Quota Reform Quotes

What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers, may be applied to Reason and Liberty: "Had we," said he, "a place to stand upon, we might raise the world." The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics. So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, - and all it wants, - is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began to contemplate redress.

They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person – No! At Berkeley we say handi capable person – and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. He had once placed a personals ad on Craigslist to recruit for those positions: Diverse social club seeking to make quota requires the services of East Asian, Jew, Hispanic, and handicapable individuals to round out Multicultural Brady Bunch Troupe. All applicants must be visibly identifiable as members of said group. Reformed Jews and ADHDers need not apply.

The message of the rebel is disturbing because of the consequences of the truth he or she speaks. To accept that Barack Obama is, as Cornel West says, "a black mascot for Wall Street" means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions or a single elected official can be instruments for genuine reform. To accept that nearly all forms of electronic communications are captured and stored by the government is to give up the illusion of freedom.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside? There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds,—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. “Columella tells us,” says he, “that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.” Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this; but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done. --From "A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers

He talks about the way in which the American academy "assigns an official group identity" to students, eliminating the distinction "between voluntary association and imposed group identity." For example, "a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor." The academy also distinguishes between people who "own" their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have "internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, "is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression." Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, "isn't really black." And "Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity." On the contrary, there's a process of "vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.

Foreign nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that support Russian democratic civic groups are a particular target of Russian accusations of foreign economic intrigue. In 2004, President Putin accused Russian NGOs of pursuing "dubious group and commercial interests" for taking foreign money. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev told the Russian State Duma in 2005 that the FSB had uncovered spies working in foreign-sponsored NGOs. He further claimed, "Foreign secret services are ever more actively using non-traditional methods for their work and, with the help of different NGOs educational programs, are propagandizing their interests, particularly in the former Soviet Union." Patrushev accused the United States of placing spies undercover within the Peace Corps, which was expelled from Russia in 2002, the Saudi Red Crescent, and the Kuwaiti NGO Society for Social Reform. Patrushev attributed an economic motive to these perceived foreign plots, alleging that industrialized states did not want "a powerful economic competitor like Russia." Echoing Soviet-era accusations of nefarious Western economic intent, he claimed that Russia had lost billions of dollars per year due to U.S., EU, and Canadian "trade discrimination. Pushing for stronger regulation of NGOs, Patrushev said, "The imperfectness of legislation and lack of efficient mechanisms for state oversight creates a fertile ground for conducting intelligence operations under the guise of charity and other activities. In 2012, Putin signed the "foreign agent law," which ordered Russian civil rights organizations that received any foreign funding to register as "foreign agents.

Page 35: The quota laws [that maintained existing ethnic proportions] of the 1920s, however, had themselves been reform achievements, supported by a broad coalition that included middle-class “Progressives” (both Republicans and Democrats), organized labor, and the most prominent African-American leaders of the day. Immigration restrictionists from the left side of the political spectrum included leaders of organized labor, prominent spokesmen for black Americans, social justice Progressives, and conservationists. They argued that uncontrolled immigration, encouraged by industrial employers seeking docile low-wage workers, flooded the national labor pool, depressed wages, worsened working conditions and tenement housing, weakened organized labor, provided the basis for the corrupt city political machines, and threatened overpopulation.

Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

In every revival of truth, the pendulum tendency to extremes finds abundant illustration. All reform movements, including the present one, are characterized by "a lunatic fringe". Neither

These days, activists who advocate "a world without prisons" are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without prisons--and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable--not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction.

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.

The Reformers understood justification to be purely preached when the Word is "rightly handl[ed]" (2 Tim. 2:15). A part of using the Word properly involves recognizing that it has two elements: law and gospel. The law is to be preached in all its terror, while the gospel is to be preached in all its comfort as that which the law cannot do (Rom. 8:3-4; CD, 3/4.6). Simply put, the Reformers taught us to preach Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23). If a church preaches any other "gospel," whether it is explicitly faith plus works or some insidious version of "get in by faith, stay in by obedience," it is not in conformity with the "teaching of Christ" (2 John 9) but with that of an antichrist counterfeit. Anything other than the doctrine of justification soles fide is what Paul termed "a different gospel" (Gal. 1:6), which brings with it an eternal anathema (Gal. 1:8-9).

This, then, is the legacy of January 1973. The "me generation" found its voice, religion became a political force, poverty and civil rights became someone else's problem, and the national will for concerted action for the common good of all its citizens was scattered into "a thousand points of light." At some point, perhaps those scattered lights will re-form and reunite to give birth to a rededicated nation, one that includes a place for everyone, opportunity for all, and help for those who need it. After all, it only takes a moment in time and some simultaneity. As Lyndon Johnson so aptly observed in his greatest speech - the "We Shall Overcome" speech - there are times in America when "history and fate meet at a single time in a single space to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom." Let us hop such a time is nearing.

