The race-obsessed Democrat Party’s attorney general chose Jacksonville to be the site of its latest attack on capitalism and racial harmony. Merrick Garland, the corrupt attorney general, personally got involved in the case, quite likely as part of Democrat President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
Garland accused a local bank’s officials of racism, in effect. He bullied Ameris Bank into paying a $9 million settlement.
Most of the local media went for it hook, line and sinker, reporting it as if the bank had been found guilty of the crime of “redlining.”
The bank is not guilty and said as much in a statement.
“We strongly disagree with any suggestion that we have engaged in discriminatory conduct and are confident in our efforts to provide equal access to affordable mortgage products in the Jacksonville community and all the markets we serve,” Ameris CEO Palmer Proctor said in a news release.
“We cooperated fully with the Department’s inquiry and have entered into this settlement to avoid the distraction of litigation and because we share the Department’s goal of expanding access to homeownership in underserved areas,” he said.
No bank, no matter how sound financially, could take on an entity with a $6 trillion budget and plenty of enmity. Especially with the thrashing it would get from the media. Eye on Jacksonville addressed the redlining issue previously.
The Justice Department has run the same scam in Houston, Memphis, Philadelphia, Camden, Wilmington, Newark, Los Angeles, Columbus, Tulsa and Rhode Island — and dozens of other cities are targets.
Ameris was accused of not having any banks in neighborhoods where the majority of the residents who have chosen to live in the neighborhood have black skin. Yet, to our knowledge no law requires banks to be located according to skin color.
It would make little difference in any case. Many banks are closing branches because customers do business online these days rather than in person. If you are online it doesn’t matter where the bank is located.
The government claimed fewer people with black skin were getting mortgages than people with white skin. But mortgages are issued on the basis of the ability to repay, not skin color. The government likely could not prove that the bank had refused to make a loan to a creditworthy person with black skin.
It was all political farce, designed to show that Biden and the Democratic socialists are fighting for people with black skin, which is the opposite of the truth. The reason many people with black skin are poor is because Democrats have been enacting policies that keep them poor for the past six decades. Democrats are pandering to a voting bloc that is beginning to shrink.
2 responses to “Government assault on a local bank was political”
Great piece Mr. Lloyd.
It harkens me back to a great book about Obama “Radical in Chief” by Stanley Kurtz ( https://www.nationalreview.com/2010/10/obamas-radical-past-stanley-kurtz/ ).
That book ALSO provided the best explanation I’ve yet seen about how / why the “subprime crisis” came to be.
Long story short: Leftist revolutionaries since at least the 1970’s have sought to foment system-debilitating financial crises that could be portrayed as failures of the capitalist system.
Barney Frank et als. pushing anti-“redlining” regulatory actions against banks, effectively forcing them to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers was deliberately setting a financial time-bomb.
After that book, after the subprime collapse, we also saw Obama / Eric Holder’s DOJ suing financial institutions and then agreeing to “settlements” by which the institutions didn’t pay to the government, but to “community groups.” It was a shakedown, and probably would not pass Constitutional muster.
As many realize, the presumptive head of the current White House is Obama and crew (Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, etc.).
So the Garland DOJ’s “redlining” efforts appears to be a reprise of what we’ve seen before under Obama.
We thought by the 1990s we were having a post-racial country. Unfortunately race has been more prevalent now than anytime in the 200 and 50 years that the United States of America existed. The neo Marxist love to have conflict and having voter blocks to have their little piece of the Utopia of the the neo Marxist project. Hopefully more and more people will realize what a horrible plague is the neo communist.