A Small Reminder
The Biden administration seems to want to violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act by telling SBA to give Covid relief funding to small business owners based on skin color. Not a joke, and definitely not legal, and two courts have blocked it, per the video at the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTuHVxSRYAE
Blocked twice in court, and I’m sure that the blockage will be contested, but maybe it will be dragged out and become irrelevant.
For the uninformed who think the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not apply here, below is a summary of that law.
Legal Highlight: The Civil Rights Act of 1964
In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of “equal protection of the laws” expected the president, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment. In response, all three branches of the federal government–as well as the public at large–debated a fundamental constitutional question: Does the Constitution’s prohibition of denying equal protection always ban the use of racial, ethnic, or gender criteria in an attempt to bring social justice and social benefits?
In June 1963, President John Kennedy asked Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill, induced by massive resistance to desegregation and the murder of Medgar Evers. After Kennedy’s assassination in November, President Lyndon Johnson pressed hard, with the support of Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, to secure the bill’s passage the following year. In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the nation’s benchmark civil rights legislation, and it continues to resonate in America. Passage of the Act ended the application of “Jim Crow” laws, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court held that racial segregation purported to be “separate but equal” was constitutional. The Civil Rights Act was eventually expanded by Congress to strengthen enforcement of these fundamental civil rights.
Source link is below:
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/civil-rights-center/statutes/civil-rights-act-of-1964
Obviously, the current occupants of the nation’s capitol are ignoring a major law that is already in place, while violating it at the same time. Perhaps they don’t really want equality as much as they may hanker after domination. But that, if you recall, has frequently been the root cause of wars, civil or otherwise.
Does anyone have any questions?
Category: 2020 Election, Biden
“…as much as they may hanker after domination.” Domination IS exactly what they hanker after. Maybe they should go after and prosecute some of the billions of $s that have been obtained from fraud by all of this COVID giveaways…much of this coming from “minority persons”? Not the FIRST (ht 2 Bim) time that the kongress klown kritters ignored the law to buy votes…and pay off supporters. Maybe they want to give the Dominion Machines one more election cycle to ensure the counting of the votes will go the way they want it to. Their need for race baiting useful idiots is coming to an end…soon.
charles w gonna be mad as hell that you have his stapler. Expect him to come out of that basement right shortly. You know that he has a drinking problem, Right?
Laws and having principles are not object to power… er, “social justice,” comrade! Leftists’ way or the highway. (Ain’t that right, Lars?)
I have freckles, SO therefore, I’m identifying as “Non-White”, and I was $$$$$$ BITCHES!!!
Where to I being my wheelbarrow ????
Oh wait, I just need one of dem welfare Credit Cards.
Where’s my chunk of the trillions.
Also I come from depressed, rejected, religiously persecuted, Western, European Islanders, so where’s my International hand out Joe?!?!?
Where do I sign Up??
—-REPARATIONS FOR THE ORIGINAL BOAT PEOPLE!!!!! Myles Standish MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!
Biden might be channeling his inner Andrew Jackson “the courts have made their ruling, now let them enforce it”. Progs care about power, not law and if they think this move will help them get more power/hold on to power they have then they will shove it through somehow (near absolute control of the bureaucracy goes a long way).
The demoRats were not for the 1964 civil rights act. The jim crow laws were the idea of the demoRats along with the clan but most of the lamestream media viewers don’t know this.
Democrats gonna Democrat.
They know it, they just chose to ignore it.
Lemme see here. Nothin’ based on sex, huh? Does that mean that the esteemed Mr. Biden, when he announced that his choice of VP candidates was gonna be limited by race and/or sex, he was discriminatin’ in an offer of a job in the US Government?
Swingline or Bostich?
Asking for a friend..
Swingline. You can tell by the oval.
FSN 7520-243-1780/s
I’m torn on things like this – I was reading the other day that up to 99.4% of the farming aid went to white, non-Hispanic farmers. Another study said 97%. White, non-Hispanic farmers make up about 92% of the farmers around.
The question is, was there some sort of subtle discrimination that lead to fewer non-white farmers getting relief? If so, is the ‘correction’ of the correct magnitude? If so, I can understand that.
I don’t subscribe to the ludicrous notion that white people are always racist, or that racism permeates every decision made, but there are clear examples of systemic issues in society that affect people differently due to race. VOV highlighted a book called “The Color of Law” a while back that tackled some of those issues. If we can address an issue in the here-and-now from last year’s relief, and do it in a way that’s fair, great.