Page 5-6: The elected branches in the liberal breakthrough of 1964-65 passed three great civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. All were based on the principle of nondiscrimination by race or national origin. … The Immigration and Naturalization Act ended a long-standing policy, so repugnant to liberal values and so embarrassing in cold war competition, of immigration quotas by national origin preference. … Then came the unintended consequences of reform. Government agencies and federal courts approved affirmative action policies, based ironically on the nondiscrimination laws of 1964-65, that imposed preferences, justified to compensate for past discrimination and designed to win proportional representation for minority groups in education, jobs, and government contracts. Similarly, in immigration policy, the reforms of 1965, intended to purge national origin quotas but not to expand immigration or to change its character, produced instead a flood of new arrivals that by the mid-1990s exceeded 30 million people, more than three-quarters of them arriving not from Europe but from Latin America and Asia. Despite the purging of racial and ethnic preferences by the 1964-65 laws, the ancestry of most immigrants in the 1990s entitled them to status as presumptive victims of historic discrimination in the united states. As members of protected classes, they enjoyed priority over most native-born Americans under affirmative action regulations.

Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought "I can't afford to" blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term "a sellout" demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forets, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

Trump is hardly the first president to promise a crackdown on illegal immigration. But he has tried to erase the political distinction between illegal and legal immigration, the former in the interest of law and order and the latter in the interest of national security. Of course, reality is very different than the one Trump portrays. He dismisses the socio-economic importance of immigration, keeping our working population younger as the baby boomers retire. And he ignores the push and pull behind global migration. The push relates to the disintegration of fragile countries due to conflict and climate change. The pull involves the unmet need for low skill work within the United States at a time of effective full employment, which existing immigration quotas can’t meet due to political paralysis. Given the political polarization, the parties talk past one another. Calls for comprehensive immigration reform are blunted by accusations of amnesty. Thus, there is no reasoned debate and little room for compromise.

The immigration laws that were in force until 1965 were a continuation of earlier laws written to maintain a white majority. However, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and accommodation, a racially restrictive immigration policy was an embarrassment. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965—also known as the Hart-Celler Act—abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all parts of the world. Its backers, however, emphasized that they did not expect it to have much impact. “Under the proposed bill,” explained Senator Edward Kennedy, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area.” The senator suggested that at most 62,000 people a year might immigrate. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives . . . .” The backers were wrong. In 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations 70 and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. Large parts of the country are being transformed by immigration. But the larger point is that “diversity” of the kind that immigration is now said to provide was never proposed as one of the law’s benefits. No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would reduce whites to a racial minority in California in little more than 20 years. In 1965—before diversity had been decreed a strength—Americans would have been shocked by the prospect of demographic shifts of this kind. Whites were close to 90 percent of the American population, and immigration reform would have failed if its backers had accurately predicted its demographic consequences.

On August 21, the Soviet defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, gave the order for troops to be withdrawn from Moscow. The State Committee for the State of Emergency had lost, and along with it, the U.S.S.R. had, too. On returning from his dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev evidently expected to be greeted by rejoicing crowds as a liberated hero. People were happy to see him back, but only as further evidence that the putsch committee had been defeated. Gorbachev's expectation of consolidating his authority on a surge of support came to nothing. All the admiration and support was for Yeltsin and a new government, the people who had taken risks and acted resolutely. This was strengthened when testimony was produced suggesting that Gorbachev might have had a part in preparing the conspiracy, or at least knew of it in advance and, in his usual way, decided not to take sides either with the Soviet conservatives or with the Russian reformers but to wait and see who came out on top. Indecision is a cardinal sin in an era of change. In an instant, Gorbachev lost everything. Once again, as happens during revolutions, something mind-blowing had occurred. On Monday he was, if not the most popular of leaders, the universally acknowledged president of a vast nation, with power over the world's largest army and over the industry and agricultural enterprises of a territory covering one-sixth of the world's land area-and the power to start a nuclear war. Come Thursday, he was nobody. He still retained a personal limousine, his secretaries, and a special telephone, only now no one was calling him. Whatever might be documented in seemingly unchallengeable statutes protected by a constitution and an army of lawyers, the center of power had shifted to Yeltsin, transferred in some intangible manner. Nobody really understands exactly how it happened, but neither was anyone in any doubt that the transfer of power had taken place. On December 8, 1991, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics, and Ukraine pulled of a spectacular ruse. Their leaders, Stanislav Shushkevich, Boris Yeltsin, and Leonid Kravchuk, met in a forest in Belarus, where they declared that, since their three republics had been the founders of the U.S.S.R., they had the right to dissolve it, which they would proceed to do. In its place they established the Union of Independent States. From their point of view, the trick made good sense: the presidents of the republics wanted to put Gorbachev and all his officials out of contention and to seize unfettered power for themselves. That is what was behind their action, and to implement it they needed formally to put an end to the indestructible U.S.S.R. Nowadays, people go on about what a mistake that action-the Belovezha Accords-was. One of those publicly lamenting it is Vladimir Putin. With great intensity and passion, he claims the accords was "a major geopolitical disaster." Well, it didn't seem like that to me at the time (and I'm not claiming to be a repository of objective truth, just relaying what my feelings were). It was just one more item on the television news-well, perhaps an item that rated a bit more discussion that usual, but there was no sense of portentousness. If those who gathered in the woods executed a crafty and, to be honest, rather deceitful and devious legalistic maneuver, they were only confirming something that was already obvious, namely that the U.S.S.R. no longer existed as a real country.