With Obama: Affirmative Action is BACK!!!!

Obama Brings Affirmative Action Back With A Vengeance

By PAUL SPERRY
  
While the Supreme Court rolls back the Voting Rights Act of 1965, condemning it as an unnecessary vestige of the civil-rights era, President Obama is acting as if America were still in the mid-'60s.

His race-obsessed administration is bringing racial preferences and affirmative action back with a vengeance.
  
And it's doing so outside the legislative process, largely behind the scenes, through executive orders, regulations and prosecutions, effectively expanding existing civil-rights law.

Consider the following race-based policy moves, which have gone largely unreported by the major media — and unnoticed by the general public (which polls show overwhelming oppose racial quotas in college and hiring and other favoritism):

To boost minority hiring, the EEOC recently warned employers they could be considered guilty of "race discrimination if they choose law-abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions." The predictable result: hiring quotas for felons.

At the same time, the Labor Department is warning federal contractors to refrain from asking employees about felonies.

It's also demanding they modify their hiring policies to favor minorities.

The agency also advised that all FDIC-insured banks must develop and implement an "affirmative action program" for hiring.

The administration, moreover, has adopted an interagency "Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending" that makes it "permissible" (and strongly advisable) for banks to apply more favorable lending terms for minority borrowers "to address past discrimination."

It has also formalized the use of a lower standard of proof — "disparate impact" liability — for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in housing and lending.

Now, just about any race-neutral policy or practice — from mortgage underwriting standards to credit scoring to criminal background checks — can be deemed racist if it tends to result in adverse outcomes for blacks or Latinos.

For the first time, disparate impact is woven through all civil-rights enforcement of the federal government.

Thanks to a flurry of disparate-impact suits, the Justice Department has forced the nation's largest home lenders — including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and SunTrust — to adopt minority-friendly lending policies and even open new branches in depressed areas with large minority populations.

Fearing prosecution, the entire mortgage industry is adopting similar policies.

In addition, the department has extracted from these and other bank defendants more than $600 million in loan set-asides and other cash payouts for yet-to-be identified "victims" of credit discrimination.

Meantime, Obama's new credit watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is subjecting car lenders to the same racial "effects test" while investigating racial bias at Equifax, Experian, TransUnion and other consumer credit reporting agencies.

(The head of CFPB's Office of Fair Lending, Patrice Ficklin, is a civil-rights activist who's helped litigate major affirmative-action cases.)

CFPB's diversity police are also cracking down on banks that turn down minority students and small-business owners for loans, or charge them higher interest rates.

The bureau's also setting up "minority inclusion" offices in all financial regulatory agencies — including the Federal Reserve — with the goal of diversifying their workforces.
The administration thinks there are too many white bank examiners.

These examiners enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining measure the administration is using to threaten lenders into opening more inner-city branches and increasing their volume of minority loans.

At the same time, the Education Department is investigating some 20 school districts across the U.S. for allegedly racist disciplinary policies that have a "disparate impact" on black students. Faced with the threat of reduced federal funding, some districts already have set caps on the number of blacks suspended for violent behavior.

The department's diversity cops are also cracking down on selective high schools in New York and elsewhere for using entrance exams that have a "disparate impact" on African-American students.

Advisers helping craft its Common Core academic standards seek to eliminate ability grouping and fast-tracking for gifted and talented students, complaining such programs tend to favor whites over minorities.

HUD, for its part, is suing Westchester County, N.Y., and several other suburbs with low shares of minorities to build more low-income housing, while conducting affirmative-action marketing efforts to relocate tenants from the projects to these suburbs.

Finally, the White House is pushing an amnesty bill that promotes affirmative action in hiring by waiving the requirements — and costs — of ObamaCare for employers who hire formerly illegal immigrants.

Make no mistake: These race-based policies are directed from the president and his Cabinet, and they will only intensify over the next few years.

"The question is not does (affirmative action) end, but when does it begin?"Attorney General Eric Holder recently told his alma mater, Columbia University.

"When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?"

Though Obama now does his best to hide his preference for racial preferences, mindful of their unpopularity, in 2006 he called for "goals and timetables for minority hiring," arguing that "affirmative-action programs can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities."

"Many Americans disagree with me on this as a matter of principle, arguing that our institutions should never take race into account, even if it is to help victims of past discrimination," he wrote in "The Audacity of Hope."

"But that shouldn't stop us."

He proposed closing the "stubborn gap that remains between the living standards of black, Latino and white workers" by "completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement — namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment, housing and education."

He added: "The government, through its prosecutors and its courts, should step in to make things right."
That means getting your ethnic numbers right — or else.

The Supreme Court just concluded that such thinking is irrational and outdated.

The high bench has it right: The racism that justified the civil-rights movement simply doesn't exist today, not in the Deep South or anywhere in America.

Obama still thinks it does and therefore justifies government stepping on the scales — at work, in the bank lobby, even in the principal's office — even if it means promoting race over ability and personal responsibility.
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Yet this president is injecting race into just about every decision made in our merit-based society.