Obama's Reparations and Redistribution Policy

George Picard

The Wall Street Journal highlights one facet of an Obama race-based agenda that has guided many of his policies since becoming President. This one concerns forced integration demanded by the Housing and Urban Development department -- even in the complete absence of racism and the dismissal of studies that show minorities often prefer to live where they have pre-existing family ties and social networks.

You'd think that federal housing officials these days would focus on repairing a housing market that continues to retard economic growth. Yet the Department of Housing and Urban Development is preoccupied with the precise racial and ethnic make-up of American neighborhoods, such as Westchester County north of New York City.

In 2009 Westchester's then-county executive, Democrat Andrew Spano, reached a settlement with HUD that ended a lawsuit brought by a liberal activist group. The suit alleged that Westchester had accepted federal grants while making false claims about "affordable housing" in the county. Never mind that prior to Team Obama's strong-arming, HUD officials in Republican and Democratic Administrations had praised Westchester's housing practices. Mr. Spano said he agreed to the deal instead of going to trial because he didn't want to put federal funds for the county at risk.

Westchester officials admitted no wrongdoing, but the county did agree to spend $50 million on 750 new subsidized housing units -- 630 of which must be constructed in enclaves that are less than 3% black and 7% Hispanic -- and to market them to minorities. According to the current Westchester executive, Republican Rob Astorino, the county is well along in meeting those goals, but the Obama Administration won't take yes for an answer.

"HUD is trying to expand the terms of the settlement from a straightforward stipulation to build housing into an open-ended utopian integration order," Mr. Astorino says. The Administration wants the county to say that its housing patterns stem from discriminatory practices, though there's no evidence to support the claim. "All of the objective studies that have been done show that housing patterns in Westchester are driven by economics," says Mr. Astorino...

The Obama Administration acknowledges that its demands on Westchester -- which include rezoning -- fall outside of the settlement, but the White House is determined to make an example of the county. "We're clearly messaging other jurisdictions across the country that there has been a significant change in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and we're going to ask them to pursue similar goals as well," said Rob Sims, a deputy secretary at HUD at the time of the settlement.

I have written about this particular policy in two columns : Racial spoils in Obama's America    and, more recently in Obama's Racial Spoils System. There are many other examples of Obama's policies -- and those of his hand-picked team -- that reveal a strong racial favoritism manifesting itself in a wide range of policies of the Obama administration. ObamaCare has a strong racial-biased component to it (among them, the expansion of Medicaid at the expense of Medicare; far more minorities use Medicaid than Medicare; race-based enforcement at the Department of Justice -- the Civil Rights Division is now staffed by very left-wing officials who see racism everywhere; The Justice Department is suing banks and other financial institutions who do not loan enough (at favorable rates) to minority borrowers; the boondoggle stimulus bill that featured a large percentage of borrowed money to keep state and city government employees in the clover (a disproportionally large percentage of the government work force is composed of minorities); just recently, the EPA has been giving away money to ACORN-like social justice groups that advocate on behalf of minorities who they say are disproportionally subject to environmental "injustice" (this was a favorite claim of Van Jones, who was forced to leave the administration when his radical views were publicized). Congresswoman Maxine Waters -- bless her heart -- has bragged that the Congressional Black Caucus had its handprints all over Obama's job proposal. The new Consumers Financial Protection bureau has been charged with rooting about racism and prejudice across America (racism, by the way, is often in the eye of the beholder).

Mona Sutphen, a senior White House domestic policy adviser, all but admitted what the agenda was and would continue to be when she said in late 2009, "We are not in disagreement with the CBC (Congressional Black Caucus) on any part of their agenda" . Not in any part? Heck, let's just have Maxine Waters draft and pass legislation.

The list goes on and on.

So much for the post-racial President. His words about there being no black America and no white America are belied by his own actions and those of his minions. His hypocrisy is self-evident.

Reparations and redistribution -- those are his policies.

If more mainstream media outlets would cover this agenda, Obama's poll numbers would plummet.

Perhaps more Americans are discovering the truth themselves: while his poll number with the black population are still relatively (and understandably) high his polling among white Americans has been in a free fall.