The Patriot Post® · Housing Data Only Part of Obama's 'Racist' Puzzle
When we reported on Barack Obama’s massive scheme to socially engineer every neighborhood in America to comply with his race quotas, one question left largely unanswered was just how Obama planned to track Americans. Well, wonder no more. But be warned, the answer isn’t pretty.
To gauge compliance with its new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has released a draft of its “Assessment of Fair Housing Tool” — more accurately, the questionnaire every locality receiving HUD funding will have to complete. If you like TSA pat-downs at the airport, you’ll love this questionnaire.
The “tool” asks localities not only to submit information regarding “segregation levels,” “patterns of segregation,” and R/ECAPs (“Racially or Ethnically Concentrated Areas of Poverty”) but also to deliver data on school enrollment policies and provide comparisons on how the particular “jurisdiction” lines up with the “region.” As Ethics and Public Policy Center Senior Fellow Stanley Kurtz notes, this local-to-regional comparison is “a technique for effectively annexing a suburb to its larger metropolitan region.”
Particularly chilling is the requirement that participants use not only available local data but also “local knowledge” to fill out the questionnaire. HUD isn’t merely counting on statisticians to gather data but on unsuspecting citizen spies to turn over information on their communities.
Interestingly, Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, New York, may become “ground zero,” so to speak, for Obama’s effort.
But Obama’s data mining goes far deeper than housing information. As the New York Post’s Paul Sperry reports, Obama’s “Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics,” gathered in the name of eliminating racial disparities, includes everything from credit card info and supermarket locations to homeowners’ lot sizes and home square footage.
Since when is your local vegetable aisle of interest to the White House? Since it’s being measured — like everything in Obama’s America — by race.
Indeed, Sperry notes that the Department of Education is now amassing “information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country,” and districts whose information does not meet Obama’s standards may become subjects of forced “reform.”
And on the hiring front, the ill-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) not only tracks loans and credit cards by race but also has a new rule requiring regulated banks to track minority hiring and give the data to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.
It doesn’t end there, either. If you thought ObamaCare was bad (and it is), Obama’s plan to track Americans’ medical records with race in mind has been far underreported. Although Electronic Heath Records (EHRs) are pitched as a way to improve health care quality, to Obama’s HHS, they’re also a tool for collecting racial and ethnic information from Americans and then housing this information in a massive “interoperable” system, with medical professionals being used as data-gathering pawns.
If you think all these data collection avenues — from housing to finance to health — are independent, think again. Put the puzzle pieces together, and you begin to realize each has been carefully and craftily designed to gather, store and monitor Americans’ most private information.
“Fair housing” is just the latest front for Obama’s war on Liberty. And as public comment on this newest attack remains open, it’s a front on which we must be willing to fight.