Amazing but Not True
In 2009, Wayne Watson took over as president of Chicago State University — a campus with a mostly black student population, a history of mismanagement, and one of the lowest graduation rates in the country. Under his leadership, retention and graduation rates soared. He bragged about this in an April 27 article in the black paper, Chicago Defender, with the modest headline, “Chicago State University: A True and Amazing Story.”
It was amazing, alright, but not true. The university’s guidelines require that anyone with a cumulative grade point average of 1.99 or lower be put on academic probation, and anyone lower than 1.80 get the boot.
In May 2011, the Chicago Tribune got hold of the cumulative GPAs of the 589 freshman who started in the fall of 2009, when the wonder-working Mr. Watson took over. They found that hundreds were retained despite getting grades so low they should have been dismissed. No fewer than 22 students managed to make it through to the end of the year with a miraculous GPA of 0.0. Some students who re-enrolled for the next year still owed fees for previous years, which is also supposed to be grounds for dismissal.
Mr. Watson has been bragging about a student retention rate of 61 percent, but the real figure should have been much lower. When the Tribune’s findings were called to his attention, he conceded that his figures were “off by a couple of percentage points, yes [but] our intent was never to mislead the public.” [Jodi Cohen, Chicago State let Failing Students Stay on the Rolls, Chicago Tribune, July 25, 2011.]
In May 2011, the Detroit Free Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see how the Detroit Human Services Department had spent a $1.2 million grant to cover payroll and administration of food and clothing banks for poor people. The paper found that $210,000 of the grant went to buy furniture for the department. Thirty thousand went on fixtures just for the department directors’ office and conference room, including a $3,000 table. The director is Shenetta Coleman, appointed by former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Miss Coleman, along with several on her staff, has since been suspended from work while the police and the FBI look through the records. Current mayor Dave Bing says he thinks more illegal spending will turn up, and expects to fire some people.
One of the jobs of the Human Services Department is to set up “warming centers” where bums can keep cozy during the winter. The money the department splashed out on furniture could have paid for a warming center, but Miss Coleman plead poverty and didn’t open the center until late in the winter. [Steve Neavling and Jim Schaeffer, High-end Items for Detroit Office Bought with Money for Poor People, Detroit Free Press, July 20,2011.]
Radical Fights for Asylum
In the 1960s, Victor Toro co-founded Chile’s Revolutionary Leftist Movement, MIR, an armed terrorist organization that killed two police officers and robbed banks to fund a war on the state. When General Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973, his government captured Mr. Toro and other MIR members, and exiled them in 1977.
Mr. Toro went to Europe, then Cuba, where he was granted asylum, and Nicaragua. He later went to Mexico, where he was again granted asylum, and from there entered the United States illegally in 1984. He settled in the Bronx and started La Pena del Bronx, a “multi-racial, multi-cultural center” that, among other things, helps illegal immigrants.
On July 6, 2007, Mr. Toro was on an Amtrak train in Rochester, New York, and could produce only an expired Chilean passport as identification. DHS has been trying to deport him ever since.
Mr. Toro claims he deserves asylum because he was tortured by the Pinochet government and is afraid to go back to Chile. Pinochet left office more than 20 years ago and died in 2006.
Asylum seekers are supposed to make a formal appeal within a year of leaving their home country. Mr. Toro says he didn’t because he was hoping immigration laws would change, and because he thought the US government was friendly to Pinochet. On March 11, 2011, federal immigration Judge Sarah Burr ordered Mr. Toro out of the country, but he managed to wangle a stay of deportation and is still here.
Why won’t this violent lefty go to Cuba or Mexico where he already has asylum? He says he had a “falling out” with his old MRI buddies in those countries and therefore cannot do “social work.” [Activist Seeks Asylum From the Chile he Once Knew, Yahoo News, July 14, 2011. David Gonzalez, Victor Toro Fights Deportation, New York Times, April 17, 2011.]
