House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s family benefited from U.S. program for minorities based on disputed ancestry

[Loren Pechtel]

The issue of getting shot by police is way overblown. The number of unarmed people shot by the police is very low and most of those involved people trying to take the cop's gun.

The police are a lot more militant than they used to be. I don't find that surprising, given all the drugs and guns and general attitude of "FUCK you pigs!" across the board.

That said though, back around 2000 when I was on the board of the local NAACP the issues of YBM and cops became a thing, here locally. A common attitude amongst other board members was something along the lines of "The problem between YBM and the cops isn't the cops. It's no account fathers. Guys who think making a baby means they're a man. It doesn't! Any fool can make a baby. Real men take care of their babies."
Statistics backed them up strongly. About 2/3rds of black kids were born to single mothers. About 1/4 of white kids were. Boys raised by single moms are at a huge disadvantage, regardless of race.
Tom

Your local NAACP must have been trash. What else could they be for basing their opinions on a flawed view of available statistics? My understanding is there is no (and has never been) any data available that counted unmarried couples as a two-parent household.

Just saying,

Whether a couple is married or not doesn't really matter. What matters is whether they are both raising the child. There is a very big racial difference here and it is highly correlated with outcome. TomC is right about the problem.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The point is not that there is no racism, but that there isn't enough racism to hold people back.

Consistently being denigrated and treated poorly can have long-lasting and severe psychological effects. You have no reasonable basis for your position.

Bad things happen to everybody.

True, but lumping random bad events with persistent non-random events is ridiculous.

Probably a bit more bad things happen to blacks. That's not enough to explain what we see and it's useless at explaining the difference between native blacks and immigrant blacks.

 

[Toni]

Your local NAACP must have been trash. What else could they be for basing their opinions on a flawed view of available statistics? My understanding is there is no (and has never been) any data available that counted unmarried couples as a two-parent household.

Just saying,

Whether a couple is married or not doesn't really matter. What matters is whether they are both raising the child. There is a very big racial difference here and it is highly correlated with outcome. TomC is right about the problem.

Why does the problem exist? And why does the racial disparity exist?

As far as I can tell, a huge part of the issue arose from attempts to 'reform' welfare--meaning, denying financial help to poor families who had a father present because if they were poor, it meant he wasn't doing his job by supporting them and so they all needed to be punished.

The reality is that it has always been difficult to be poor, and that being poor has little to do with work ethic or willingness to work (yeah, of course there are exceptions and I'm thinking of one right now) and a lot more to do with things that involve how hard it is to find a job that provides stability, decent pay and health care and a bit of flexibility which we all need if we are to live decent lives. When we decided that welfare was only for mothers of children who had been abandoned by the father, then we did a huge disservice to our entire country, the burden of which has fallen most harshly on the shoulders of the poor.

 

[laughing dog]

Consistently being denigrated and treated poorly can have long-lasting and severe psychological effects. You have no reasonable basis for your position.
True, but lumping random bad events with persistent non-random events is ridiculous.

Probably a bit more bad things happen to blacks. That's not enough to explain what we see and it's useless at explaining the difference between native blacks and immigrant blacks.

Forgive me if I do not take your handwaved word on it.

 

[Jarhyn]

Consistently being denigrated and treated poorly can have long-lasting and severe psychological effects. You have no reasonable basis for your position.
True, but lumping random bad events with persistent non-random events is ridiculous.

Probably a bit more bad things happen to blacks. That's not enough to explain what we see and it's useless at explaining the difference between native blacks and immigrant blacks.

Forgive me if I do not take your handwaved word on it.

So, I wouldn't handwave the difference that Lauren handwaved.

Let's think about it for a moment. Lauren has expressed a difference perceived, at least by Lauren, as meaningful. It didn't come from nowhere. It is a perception, a meme that Lauren got from somewhere, and likely not the original font of such thought.

So, while it is by no means necessarily true by substantive effect, I cannot help but wonder if it is not true by Tinkerbell effect: "very fine" people believe it and operate on such "very fine" reasoning.

I will fully accept this as that, unbidden, I am evoked of similar feelings. At best I can force myself to have as much empathy about that and maybe decisions come out the other end roughly ethically.

