A monumentally-destructive Justice Department attack on banks may soon occur. Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama Justice Department is now forcing banks to make risky loans (in the name of “fair lending”), thus planting the seeds of a future financial crisis. In response, I received an e-mail from a former Justice Department lawyer who told me that the Justice Department’s HCE (Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Civil Rights Division) is planning to block foreclosures across America (“across the whole [banking] sector”), even for irresponsible deadbeats who deserve to be foreclosed upon, citing racial disparities in foreclosure rates (which generally exist between black and white borrowers due to causes unrelated to intentional discrimination — as the Supreme Court has observed, racial disparities often occur for reasons completely unrelated to racist decision-making, as it has noted in cases like Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust, and United States v. Armstrong).
He wrote that “there is a unit in the HCE section headed by a nut running this. They are next going to BLOCK foreclosures based on this theory. It is part of an administration wide-strategy to stop foreclosures. I’ve heard from people who have participated in the internal meetings.” He also asked that I not print his name yet, but allowed me to pass on the content of his e-mail.
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Have a listen here.
The Department of Justice sued this week to stop the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger. Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia thinks this is a mistake. The evidence that the merger would make the wireless market less competitive is unconvincing. Nobody knows if the merger will succeed or not. Either way, consumer harm is unlikely.
Today, the Department of Justice sued to stop the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger. They claim to know in advance how the merger will affect the mobile market for years to come. It’s an example of F.A. Hayek’s fatal conceit. Of course, most people haven’t read Hayek. So over in the Daily Caller, I use a better known thinker to make the same point:
The philosopher Yogi Berra once said that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Let’s apply his lesson to the proposed $39 billion AT&T-T-Mobile merger…
Competitors are also surprisingly confident in their ability to predict the future. A Sprint spokeswoman said that “Sprint applauds the DOJ for conducting a careful and thorough review and for reaching a just decision … Today’s action will preserve American jobs, strengthen the American economy, and encourage innovation.”
This translates roughly to “We think the merger would make the market more competitive. We were scared that we’d have to work harder to innovate and cut costs to keep our customers happy. Whew.”
Most mergers fail. Nobody knows if a merged AT&T and T-Mobile would offer a better, cheaper product line. The only way to find out is trial and, often, error. The Justice Department’s astounding claim that it knows the merger’s effects in advance is either proof of its superior enlightenment, or else the height of hubris. I’m guessing the latter.
Read the whole thing here.
The Wall Street Journal today writes about how the Obama administration is repeating the “mistakes of the past by intimidating banks into lending to minority borrowers at below-market rates in the name of combating discrimination.” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has argued that bankers who don’t make as many loans to blacks as whites (because they make lending decisions based on traditional lending criteria like credit scores, which tend to be higher among white applicants than black applicants) are engaged in a “form of discrimination and bigotry” as serious as “cross-burning.” Perez has compared bankers to “Klansmen,” and extracted settlements from banks “setting aside prime-rate mortgages for low-income blacks and Hispanics with blemished credit,” treating welfare “as valid income in mortgage applications” and providing “favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit,” notes Investors Business Daily.
Under Perez’s “disparate impact” theory, banks are guilty of racial discrimination even if they harbor no discriminatory intent, and use facially-neutral lending criteria, as long as these criteria weed out more black than white applicants. The Supreme Court has blessed a more limited version of this theory in the workplace, but has rejected this “disparate impact” theory in most other contexts, such as discrimination claims brought under the Constitution’s equal protection clause; discrimination claims alleging racial discrimination in the making of contracts; and discrimination claims brought under Title VI, the civil-rights statute governing racial discrimination in education and federally-funded programs. Despite court rulings casting doubt on this “disparate impact” theory outside the workplace, the Obama administration has paid liberal trial lawyers countless millions of dollars to settle baseless “disparate impact” lawsuits brought against government agencies by minority plaintiffs, even after federal judges have expressed skepticism about those very lawsuits, suggesting that they were meritless.
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Andrew Stiles describes “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations” from the Obama administration that will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus discourage anyone from setting up new trucking companies.
Still another is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring — a practice it is now considering broadening, through agency guidance further restricting consideration of applicants’ criminal histories in hiring decisions. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? If you don’t hire a criminal, the EEOC may sue you for “disparate impact”; but if you do hire the criminal, you may later be sued under a state law for “negligent hiring” if the criminal harms someone on the job or while doing errands for your company.
