In tonight’s Steve Sailer column Playing With Fire: The Obama Administration Backs Anti-White Discrimination in Ricci, I couldn’t resist adding a link to the classic American Renaissance article Quotas in the San Francisco Fire Department -A report on ten years of mischief. I’d forgotten an earlier version of this, Fighting “Racism” Rather than Fires - A first-hand report on the consequences of affirmative action. Two fascinating quotes:

An inexperienced black lieutenant quota-hire lost his life because he didn’t recognize the signs of an impending back-draft (explosion). Eight other firefighters had thrown themselves to the floor to avoid the heat that was sure to come (later estimated at 2000 degrees), but the medical examiner’s report said the man had been standing, and had not properly used [M]any of his protective clothing. Shouts from the firefighter bashing in the door to “hit the floor,” along with the eerie calm that precedes a back-draft were wasted on this unfortunate man, who was hired and promoted beyond his abilities. Affirmative-action literally killed him.

There was a bitter epilogue to this incident. As they always do, hundreds of firefighters from the entire region attended the funeral to pay respects to a fallen comrade. The crowd spilled into the aisles and rear of the church. The former president of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association — who was hired and given four promotions because he is black — took the opportunity to lecture the congregation about racism. It is a miracle no one walked out.

and

The best women are mostly lesbians. We have a group of athletic, outgoing, sock-you-in-the-arm women who are eager to at least try to perform at an acceptable level, without whining, without ducking work, and without filing frivolous sex-bias suits. They’re not as good as the pre-affirmative action men, but they can do the job.

Almost twenty years ago, I remember discussing affirmative action quotas with the University of Michigan’s Joseph Adelson, who had written so powerfully against them in Commentary magazine. (Those were the days!) Adelson said: “The debate is over. What we need now is journalism.” But apparently Jared Taylor and I are the only editors who agreed.

As I’ve repeatedly noted, America has a huge data-collecting and data-interpreting infrastructure serving a political and media juggernaut designed to make sure that minorities get plenty of mortgages. In contrast, we have virtually no infrastructure to let us know whether minorities then pay back those mortgages.

Our system for making sure minorities get enough lending is like driving a car rigged up with a complex safety system that warns you loudly and incessantly to make sure you don’t drift too far in your lane to the left, and that makes it hard to turn to the steering wheel to the left, but totally ignores any drifting you do to the right. Not surprisingly, you are eventually going to wind up in a ditch on the right.

So, social scientists are still debating last century’s question: are minorities being discriminated against by lenders, while largely ignoring this century’s big questions about minorities and mortgages.
Here’s a new study from economists at the New York Fed on the question that the media has been much more up in arms over: did minorities get charged higher interest rates?

A new study by economists at the New York Federal Reserve says “No.” (more…)

In VDARE.com in 2001, I wrote:

ConEstablishment types assume that “assimilation” works automatically, sort of like “osmosis,” to solve any minor cultural problems created by heavy immigration. They tend to have this 19th Century picture of assimilation in action: The huddled masses stumble off the docks in Boston, only to notice the Cabots and Lodges glowering at them for their uncouth behavior. Chastened, the newcomers resolve to begin the long struggle to become good Americans just like those august families.

Of course, these days, the descendants of those Puritans are working as program officers for foundations telling the newly-arrived immigrant how much better the culture back home in, say, Guatemala was than the culture created by their Boston Brahmin ancestors - who, as you will recall, were so criminally insensitive as to glower.

There is, however, one vibrant, self-confident culture in modern America: hip-hop. … Hip-hop is doing what whites no longer have the will or means to do: assimilate the children of Hispanic immigrants.

Of course, Dr. Dre, Puff Daddy, and the rest are leading Latino-Americans toward the African-American model. As I wrote last year, “Currently, 22% of white births are illegitimate compared to 69% of black births. Among immigrant Latino mothers, 37% of their new babies were illegitimate. But among American-born Latino mothers, the illegitimacy rate rises to 48%.”

The New York Times is finally catching on. Jason DeParle writes in “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In” about the children of Latino immigrants in the suburban slums of the Washington D.C. metroplex: (more…)

For years, mainstream economists pooh-poohed the very existence of the concept of “predatory lending.” When two willing parties agree to a transaction, how can one be “predator” and one “prey”?

Of course, this totally ignores differences in, say, math ability between lenders and bottom-of-the-barrel borrowers.

Yet, while I think the concept of “predatory lending” has some merit, especially in areas such as credit card lending, it  mostly throws us off the scent in figuring out the subprime mortgage disaster.