But if I were to put a finger on it it would be that there's a lot of difference between someone starting off the children of people who weren't allowed to build wealth and people who immigrate with the massive piles of wealth that the US requires people to have to do so.

Just a thought.

 

[laughing dog]

Forgive me if I do not take your handwaved word on it.

So, I wouldn't handwave the difference that Lauren handwaved.

Let's think about it for a moment. Lauren has expressed a difference perceived, at least by Lauren, as meaningful. It didn't come from nowhere. It is a perception, a meme that Lauren got from somewhere, and likely not the original font of such thought.

So, while it is by no means true but substantive effect, I cannot help but wonder if it is not true by Tinkerbell effect: "very fine" people believe it and operate on such "very fine" reasoning.

I will fully accept this as that, unbidden, I am evoked of similar feelings.

But if I were to put a finger on it it would be that there's a lot of difference between someone starting off the children of people who weren't allowed to build wealth and people who immigrate with the massive piles of wealth that the US requires people to have to do so.

Just a thought.

Yeah, but the bold-faced is exactly the type of SES factor that LP always controls for.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But if I were to put a finger on it it would be that there's a lot of difference between someone starting off the children of people who weren't allowed to build wealth and people who immigrate with the massive piles of wealth that the US requires people to have to do so.

Just a thought.

Pile of wealth? Immigrants usually come with little if anything beyond education.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Your local NAACP must have been trash. What else could they be for basing their opinions on a flawed view of available statistics? My understanding is there is no (and has never been) any data available that counted unmarried couples as a two-parent household.

Just saying,

Whether a couple is married or not doesn't really matter. What matters is whether they are both raising the child. There is a very big racial difference here and it is highly correlated with outcome. TomC is right about the problem.

Why does the problem exist? And why does the racial disparity exist?

As far as I can tell, a huge part of the issue arose from attempts to 'reform' welfare--meaning, denying financial help to poor families who had a father present because if they were poor, it meant he wasn't doing his job by supporting them and so they all needed to be punished.

I don't know if it's a huge part but it certainly is a factor.

 

[Swammerdami]

Returning to the topic of Kevin McCarthy, I hear that he has already committed felony obstruction of justice by threatening telecom companies. If they obey the law and comply with subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 Select Committee, then — according to McCarthy — when the GOP regains power the GOP will take revenge.

Our right-wingers insist that they believe in law and order. What do they think of this?

 

[ZiprHead]

But if I were to put a finger on it it would be that there's a lot of difference between someone starting off the children of people who weren't allowed to build wealth and people who immigrate with the massive piles of wealth that the US requires people to have to do so.

Just a thought.

Pile of wealth? Immigrants usually come with little if anything beyond education.

Yeah, then they buy a half million dollar convenience store.

 

[TomC]

Why does the problem exist? And why does the racial disparity exist?

I totally agree that both are very important and complex questions. But they're separate questions. Discussing them in conjunction, but not together, would be a great conversation.
But, a derail.

As for the OP, assuming the story presented is accurate, Wages didn't commit fraud, at least not technically. The SBA accepted whatever it was he presented almost 25 years ago. Maybe they need to up their standards for what constitutes BIPOC.

But here's the thing. If SBA has affirmative action goals to reach, like disbursing X number of dollars in contracts to Native American companies, maybe Vortex was the most Native American company qualified to do the work.
Tom

 

[Jarhyn]

Why does the problem exist? And why does the racial disparity exist?

I totally agree that both are very important and complex questions. But they're separate questions. Discussing them in conjunction, but not together, would be a great conversation.
But, a derail.

As for the OP, assuming the story presented is accurate, Wages didn't commit fraud, at least not technically. The SBA accepted whatever it was he presented almost 25 years ago. Maybe they need to up their standards for what constitutes BIPOC.

But here's the thing. If SBA has affirmative action goals to reach, like disbursing X number of dollars in contracts to Native American companies, maybe Vortex was the most Native American company qualified to do the work.
Tom

That's not the criterion, though, nor the intent of the law at least not on the face of it. The law is specifically to ease barriers to entry for BIPOC, communities for which resources have been systemically withheld.

If there is no barrier for a company from such reasons as community resource starvation, then there is no justification for allowing the program to be leveraged, especially by someone with fraudulent claims. And ya, it was fraudulent.

Do we really need to go back and start holding up posts from the "Pocahontas" thread?