Friday, July 09, 2010

Legislation of the Day

UPDATE: below

The Dems are about to pass the Financial Reform legislation (HR 4173)--the House passed the amended conference version on June 30th. It's supposed to reduce the risks of future credit crunches--though it does nothing to fix Fannie and Freddie, which were at the core of the melt-down. Instead, it adds a bunch of costly new requirements, overseen mainly by the same regulators that failed last time--which will hurt both banks and job growth--paid for by at least $11 billion of TARP funds, i.e., taxpayers.

Even worse, along the way, Congressional Democrats tossed in provisions to please their progressive constituency, says economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth on RealClearMarkets:
I was searching the bill for a provision about derivatives. What did I find but Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major power grab, the new law inserts race and gender quotas into America's financial industry.

In addition to this bill's well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. . .all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors. . .

Lest there be any narrow interpretation of Congress's intent, either by agencies or eventually by the courts, the bill specifies that the "fair" employment test shall apply to "financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services." . . .

With the new financial regulation law, the federal government is moving from outlawing discrimination to setting up a system of quotas. Ultimately, the only way that financial firms doing business with the government would be able to comply with the law is by showing that a certain percentage of their workforce is female or minority.

The new Offices of Women and Minorities represent a major change in employment law by imposing gender and racial quotas on the financial industry. The issue deserves careful debate -- rather than a few pages slipped into the financial regulation bill.
So, the about-to-pass Financial Reform legislation's not just a bad law about banking. It's a quota bill. Courtesy of our community-organizer-in-chief.

MORE:

Carl Horowitz at Townhall:
If the Senate approves the measure -- it is set to begin debate shortly -- Congress once more will have made clear that it views institutional safety and soundness as a lesser priority than achievement of demographic "diversity" among borrowers.
(via reader Doug)

3 comments:

Bob Cosmos said...

This is unbelievable.

A_Nonny_Mouse said...

Oboyoboyoboy!!! Heeere comes -- Social Justice!

Screw education or ability, screw rules of accounting, screw sound economic theory-- Obummer & Co are gonna pass those "good jobs" around to officially-recognized "under-served minority groups" (as long as they've got the right political bona fides, of course). And you can bet they'll make darn sure not to hire any Asians or white guys by accident.

Ugh. I abolutely HATE, LOATHE, DETEST this administration and every scum-sucking liberal flunky in it.

The only "consolation" (if you can call it that) is that "eliminating whitey" will have the same effect here that it had in Zimbabwe: a crushingly incompetent bureaucracy, followed by the devastating failure of Reality to accommodate their ideology, followed by chaos.

The subsequent meltdown will be our chance to implement "USA 2.0". Let's just be sure that in the new updated version of the Constitution we explicitly declare "passing bills without reading them" to be treason, punishable by death. (Recall is too lenient, and too uncertain.) Let's also explicitly forbid unionizing (or the establishment of collective bargaining) at any level of government, including states and cities/towns.

(Damn that 52% of Hopey Changey Unicorns-n-Fairy-Dust believers; and damn the MFM for pushing that Progressive propaganda in every way they could...)

Warren said...

Of course, the liberal MSM doesn't see a story here because most of them believe this is the way things should be. Quotas are good. And people who don't believe in quotas are bad.