Saying that fixing an act that may have been discrimination is in itself discrimination is a bit of a stretch. It’s like if you accidentally give someone $200K instead of $200, and then they claim that giving it back is theft.
Source article on the 99.4% number:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/behalf-white-farmers-trump-allies-wage-legal-war-against-equity-n1269737
You don’t correct it by skewing the act in favor of one group. That skewing IS the original problem. You correct it by applying it equally.
I agree the skewing is the original problem, but the correction is to ensure it was applied equally. You’ve got two options:
1) Wait until the next time the government is giving out billions in loans during a financial crisis, and pinky-swear you’ll get it right then, having just screwed over some people by race (allegedly, I’d like to see more data).
Or, 2) You fix the skew by providing those who missed out on those opportunities what they would’ve gotten.
Now, in the case of reparations for slavery, I’m wholly against it – saying that people who are several generations younger than those who owned slaves need to pay the price isn’t fair. We don’t make kids pay for the sins of their parents. But for something last year? I can get behind that.
Now, clearly, if this were an ongoing thing where they said, “Hey, you know what? Fuck white people. Only people of color get new benefits!”, then that’s nuts. But, at least in the case of the farm aid in the article above, it’s just a one-time fix, with a promise to do better.
Right. The answer to racism isn’t more racism.
I guess I don’t really view a correction as ‘racism’. Imagine this:
The government decides to hand every soldier an extra $100. Except, in this made-up scenario, for whatever reason, while 100% of the white soldiers got that check, only 50% of the black soldiers did.
Is doing a new disbursement of those checks that only gives checks to the black soldiers who missed out somehow ‘racism’? That’s a big stretch, in my opinion.
Now, in the real world, things aren’t as black-and-white (pardon the pun) as that scenario. Relief was by need, so not every white farmer got it, and not every black farmer didn’t… but if we can show a systematic preference against the black farmers, one that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, is addressing that somehow racism? Why would that be different than the scenario I made up above? Just because the numbers are no longer absolute?
Like I said, I’d like to see the data, but if there’s a clear trend along racial lines, fixing it isn’t ‘racism’, it’s fixing the racism that already happened.
It seems to me, LC, that you’re suggesting a law that while not fully retroactive on its face, is most assuredly retroactive in its intent and undeniably retroactive in its effect. In short, it is ex post facto legislation. From Wikipedia:
“Ex post facto laws are expressly forbidden by the United States Constitution in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 (with respect to federal laws) and Article 1, Section 10 (with respect to state laws).”
So what you’re leaning toward will undoubtedly set up a Supreme Court challenge which I do not think will survive the conservative majority.
I’m not well versed in the law. On the surface, I imagine you’re fully correct. And maybe it doesn’t survive the legal challenges. But if the data supports it, then I’d think that would give those who were refused relief grounds for suing for discrimination, in order to recoup what others gained?
At the end of the day, I’m not saying that an ex post facto law is the right solution, only that upon reading the article I linked, and if the data bears that out, there’s merit in fixing a mistake. One way or the other.
I also recognize this is a fuzzy area – where one draws the line for what past mistakes can be corrected in the present varies a lot. As I said below, I’m against reparations for slavery because we’re all so removed from it, even if there are generational effects. I’m even against affirmative action, for similar reasons. But something from last year? I think we can reasonably recognize that happened on our watch, and fix it in the present.
Not a legal statement, just an ethical one.
See my comment below…
Mother Jones pegged the number at 97%.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/03/white-farmers-got-97-percent-of-last-years-ag-bailout-now-some-are-mad-black-farmers-are-getting-debt-relief/
BOL pegs the number of farmers being white (including hispanic) at 95.4% in their 2020 data.
https://usafacts.org/articles/farmer-demographics/
This could simply be a margin of error effect in polling. We are talking 3.6% based on BOL numbers from 2020 if you accept the 99.4% number. If you take the Mother Jones article the difference is only 1.3%.
Hardly an outrage or indicative of systemic racism.
Not that I would accuse our noble liberal leaders in DC (or the honest and forthright MSM) of attempting to massage data to create a problem convenient for their electoral base/those of their own leanings.
Yeah, this is why I’d love to see more data – coming up with different numbers via different methodologies happens, since things aren’t exact, but there’s a pretty big difference between 97% and 99.4%. Obviously, the closer it gets to the ratio of farmers by race, the more you’re in the ‘noise’ of error, and not something that warrants action.
But I’m arguing from the perspective of if there’s a clear signal, then fixing it seems fine to me.
I actually read the article you cited and the numbers cited has nothing to do with Covid relief. It was about the MFP trade relief bill. The Chinese had of course had targeted white farmers since they made up a good chunk of Trump’s base.
