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.

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Ron Paul Votes Against His Own Amendment

to be exact, against the bill that contains his own amendment.

Ron Paul votes against his own amendment
(Robert Rule, 12/11/09 Examiner.com San Francisco) [emphasis is mine]

"Congressman Ron Paul (R Texas) is the last true statesman. Want proof, the Congressman and 2008 Presidential candidate fought more than twenty years to finally create an amendment to fully audit the Federal Reserve, which is the main cause of the present financial crisis.

"The Audit the Fed bill was accepted as an amendment to a larger bill, the Wall Street Regulatory Overhaul. Even though the congressman’s bill was attached he could not in good faith vote for the larger legislation. Imagine a country full of men like that. Imagine just having 100 representatives like that.

"The legislation will now go to the Senate for a vote. Ron Paul said “I have no clout in Congress, it was the people (grass roots) who made this happen.” A good guess would be that the Senate will try to take this amendment out. Reportedly, Senator’s are a little closer to those at the Fed than Congressman. It will be up to the people once again to make sure this amendment sticks if the larger bill is passed." (The article continues.)

I had suspected that Dr. Paul would do exactly what he just did. In good conscience he couldn't have voted for the larger bill, H.R. 4173 "The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009", which will create another federal bureaucratic monstrosity called Consumer Financial Protection Agency and will give the federal government unprecedented authority to seize a private entity which it deems to be of a threat to the greater economy, even before the threat becomes real. And of course that "threat" is defined by the government.

Sound familiar to you? It should, because that's the Bush doctrine of preemptive strike even if the threat is not there. All this government needs is a possibility of a threat that it may jeopardize the system sometime in the indeterminate future.

Are we entering the Greater Depression, contrary to what Obama said ("we avoided the depression" he averred the other day), where the government is set to control every single aspect of our economic life to "save us from ourselves", so to speak? From our capitalist mentality that a free market gives us prosperity, from our (dwindling majority, maybe) deeply ingrained belief that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?

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