I have blogged ad nauseaum about why conservatism remains so white and so male. I've tried for finesse often, but here's a reason that's about as subtle as butcher knife--they really don't give a fuck. Witness this silly item from Mark Krikorian that passive-aggressively tries to link Wamu's failure with its diversity efforts.
It's a real piece of work, but this is what you do when you have nothing of substance to say about one of the most challenging issues of our time, when you can't man up to the fact that, on these matters, you hail from the side that supported "Whites Only" signs and backed the thugs at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. You sit back and make snide comments about Affirmative Action run amock. You hurl spitballs from across the room at liberals and their sensitivity training. You get up dancing after a first down, while your team--our team--is getting blown out the stadium. Good God, people are packing their future into boxes, parents are sick over their college funds, middle-agers are watching their retirement waste away, and this dude is cracking wise about diversity. How classy.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
And of course Krikorian gives the "hat tip" to white supremacist Steve Sailer, who always seems to be there when bashing minorities is involved. He's the president of the He-Man Haters Association, I guess. What a sad collection of bedwetters and impotent shitheads they are.
TNC,
I have a very, very well-informed and well-educated friend* in California who is just as furious as you, and we have a running discussion that seems to be a repeat of everything you just said...
... however, I have to thank you specifically because here you corroborated something that we figured out last night while talking before the debate: that the "angry white men" about whom he and you are referring are too often confused with those 'ordinary' angry white men - sometimes called rednecks - who hale from the South and who sometimes exhibit attitudes that seem retrograde if not worse.
But that's definitely NOT, I think, who the two of you are talking about, I now realize... you're talking about the lazy jokers who benefited from the ethos of 'every man for himself' and who were the chicken hawks who watched 'real' men (and women) pony up by putting on a uniform or by getting real jobs... when they could and if they could keep them. Those blowhards fed a mythology of 'us-versus-them' both in house and around the world... and now we are all stuck with the bill...
Now, I should all calm down - which is what I try to tell my friend - and make sure that it does not endure any longer...
Thanks again... and keep up the good work.
* By the way, we are both angry white men... though I hope that we are on the same side of history as you...
Sorry, dude, I normally try not to do this...it's Pettus.
At the great risk of stepping on toes and sounding out of touch, I can see why a company that is ready to announce the biggest bank failure in history should be mocked for issuing this as their next to final press release. There is something odd about a corporation that just ran itself into the ground and is going to have to fire perhaps thousands, yet they are bragging that they are kind to Hispanics and the transgendered. It could be easily argued the WAMU is dancing after a first down while the stadium is burning with this press release.
I think diversity is important for many reasons, the fairness reason doesn't need any explaination. It also solidifies the country because it allows for previously ignored talent to rise up. But it sometimes gets to be a bit much when framed by hypocrites and corporate types who use it for PR. It sets off a smug alert.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/19/7-diversity/
I do have a problem with the NRO guy making an implication, even if jokingly, that diversity is somehow tied to the bank's collapse. However, I find it bizarre that self-promotion was even on the plate of a COO while his bank was crashing.
Conservatism has long been a philosophy to justify greed and selfishness.
Point taken Doug. I think it's more likely that was just a coincidence than an actual strategy. Do you think they really meant to send out that release just as they were tanking? Sometimes the head isn't talking to the arms.
I know it goes against the grain here, but it seems quite plausible to think that WaMu's "diversity" efforts did indeed contribute to its collapse.
These days, "diversity" is code for "hiring less able people because of their race." Most corporations have enough jobs that only need to be done moderately well that they can afford a bit of "diversity," but taken too far it can had an adverse effect on company performance.
But in WaMu's case, it's probably not about employment -- it appears to be about bad loans. And this is a case where "diversity" really can cause problems. People like Barney Frank (and, ahem, Barack Obama in his brief stint in the private sector) claimed that things like credit standards and down payments were racist. So, under intense regulatory pressure, many banks, including WaMu gave out subprime loans to people who couldn't pay them back. Having done all they could to encourage this nonsense, people like Barney Frank are now blaming the market.
I mean, diversity is fine if we're talking about letting a few kids who ought to be at Illinois State get into Harvard, or hiring a "Vice President for feeling good about ourselves" at an inflated salary (like, ahem, Michelle Obama). But risking the collapse of the American economy to make ourselves feel smug is a bit much, don't you think?
Shorter Cheerful Iconoclast:
Black people can't write good loans.
It might be more accurate to say that the people who write "conservative" commentary and op-eds are overwhelmingly white and mail (Malkin notwithstanding). But actual conservatives are far, far more balanced, both by gender and by race.
It might be interesting to examine the selection bias which results in this.
Cheerful,
1.) Please specifically demonstrate how diversity led to WAMU's downfall. A general, vague, mushy, mealy-mouthed musing over the effects of diversity on corporations doesn't cut it. You've put it out there. Now prove it.
2.) Please provide a quote where Barney Frank calls credit ratings racist. Then show us how Frank and others enacted regulations which pressured the banks to invest in the subprime market. I am willing to hear out the argument. But you have to make with details and specifics.
Yeah, there may have been disconnect between PR and operations, and for all I know, WAMU may even use an outside firm for their press relations.
