FROM ONE NEWS NOW/AFA

By Bryan Fischer

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, wrting in RealClearMarkets, points out that the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill will mandate discrimination based on both gender and race.

In other words, this bill is both sexist and racist, since it requires that both males and whites be discriminated against in order to fulfill gender and ethnic quotas.

What’s worse is that this sexism and racism is being forced on private companies in the financial industry.

All this, of course, is utterly at variance with the Judeo-Christian tradition, which suggests that in an enlightened view of the world, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

In other words, in view of higher basis of unity, distinctions of race, class and gender no longer become bases on which we separate, divide and count people. Dodd-Frank will drag us another step backward in the direction of division and tension based on surface characteristics and away from our national slogan, “Out of many, one.”

Liberals want to make “many” out of “one” instead, and seem intent on destroying unity and common identity wherever they can. Surely we as a people are better than that. That’s what the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s was all about.

The liberals who support Dodd-Frank want to drag us back to the pre-Civil War South, in which people are excluded from economic opportunity by the color of the skin. Shame on them.

Here are some excerpts from Ms. Roth’s piece with commentary:

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.

Since the Supreme Court has ruled that fair inclusion is a matter or proportion (if a college student body is 55% female, 55% of its athletes must be female), this is nothing less than a quota system imposed on private financial institutions. They no longer will be allowed to select employees based exclusively on merit. They will, in fact, be required to lower the level of talent in their workforce to satisfy sexist and racist standards.

This means quite simply that highly qualified males and highly qualified whites will be denied employment based on their gender and race. What else is this but sexism and racism? This is not reverse discrimination, it is plain, old-fashioned discrimination, period.

This latest attempt by Congress to dictate what "fair" employment means is likely to encourage administrators and managers, in government and in the private sector, to hire women and minorities for the sake of appearances, even if some new hires are less qualified than other applicants. The result is likely to be redundant hiring and a wasteful expansion of payroll overhead.

If the director decides that a contractor has not made a good-faith effort to include women and minorities in its workforce, he is required to contact the agency administrator and recommend that the contractor be terminated.

Translation: This is a green light for government bureaucrats, accountable to no one, to rat out contractors on the entirely subjective basis that the bureaucrat thinks “a good-faith effort” has not been made to meet racial and gender quotas. This is a license to put any contractor out of business who will not make sexism and racism his highest priority in hiring and firing.

Section 342's provisions are broad and vague, and are certain to increase inefficiency in federal agencies. To comply, federal agencies are likely to find it easier to employ and contract with less-qualified women and minorities, merely in order to avoid regulatory trouble. This would in turn decrease the agencies' efficiency, productivity and output, while increasing their costs.

As if our federal government was not inefficient and unproductive enough as it is!

With the new financial regulation law, the federal government is moving from outlawing discrimination to setting up a system of quotas. Ultimately, the only way that financial firms doing business with the government would be able to comply with the law is by showing that a certain percentage of their workforce is female or minority.

As Ms. Roth points out, this provision in Dodd-Frank has received no attention in the media. It’s time for that blackout to end.