Farmers in the US are actually 95.4% white. Only 1.3% are black, most of the rest being NA.
The MFP primarily favored large corporate farms many of which are publicly traded corporations. To say that they are “white farmers” is simply untrue. Some of the largest recipient corporations such as JBS SA, that received billions, are not only foreign owned but is also nearly completely owned and run by Brazilians, presumably mixed-race Hispanic since whites do not make up a majority there.
That’s why I said I’m torn on things like this. I didn’t see a specific case in Ex-PH2’s post, so I linked the farm relief issue, which seems similar.
I think there’s all sorts of valid opinions on targeting relief towards people who were victims of a trade-war with another nation.
In terms of the percentages in this case, though, like I said, I’d like to see more data. If, to take the numbers from the NBC article, 99.4% of aid went to the 95.4% of white farmers, and 0.6% went to the other 4.6%, that does seem a bit imbalanced, doesn’t it?
And one of the questions then is, what caused that? Is it because China targeted goods mostly produced by white farmers, and hence the relief went to them (again, with all sorts of valid positions to have on whether that’s a good thing for the US to do), or is it because there was some racial bias in the relief grants? The latter would not be outside the realm of possibility, given the various studies that show bias, even unconscious bias, against ‘black’ names, or other such things.
All I’m saying is that I think it’s worth considering and analyzing the data. The relief should’ve been granted by need, not race. If it was, great. If not, that should probably be fixed.
My point was more along the lines that the money wasn’t actually given to white farmers it was given to large corporations.
That low percentage of black farmers is most likely due to the nature of black farming in the South where most of the black farmers were post-Civil War. Those that weren’t sharecroppers working land owned by whites, were small-plot farmers whose operations didn’t allow them to participate in the huge leap in mechanization/corporate farming in the last half of the 20th Century.
However, the same was true of white, small-plot farmers who also got left by the wayside in this dramatic modernization of agriculture. Almost all my ancestors, even into the first half of the 20th Century were farmers. Both my parents were raised in farming families. By 1970 none of them were.
It was cultural/economic Darwinism at work and certainly does not justify anti-white discrimination in the 21st Century. What we should be paying attention to is where these funds can go that most benefit the entire nation’s food production, not some particular race or class.
The workaround is simple and already being used. Funds are targeting “underserved communities”, “underprivileged communities”, and “inner city communities”.
In Chicago, the problem has been finding business owners to offer this help to in these communities since so many business owners have just closed up shop and moved elsewhere. Businesses looted and burned, who had to hire armed security guards to protect their customers and employees, who saw “shrinkage” rates many times higher than other neighborhoods, have found it too expensive-and dangerous-to run those businesses. And that response is proof-positive of “systemic racism”. Of course the answer is to be crystal clear in who these funds should be helping, Black and Brown (but the right shade of not-White, Arabs and Asians need not apply) folk. Because “systemic racism”.
How do we get around all those who are not White but are the wrong shade of other-than-White owning and operating all these small businesses? Simple. Funds are given to those who “live in and/or represent” the communities in which they are or seek to operate.
Can’t make this stuff up.
OAM, I have to disagree.
Modern societies flourish in settings that offer them services ranging from small mom and pop operations to huge corporate outlets. If we accept that black urban enclaves can only tolerate and support locally-owned, black-owned businesses in their communities then we are once again segregating them culturally and economically into communities that can’t function within the same framework as society as a whole.
That, to me, smacks of Democrat-style patronizing and creates a special environment for blacks that accommodates their worst, self-destructive behaviors of burning down and antagonizing the very infrastructures that support them.
Mom and Pop businesses are never going to be adequate to support black communities.
Poetrooper, I don’t think we are disagreeing. I agree with your description of what is necessary. My rant was a recitation of what is actually going on in Chicago. And their excuse for why it is not and has never worked is “systemic racism” while ignoring the fact they are the ones who designed and are continuing to perpetuate “systemic racism”. These initiatives are just the latest manifestations of policies intended to marginalize and segregate their base.
It hasn’t and won’t work, but they get to virtue signal they are “addressing the problem”, and the woke limo-liberal idiots get to virtue signal with their votes.
I am coming to believe you have to be either stupid or evil to vote Democrat. I used to qualify that statement to refer to Democrat run cities, but I am having a harder and harder time justifying that limitation.
You’re right, OAM, we are in agreement.
Especially regarding your last paragraph…😜
Not surprising seeing as the democrats did want the Civil Rights Act to begin with.
Sorry, didn’t want.