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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.” Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites. This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds. Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online. So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. Housing database The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances. The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas. Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites. HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination. Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements. “By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.” Mortgage database Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records. Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects. The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate. FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias. The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.” However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.” Credit database CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections. Employment database CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition. School database Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform. Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms. Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes. Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office. Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system. Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair. Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society. The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration. Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust. 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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
Sounds like another boondoggle in which bureaucrats pretend they are doing something.
What a surprise. Obama is trying to make data available to so-called "civil rights" organizations so they can sue cities, banks, realtors, and employers if there is any statistical variation in the numbers of blacks who get jobs, loans, or live in a particular zip code compared to their numbers in the population. This is both foolish and unproductive. For example, blacks comprise 13% of the U.S. population, while Asians comprise 7% of the U.S. population. Yet Asians comprise more than 30% of the employees at tech companies like Google and Microsoft, while there are few blacks employed at most tech companies. Is this because tech companies are racist against blacks (but somehow not racist against Asians)? No, its because there are few blacks with degrees and/or experience in computer science. When I was a senior manager at Microsoft in the 1990's, once a quarter the HR department would come in and chastise me for not having a "diverse" team (having lot's of Asians on the team didn't count as "diversity"). My response was always the same -- where are the resumes of qualified black people that YOU in the HR department were supposed to provide to me to look at? That would shut them up until the next quarter. Of course, this all has downstream impact, e.g., 35% of people living in Redmond, WA (home of Microsoft) are Asian, but few blacks live there. Fixing the rotten government schools so more black kids graduate with the math and science needed to get into STEM programs in college is what Obama SHOULD be doing. Unfortunately, Obama is not about to piss his NEA union buddies off. So, instead he is going to make it easy for race profiteers like Al Sharpton to sue companies to force them to hire unqualified people and cities to force them to provide "low income" income housing for the unqualified people. Obama has this all backwards. Instead of helping disadvantaged people achieve high standards, he is trying to force society to lower their standards. This is wrong and destructive. Again, what a surprise. “Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.” -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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