Here We Go Again
In June 2002, President Bush set a goal of helping 5.5 million more minorities to become homeowners by 2010. The next year, he boasted that thanks to his efforts, “one million minority families have become homeowners.” It took drastic cuts in credit standards to turn that many minorities into new homeowners, and in return we got a major housing and financial crisis. [Steve Sailer, Karl Rove — Architect of the Minority Mortgage Meltdown, VDARE.com, Sept. 28, 2008.]
Nearly a decade later, the federal government is still requiring “affirmative-action lending.” As many as 60 banks are being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly discriminating against non-whites. Some banks have settled out of court to avoid costly legal battles and the risk of being labeled “racist.”
To date, banks have coughed up $20 million in minority loan set-asides, including prime-rate mortgages and help on down-payment for blacks and Hispanics with bad credit. In a typical settlement with St. Louis’ Midwest BankCentre, DOJ made it earmark $1 million in “special financing” for blacks “who would ordinarily not qualify for such rates for reasons including the lack of required credit quality, income or down payment.”
In some cases, DOJ has forced banks to count unemployment benefits, food stamps, and welfare payments as valid income for mortgage applications. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” says former Congressman Ernest Istook, now a Heritage Foundation fellow. “How can someone both be financially stable enough to merit a mortgage at the same time they’re on public assistance?” DOJ has even forced some banks to post notices in all their branches and in all their marketing materials saying that minority customers — but only minorities — can’t be turned down for loans just because they are on welfare or food stamps.
Perhaps most outrageous, as part of their settlement agreements with banks, DOJ has made some sign “nondisclosure agreements” that prevent them from revealing DOJ’s criteria for alleging discrimination. Why would the government do that? Reginald Brown is a partner at Wilmer Hale who has represented banks. He says it is because the feds “don’t have any proof [of discrimination], just theories,” adding that “their theories are loopy and wouldn’t stand the light of day.”
DOJ may be using “disparate impact” theory, the idea that a seemingly fair rule is discriminatory if it has a “disparate impact” on protected groups. At the most basic level, requiring borrowers to have a job has a “disparate impact” because blacks and Hispanics are less likely than whites to be working. Whatever reasoning DOJ is using, it doesn’t want the public knowing about it.
There may be no real reasoning at all. The man leading the witch hunt is Civil Rights Division chief Tom Perez. He says many bankers are guilty of discriminating with “a smile” and “fine print,” which is a form of racism “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.” He has put together a 20-man Fair Lending Unit to sniff out cross-burning bankers.
Lenders must walk a line so fine it is practically invisible. At the same time that Mr. Perez is prosecuting them for alleged redlining, he is also going after them for “reverse redlining through the targeting of minority communities for predatory loans.” The irony does not escape Mr. Istook of Heritage. “Banks are damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” he says. [Paul Sperry, Holder Launches Witch Hunt Against Biased Banks, Investor’s Business Daily, July 8, 2011.]
Growing Wealth Gap
The recession and housing crisis have been particularly damaging to the net worths of blacks and Hispanics, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. From 2005 to 2009, the median household net worth of Hispanics fell 66 percent — from $18,359 to $6,325 — while that of blacks fell 53 percent: from $12,124 to $5,677. The median household wealth of whites fell only 16 percent during that period — from $134,992 to $113,149. The 2009 figure is 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics.
The housing bubble’s collapse in 2006 accounted for much of the difference in lost wealth, because more than half of blacks and Hispanics’ net worth comes from home equity, compared to 44 percent of whites. [Miriam Jordan, White-Minority Wealth Gulf Widens, Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2011.]
Forced lending to credit-risky minorities undoubtedly also played a role.
Call the Thought Police!
A reader from Quebec reports that his 9-year-old child came home from French-speaking summer camp singing a song about the Mexican army. The counselors taught it to the children as a marching song. Each verse was a couplet that ended with the wards, dans l’Armée Mexicaine or “in the Mexican Army.”
