Girlfriend's Family Entire Life Savings Stolen Part II

When I was despairing in my last post, I had totally forgotten about something that I do have that can help: this blog.

So here goes Bernadette's family story. I admit that this is a long shot, but it sure beats sitting around waiting for something to happen.

Bernadette's family came to this country from Indonesia. They came, like most immigrants do, very poor, but had worked up their hospital uniform business to be something that's rather reputable. This was the first year in many that they had a profit.

But earlier today while they were at work, nearly $330,000 in cash was stolen from a safe in their family home in Rosemead, CA. Lots of family jewelry was also stolen and all of it was uninsured.

Anyone with any information should leave it in the comment section or email me.

Girlfriend's Family Entire Life Savings Stolen...

There isn't really a Claremont connection here and this will be one of those rare moments where I actually give off an emotion. Not for nothing have my friends described me as Dexter. Long ago, I gave up those kind of emotions that would take the better of me. Resilience is a virtue often practiced with my family, given my moms bouts with cancer, and I do my level best to grin and bear it. (Perhaps, that's why I am so enamored of Winston Churchill, Megaphone, because, though things looked dreary and bleak, he nevertheless, pushed on, and in so doing, inspired a nation to rise to its own defense. Naturally, Hitler bombing them helped, too.)

Every once in a while, though, something does get through my armor and this is one of those times. The whole evening I have been thinking about what I could do to make a situation better over which I have absolutely no control.

So, as fate would have it, Bernadette will not be going with me to Guatemala because her house was burglarized the very day before we were planning on going and she thinks it would be best to stay with her family, which is, of course, the right thing to do. One moment, we were elated and planning our trip, the next, the trip was off, and everyone felt awful. I had planned to take her to some beautiful places, but now I don't know what I'll do.

Of course, this being a burglary, not everyone is feeling awful. Someone out there is peddling the jewelry of my girlfriend's mother, spending the cash of a poor family trying to achieve the American dream, and I'm off to spend time with my family down there for the eighteen or so days before I return to school. The semi-vacation I had been looking forward to for months with the person I would most like to spend it, is altered before it has even begun.

But hey, at least the booze in Guatemala is cheap and I have eighteen days to punish myself with work.

Jesse Jackson Sr's Role in The Housing Crisis

If you haven't heard already, Jesse Jackson Sr. will be coming to speak at the Athenaeum. (You can see what I've written already here and I'll have more as we get closer to the deadline.)

Many of you already know Jesse Jackson the race hustler, but few of you know the extent to which he was involved with harming the very people he professes to help -- blacks and low-income minorities.

Ironically enough, Jesse Jackson's involvement with the disgraced ACORN shows us that he's really a shakedown artist with no concern for anyone but himself.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), aggressively lobbied for by ACORN and Jesse Jackson Sr., passed. The purpose of that legislation was to punish lenders for limiting loans to wealthier, more creditworthy markets, a practice called "redlining" and to give regulators -- and the Department of Justice, no less! -- the authority to make life difficult for banks that didn't give loans to politically preferred pigmented folks. (The governor of my home state, Deval Patrick, did much of this agitation when he was at the Justice Department under Clinton.)

These activists concluded that disparate loan approval rates between black and white borrowers was evidence of racism by the banks against blacks because whites were approved for loans at higher rates than black folk. Of course, had they looked at the approval rates for Asians versus whites, they would have concluded that the banking industry was racist against whites, which is, to put it mildly, ridiculous. (For more, see Thomas Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust.)

During the 90s and early 2000s, activists, like Jesse Jackson and ACORN, turned to the supposed housing gap between blacks and whites and again, tried to get the banks to approve loans that they really were in no position to give -- so-called NINJA loans. Jesse Jackson bragged about his involvement, pressuring those banks in an ACORN "banking summit," in 1992. "Why did Jesse James rob banks?" he asked, rhetorically, "Because that's where the money was."

Flash-forward to the current wave of housing foreclosures and you see the net effect of that kind of agitation: more minorities out of a home. As John Derbyshire explains in his recent book, We Are Doomed, p. 240,

In 2006, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, "twenty-six percent of mortgages for home purchase by whites were subprime . . . for Hispanics, it was 47 percent and for African Americans, 53 percent."

Naturally, a subprime mortgage is only given to those with poor credit, which, in this case tend to be largely, but not exclusively, non-Asian minorities. It is not necessarily awarded to those with high income or low income, but with a proven ability to pay back the loan. Jesse Jackson, though, sees the award of such loans as indicative of some covert racism. Here's how he described it to the Chicago City Council, according to The Chicago Sun Times on November 27, 2007.

Jackson accused "unscrupulous lenders" of targeting minorities for high-cost loans in a "form of redlining and racial profiling." He pointed to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition that shows African Americans of all income levels in the Chicago area were more than twice as likely as whites to receive the subprime and ballooning adjustable interest rate mortgages that can be a prelude to foreclosure.

The City Council has no power to bring about the solution that Jackson is seeking: a freeze on both adjustable rate mortgages and home foreclosures, and restructuring in favor of repossession. But, City Council hearings can apply political pressure.

"Rats run in holes when lights come on. The City Council can expose the lenders," Jackson said.

He added, "People who have been trapped are suffering in the dark alone."

But why does Jackson think that blacks are likely to get those subprime mortgage rates? Could it be that they just have bad credit? Make poor investments? Buy the wrong things?

Nah, it's got to be racism, you know. Those "rats" causing all the problems. Uh huh.

In October, Jackson, according The Detroit Free Press [sic], said that the "stimulus spending should be structured to provide direct aid to homeowners fighting foreclosure." Right, because there will be no moral hazard there, ladies and gentlemen. Never fear, Jesse Jackson's on the case! Again from The Detroit Free Press [sic],

Jackson, who is founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said his organization intends to expose weak laws that allowed for the problems in the mortgage industry and work toward reform.

Something tells me "reform" will be anything, but.