Racial and Gender Quota Coming to Financial Institutions?

under the financial "reform" bill, aka Dodd-Frank bill.

Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC Blog writes:

How Washington Plans to “Stabilize” Financial Institutions (July 8, 2010)

"By ordering them to abandon merit in hiring decisions and replace it with skin color and type of sex organ. This is no surprise, of course, since the defining charactaristic [sic.] of the American Left, in academe, politics, and elsewhere, is hatred of white heterosexual males (“while male oppressors” in the language of the academic Marxists who dominate higher education). A second defining characteristic of the American Left, which is on display every week with Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns, is radical and belligerent economic ignorance."

What??

So I followed the link, and here is what I landed:

Racial, Gender Quotas in the Financial Bill?
(Diana Furchtgott-Roth, 7/8/2010 Real Clear Markets)

"WASHINGTON - What one finds when reading congressional legislation is invariably surprising. Take the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for instance, which was created by merging Senate and House bills. When the Senate returns from recess one of its first actions will be to vote on the bill, which passed the House on June 30.

"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.

"What would be the mission of this new corps of Federal monitors? The Dodd-Frank bill sets it forth succinctly and simply - all too simply. The mission, it says, is to assure "to the maximum extent possible the fair inclusion" of women and minorities, individually and through businesses they own, in the activities of the agencies, including contracting." [Emphasis is mine. The article continues.]

My immediate question is "What is 'fair' and who defines it?"

My second question is "What the hell does this have to do with preventing the financial crisis?" If there had been more minorities and women in the financial industry, the credit crisis and sovereign debt crisis wouldn't have happened? Is that the rationale?

Do they even know (with a few exceptions) WHY the financial crisis and market/economic crash occurred? (It's because of the private banking cartel whose name is "Federal" and who doesn't have "Reserve", and who will be in charge of presiding over all financial transactions of 'small people'.)

(The Congress does deserve a 'fair' wage for coming up with such a brilliant idea. They deserve to be paid NOTHING. Zero. Nada. Null.)

The bill, which by the way dropped "Wall Street" from the bill title in the Senate (isn't that telling?), is currently titled "Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010". H.R.4173 is the bill number.

The writer, however, may have gotten the Section number wrong (or the sections got moved around in conference). I found the Section 1801 in the final House bill (referred to Senate) that defines the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

If you are curious, here's the PDF file of the House bill. Go to page 522. I couldn't find it in the current Senate amendment, which does not mean it is not there.

Tweet