in 1995,
I‘d bet that he would score in the 700s on both Critical Reading
(a.k.a. Verbal) and the new Writing subsection. I don’t have any
evidence for guesstimating his quantitative skills since he
doesn’t have a very numerical turn of mind. …Reagan liked numbers. Obama, in contrast, doesn’t show
much affection for them. That doesn’t mean he’s bad with
numbers, just that his mind follows paths that are more verbal
than quantitative.

(AHBP P116)

I do not mean to endorse the econometric mumbo-jumbo which has infected modern academic economics, but the fact is that Classical economics is based on the principal of marginal analysis, which in turn needs a comprehension (possibly subconscious) of Calculus.

Of course, there is another approach to predicting Obama’s economic policies. The Left generally is motivated in this area by jealousy, resentment, spitefulness and hatred. As Steve demonstrates in AHBP, Obama is heavily laden with these qualities (albeit very beautifully veneered).

America’s Half Blood Prince: essential reading for the Obama era.