After all, the point of making predatory loans is to extract a stream of high monthly payments from the borrower. But the point of making worthless mortgage originations was not to get paid back a lot of money over the next thirty years (many wouldn’t last past the two year teaser rate period, and by 2005-2006 a fair number of loans never made more than one payment). No, the point was to extract a high payment now from credulous saps who bought the worthless mortgages from you thinking that they would get up to thirty years of high payments.

What hundreds of anecdotal accounts show is a process often involving collusion between the borrower and the originator of subprime mortgages to defraud institutions farther up the financial food chain by selling them garbage. Of course, many financial firms then played a game of Hot Potato with each other, repackaging the garbage loans and selling them on to rich but clueless folks, or insuring themselves with AIG against losses.

Thus, the term “predatory securitizing” may be more useful for describing much of what happened during the Housing Bubble than “predatory lending.”

A Google search shows that nobody has used the term “predatory securitizing“ before, and only a handful have used “predatory securitization.” I would prefer the former version–“predatory securitizing” – since it’s in the same format as “predatory lending.”

The Washington Post’s top story is:

Supreme Court Poised to Review Civil Rights Laws

Justices to hear cases challenging government efforts to ensure equality in voting, employment at time of national dialogue on race and diversity.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to reaffirm or reshape the nation’s civil rights laws as it faces a rare confluence of cases over the next two weeks, including a high-profile challenge brought by white firefighters who claim they lost out on promotions because of the “color of their skin.”

The cases also touch on the Voting Rights Act, the need to provide English classes for immigrant children and, more tangentially, discriminatory mortgage lending. [Because minorities not getting enough mortgage money is a big problem in America in this decade.]

The most emotionally charged case is from the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, whose complaints define the real-life quandary that sometimes accompanies government efforts to ensure racial equality.

The firefighters accuse city officials of violating civil rights laws and the Constitution by throwing out a promotions test on which they performed well but no blacks scored high enough to be eligible. The city responds that relying on test results with such wide racial discrepancies could have violated federal law and left them open to being sued by minorities.

When the results of the 2003 exams came back, only white firefighters, including one who is Hispanic, scored high enough to be considered for the openings for lieutenants and captains. All 27 black firefighters who took the test were below the cutoff.

After tumultuous public hearings, with minority groups arguing that the tests were flawed and the white firefighters saying officials were caving to political pressure, the city’s Civil Service Board voted not to certify the results. The promotions remain in limbo.

The city argues that the test it commissioned, in which 60 percent of the score came from a multiple-choice questionnaire and 40 percent from an interview, must have been biased, despite its best intentions. It is not specific about the problems with the test, though it says the exam did not measure “command presence” and should have given more weight to the interview.

At any rate, the city says it was bound by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires employers not to rely on hiring or promotional tests that have a “disparate impact” on minorities unless they can show a “business necessity.”…

The Obama Justice Department mostly sides with New Haven officials.

Were the test results anomalous? Unlike everybody else commenting on the Ricci case, I’ve actually calculated the racial gap in standard deviations for the New Haven firefighters’ promotion tests and compared them to the racial gap in the Law School Application Test used by a certain law school in New Haven.

More to come ...

Charging on from his rash reinstatement of Vivek Kundra as “chief information officer” despite serious questions, President Barack “I am a Desi” Obama has now come up with another young Indian to put in a position of immense power in the Federal Government IT world: Tech Industry Cheers as Obama Taps Aneesh Chopra for CTO by Amy Schatz WSJ Blogs April 18 2009.

Native-born white Americans, of course, lack the intellect for these jobs.

It appears that Chopra and Kundra worked together in the Indian-heavy Virginia Technology Secretariat. Normal business practice would incline against re associating these two, given the shadows over Kundra.

However, I applaud, because it gives me the opportunity to refer to a fairly recent story which seems to have sunk without trace in the MSM:

The Jackson $5 million? By Natasha Korecki The Chicago Sun-Times April 13 2009

asserts the recently-indicted Illinois Governor Blagojevich was told that in the interests of getting the contemptible Rep Jesse Jackson Jr., appointed Senator, there would be

$1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign fund that would come from Indian donors…Rajinder Bedi, a state employee who acted as a conduit to the Indian community for Blagojevich, sources say…met with the governor’s brother, Robert, to tell him that a longtime fund-raiser and wealthy health care businessman, Raghuveer Nayak, would help organize fund-raising within the Indian community….

Rajinder Bedi has subsequently quit – not a good sign - an event apparently reported only overseas.

Having Indians in positions of power ensures corruption – and ethnocentric discrimination. This may well prove to be the Achilles Heel of the Obama Administration.