You can look at the White House and see that the head and arms aren't working together
Good post. I often think that there is undue pressure on black journalists that have an authentic claim at mainstream "legitimacy" to impose a false equivalency of ideas. A sort racial correllary to the symmetry of sin. Bottom line, both sides aren't equally wrong. One side is motivated by a world they believe in that doesn't exist and the other has a less compelling narrative because reality is defined by uncertainty. In 50 years we'll either be living in the Dark Ages 2.0 or probabalistic reasoning will be well understood throughout society. I used to try to see things from the other side. Now I'm coming to the view that they are just dumber. For real
Cheerful Iconoclast says,
"These days, "diversity" is code for "hiring less able people because of their race." Most corporations have enough jobs that only need to be done moderately well that they can afford a bit of "diversity," but taken too far it can had an adverse effect on company performance." [Shorter CI, colored folk are stupid]
"But in WaMu's case, it's probably not about employment -- it appears to be about bad loans. And this is a case where "diversity" really can cause problems. People like Barney Frank (and, ahem, Barack Obama in his brief stint in the private sector) claimed that things like credit standards and down payments were racist."
[TNC, he can't provide a quote because here, CI is just flat out lying]
"So, under intense regulatory pressure . . ."
[Too much regulation! Those evil liberals in charge of the SEC and congress these past 8 years forced the banks to give loans to anyone with a pulse and sell the bad paper at huge profits so as not to appear insensitive to the crazy liberals is that what you are saying?]
". . . or hiring a "Vice President for feeling good about ourselves"
[What does Sarah Palin have to do with any of this?]
You have characterized that NR guy correctly. "Cause and Effect?" It's an awful, thuggish headline.
Wow, I guess AIG, Bear Stearns and Enron must have been models of diversity, huh?
We need a better typology of white nonsense (says the white lady approaching 50).
Krikorian's snideness does not look to me like "the black guy took my job" anger from people who are down on their luck. Pulling from another of today's posts, it isn't from someone who's white and poor, or white and afraid of being poor.
Instead, it's from the libertarian smart-aleck corner. The key point is "The people in charge are irrational and I'm going to show you how they're stupid." The same people, with the same tone, will show up to oppose tax increases, price controls, government subsidies, minimum wage,tobacco limitations, and every effort to make public education work.
The people involved think that they're the smartest folks around, and they're mad that folks don't elect them to run everything. If you remember a kid in middle school who felt that way, imagine that guy grown up. Also, remember that the kid didn't have many friends or convince many people with his obsessively detailed but always odd little explanations--and the grown-up versions are not very successful even among conservatives.
Nevertheless, they appear often enough on affirmative action to be annoying. Often, they are beside themselves with glee because they've thought of the witty idea of using the phrase "the content of their character" in a sentence.
I'm not saying it isn't garbage. I am, though, saying it's a particular subset of garbage, and it's worth knowing which kind. This isn't working class rage. It's a geeky nerdy guy trying to get attention by showing how smart he is--and never understanding why hardly anyone is ever impressed.
I want a name for this particular variety, but the best I've come up with is "snuppity," to capture the combination of snark and self-promotion. Doesn't quite work,but I don't have a better name yet.
Barney Frank never attributed "racism" to credit ratings. He has been a staunch defender of affordable housing, and in the case of Fannie and Freddie, he fought against the Bush administration's regulatory overhaul efforts in 2003, stating:
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis.....The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''
The Bush plan was defeated. And Fannie&Freddie's bad accounting practices continued. This did, indeed, contribute to the housing crisis. But even if the plan had passed, it's likely Fannie&Freddie would have eventually failed, because Bush's plan did not address one of the biggest underlying problems: the implicit guarantee that the government would bail the companies out if they ran into financial difficulty. This guarantee encouraged F&F to issue debt at significantly lower rates than competitors.
Now, I still think Frank did a lousy job on the Financial Services Committee. And there's no doubt that the rise in subprime mortgages contribute to the housing crisis...but to turn this into a race-based issue is ridiculous. To pin the crisis on the poor, on minorities, is just plain wrong when the crux of the problem is really a regulatory issue....unregulated mortgage brokers backed by unregulated Wall Street investment banks.
The banking collapse is not the result of big, bad government forcing these banks to loan to minorities. The banks were loaning to minorities and MANY other groups because they were making money doing it.
The root of the problem was that their decisions were based on flawed assumptions, ie. housing prices would continue to increase.
It's not about lending to minorities. It's only marginally about assuming housing prices would continue to rise.
It is about criminally predatory lending.
i.e., knowingly making loans to people - mostly white, I believe, just on the basis of the fact that whites make up 90-% of the population overall - who didn't have the income or assets to afford the principal on the properties the mortgage brokers were telling them they could in fact afford. But only if they took out these ridiculous, interest-only or sometimes upside-down, add-to-the-principal, adjustable-rate monstrosities that would reset to double or triple the rate within two years.
And then, when they could barely afford the original payment, everyone was shocked when these borrowers couldn't handle a payment that was double the old one, and the foreclosed houses flooded the market.
Now, why would a bunch of foreclosed houses flooding a market make them all lose value?
Why are we pretending that these awards about which WAMU was bragging have any meaning. Awards such as this are largely bought and sold, sometimes by adding specific programs, sometimes directly by donations. I have no idea what WAMU's actual hiring and HR practices are, but they have nothing or little to do with these awards. Corporations generally pay for charitable giving out of their PR budgets. If they win awards such as these, it is generally because the PR folks decided that the press release NRO was deriding would give them more of a bang for their buck than whatever other promotion on which they were considering spending money.