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Analysts who once downplayed the government’s role in causing the financial crisis now have changed their tune, concluding that government regulations that promoted risky loans played a major role in spawning the crisis. In a May 3 note to clients, Michael Cembalest, the Chief Investment Officer of JP Morgan Private Bank, revised his 2009 account of what caused the financial crisis. Under the heading, “Retractions – the primary catalyst for the US housing crisis,” he wrote:
“US Agencies played a larger role in the housing crisis than we first reported. In January 2009, I wrote that the housing crisis was mostly a consequence of the private sector… However, over the last 2 years, analysts have dissected the housing crisis in greater detail. What emerges from new research is something quite different: government agencies now look to have guaranteed, originated or underwritten 60% of all “non-traditional” mortgages, which totaled $4.6 trillion in June 2008. What’s more, this research asserts that housing policies instituted in the early 1990s were explicitly designed to require US Agencies to make much riskier loans, with the ultimate goal of pushing private sector banks to adopt the same standards.” (emphasis in original)
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has found that political appointees, not career Justice Department lawyers, made the decision to drop a voter intimidation case against two black panthers after the Justice Department had already won a lawsuit against them by default. That contradicts claims made by the Obama administration and its civil-rights chief, Tom Perez.
Earlier, a career Justice Department lawyer, Chris Coates, testified that under the Obama administration, the Justice Department has a policy of systematically ignoring voter intimidation and voting-rights violations when the perpetrator is a minority.
The case arose out of intimidating behavior by members of the bigoted New Black Panther Party outside a Philadelphia polling place.
The testimony by Coates, a former ACLU lawyer hired by the Justice Department under the Clinton administration, “supported earlier accusations made by J. Christian Adams,” a former Justice Department lawyer:
Adams had told the commission that DOJ officials “over and over and over” showed “hostility” to prosecution of voter-intimidation cases involving “black defendants and white victims.”
Adams testified that Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, a political appointee, himself overruled a unanimous recommendation for continued prosecution by Adams and his associates of voter intimidation of white voters by members of The New Black Panthers at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.
Adams had also testified that Julie Fernandes, a deputy assistant general in the Civil Rights Division in charge of voting matters, told Voting Section leadership that the Obama administration would not file election-related cases against minority defendants — no matter what the alleged violation of the law.
Coates verified Adams’ testimony about Fernandes, and also said he had been “specifically instructed” by Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, “not to ask any other applicants whether they would be willing to, in effect, race-neutrally enforce the VRA (Voting Rights Act).”
The Washington Post recently ran an interesting story about “deep divisions” and internal infighting at the Justice Department about whether to enforce the civil-rights laws “without regard to race,” even in cases where the perpetrator may be a member of a minority group — like the Ike Brown case in Mississippi, where a black political boss violated the voting rights of many whites as well as a few blacks. (Lawyers who worked on that case during the Bush Administration ended up being harassed by left-wing colleagues who did not believe that the civil-rights laws should be enforced when the perpetrator is a minority. A relative of one of those lawyers who worked in the Justice Department was also harassed.)
The Supreme Court has ruled that voting rights protect people of all races, not just members of historically disadvantaged groups.
Illinois officials missed the deadline to mail ballots to U.S. troops overseas, but they hand-delivered ballots to inmates, without even waiting for inmates to apply.
Perhaps this discrimination can be explained by the fact that inmates vote mostly for liberal candidates, while soldiers vote predominantly for conservative candidates.
There are federal laws requiring states to send ballots in a timely fashion to troops overseas, but the Obama administration is not enforcing them, as part of its ongoing politicization of the Justice Department (such as rubberstamping unconstitutional legislative proposals, and downplaying of voter intimidation by liberal activists, while investigating Tea Party pollwatchers who uncovered rampant voter registration fraud in Houston).
Meanwhile, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran (D) has dismissed his opponent, a retired colonel who served in the military for 24 years, saying that he has not “served or performed in any kind of public service,” and had simply “taken a government check.” (Moran himself has collected a government paycheck for many decades, first as a state official, and then, for the last 28 years, as a congressman.)
by Hans Bader on August 9, 2010 · 1 comment
in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Health and Illness, International, Labor, Legal, Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Privacy, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist
“Amazon.com . . . tried to sell a talking Kindle reader, but” the Justice Department “said it couldn’t because the button to make the Kindle talk didn’t have braille. Never mind that books neither talk nor have Braille buttons telling them to talk.” Obama’s radical appointees at the Justice Department, like Tom Perez, think that it’s better to have NO accommodation for the disabled, then an imperfect accommodation. The Obama Justice Department also used the threat of suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act to prevent colleges from using Kindle to lighten “the textbook load on their student body by moving to e-book formats.” Blocking Kindle harms people with chronic back problems.