Here are some of the first lines of the couplets:
Les soldats sont en chocolat
The soldiers are made of chocolate
Les capitaines ont de grosses bedaines,
The captains have big beer bellies
Les caporals n’ont pas de morale
The corporals have bad morale
Les pistolets ils tirent du lait
The pistols shoot milk
Les bazooka ils tirent des bas
The bazookas shoot stockings
Les mitraiettes tirent des bobettes
The machine-guns shoot underwear.
Diversicrats
California is broke, and the university system expects to lose $650 million this year in state money. Campuses are cutting staff and scrapping degree programs. Despite this grim climate, UC San Diego has created a new position: Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. We think the school already has enough diversity bureaucrats. Here they are, in no particular order so as not to discriminate:
Chancellor’s Diversity Office, associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, assistant vice chancellor for diversity, faculty equity advisors, graduate diversity coordinators, staff diversity liaison, undergraduate student diversity liaison, graduate student diversity liaison, chief diversity officer, director of development for diversity initiatives, Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, Committee on the Status of Women, Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, Diversity Council, and directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.
It’s not clear if there is anything left for the new vice chancellor to do. Outgoing chancellor Mary Anne Fox says the VC for EDI will “implement a campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion, . . . and will identify potential additional areas of responsibility.” In other words, he (or, more likely, she) will get to define his own job. If Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri is any indication, UCSD’s new hire can expect a base salary of $194,000 and a staff of 17, for a combined drain of over $1 million in tax money.
UCSD’s Academic Senate decided to expand the diversity machinery two months after voting to junk several academic programs because there wasn’t enough money for them: master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering, and in comparative literature. Courses in French, German, Spanish, and English also got the axe. In the same meeting, the Academic Senate voted to establish a campus-wide diversity requirement that must “focus on African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other [presumably non-white] groups.” [Heather MacDonald, Less Academics, More Narcissism, City Journal, July 14, 2011.]
Defensive Measures
As the militant ANC Youth League president Julius Malema gains popularity in South Africa, whites are preparing for the worst. Last April, a month after singing his favorite song, “Shoot the Boer,” at a university rally, Mr. Malema went to Zimbabwe where he complimented President Robert Mugabe on grabbing white farms and said he wanted to do the same in South Africa:
In SA we are just starting. Here in Zimbabwe you are already very far. The land question has been addressed. . . . We hear you are going straight to the mines. That’s what we are going to be doing in South Africa. . . . We want the mines,” Malema said in a speech to Zanu-PF youths. [Melama Lauds Bob, Says SA Will Copy Zim’s Land Seizures, Sunday Times, April 4, 2010.]
As a precaution, young whites are learning military tactics. Col. Franz Jooste, a former instructor of the late Eugene Terre’Blanche’s elite Iron Guard unit, is executive director of the Commando Corps, which trains them. “It is a matter of survival for our people,” he says. Each weekend, border-war veterans train roughly 1,000 young whites in weapons handling and self-defense. The corps also trains older whites in survival methods, and holds special camps for advanced military training.
Col Jooste explains:
The enemy has only one goal in mind: they want to take everything we build up. We do not want to attack anybody and do not want to threaten anybody. We only want to protect our own people and our own land. . . . We are not the aggressors, but do not provoke us.
Unlike other security groups, which are like neighborhood watches, the Commando Corps is for whites only; they are the ones threatened with land grabs and who are the object of “Shoot the Boer” hatred. Col. Jooste would like to see his “security network,” as he calls it, cover all of South Africa. The corps has just launched a “major recruitment campaign.”
Commando Corps president Col. Dawid Grobbelaar says the group is training for a war against crime: “Most of the criminals are well trained terrorists, with excellent weapons at their disposal,” he says. “Therefore we have to be well trained.” [De Wet Potgieter, Whites Train to ‘Defend,’ The New Age, July 8, 2011.]