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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