The Obama Justice Department is also threatening South Carolina with a lawsuit over an anti-AIDS program that saves lives in the state’s prisons. South Carolina tests incoming inmates for AIDS, and “half of those tested never knew they were infected. The testing policy saves lives because treatment starts immediately, at state expense.” The Administration ridiculously claims this is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. But the Supreme Court has made clear that prisons have broad powers to restricts’ inmates rights to protect health or safety, or to promote any other legitimate correctional or penological purposes. (Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decision in Beard v. Banks says that prisons can even restrict what inmates read. South Carolina is not trying to do anything that extreme.)
The Obama administration also claims that the policy violates the disabled-rights laws, even though it saves lives, because it provides “separate living facilities” for prisoners with AIDS. South Carolina’s program “has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a single prisoner.” In other prison systems, many lives have been lost due to transmission of HIV to previously uninfected inmates. The Obama Justice Department’s demand could thus result in many deaths.
The Obama Administration’s claim is flatly inconsistent with a federal appeals court ruling that held that even a tiny risk of HIV transmission can justify sweeping anti-AIDS measures like not employing a surgeon with AIDS, given the lethal nature of AIDS. (See Doe v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp., 50 F.3d 1261 (4th Cir. 1995).) That ruling is binding precedent in South Carolina, and it rejected challenges under both the Americans with Disabilities Act and its sister statute, the Rehabilitation Act.
Moreover, South Carolina is not trying to go nearly as far as the federal appeals court held was permissible, in its sensible measure to save lives–it is not firing anyone, just housing them separately. Prison officials are given more leeway to take HIV-positive status into account than employers are, given the extra deference that courts give to prison administrators. Even the most liberal federal appeals court upheld a policy of denying inmates who tested positive for HIV access to food service jobs. (See Gates v. Rowland, 39 F.3d 1439 (9th Cir. 1994).)
The Obama administration also wants to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to regulate the Internet. It also has signed an international treaty on disabilities-rights that could undermine American sovereignty.
Deferring to the Justice Department, the most-liberal federal appeals court recently ruled against Chipotle in a lawsuit that will lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and attorney fees–and a catch-22 against the company, which must lower its employee counter tops to make them easier for disabled patrons to view (to satisfy the ADA), but must simultaneously keep them high to comply with worker-safety rules. (Ironically, the court’s ruling in Antoninetti v. Chipotle conflicted with one of its own past rulings, violating the rule that a panel of an appeals court cannot contradict an earlier panel. It also rewarded nuisance litigation.)
Judicial Watch is suing the Obama administration over its stonewalling in the Black-Panther voter intimidation case, where the administration has flouted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in order to hide how it protected members of the racist, anti-Semitic New Black Panther Party. Although FOIA requires that documents be released within 20 days, the administration has withheld for over a year the records Judicial Watch requested about how the administration dismissed a lawsuit that career Justice Department lawyers had won against Black Panthers who used a nightstick and racial epithets to drive white voters away from a polling place.
Earlier, a career Justice Department lawyer resigned after the Obama administration illegally defied a subpoena from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Civil Rights Commission is investigating the administration’s politicization of the Justice Department and its selective refusal to enforce the Voting Rights Act against the Black Panthers and black political bosses.
A former Justice Department lawyer describes the Obama administration’s stonewalling, cover-up, and deceit at this link. The Black Panthers that the Obama administration sought to protect by dropping the lawsuit included a local Democratic official and Obama poll-watcher.
One of the Panthers, who has been videotaped saying “that he wanted to kill white people,” is shown in a recent documentary talking about “how much he hates and wants to kill white people, including white babies.” He called a terrified black poll watcher a “race traitor,” and told him there would be “hell to pay” if he interfered with the Panthers’ campaign of voter intimidation.
In their campaign of voter intimidation, the Panthers told a white former civil-rights lawyer and former publisher of the liberal Village Voice, “Now you are going to find out what it is to be ruled by the black man, cracker.” They called a white poll watcher who lives nine blocks from the polling place a “white devil” and a “cracker,” telling him he would be ruled by the black man the next day, and he would have to get used to “living under his boot.”
The New Black Panther Party, which has a venomous hatred for what it refers to as “bloodsucking Jews,” is designated as a hate-group even by the liberal SPLC, because of its anti-Semitism.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that discrimination against whites is prohibited under federal law (including voting discrimination). The Obama administration seemingly disagrees with those rulings (which include a 9-to-0 Supreme Court decision).
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