Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain (At Your Own Risk)

You heard it here first, boys and girls:

"Oy gevalt, shades of Moscow"

 

(I knew it, I knew it!)

 

Stanley Kurtz at NRO's "The Corner":

... Early but unmistakable signs indicate that Obama’s regionalist push is well underway. Yet the president doesn’t discuss his regionalist moves and the press does not report them.

The most obvious new element of the president’s regionalist policy initiative is the July 19 publication of a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation broadening the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” The apparent purpose of this rule change is to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities.

Several administration critics noticed the change and challenged it, while the mainstream press has simply declined to cover the story.

Yet even critics have missed the real thrust of HUD’s revolutionary rule change. That’s understandable, since the Obama administration is at pains to downplay the regionalist philosophy behind its new directive. The truth is, HUD’s new rule is about a great deal more than forcing racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs. (Regionalism, by the way, is actually highly controversial among minority groups. There are many ways in which both middle-class minorities in suburbs, and less well-off minorities in cities, can be hurt by regionalist policies–another reason those plans are seldom discussed.)

The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” 

 

READ. IT. ALL.

 

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

"Forced economic integration" -- a brilliant euphemism for Big-Brotherism run amuck. The idea would warm the cockles of Lenin's heart, and for good reason: this is exactly the idea the Soviets dreamt up and imposed on the hapless Soviet peoples for nearly three-quarters of a century: Wipe out the middle class, herd the dregs into bleak and soulless cities -- and make sure, of course, that the Ruling Class is separated from this horde of proletarians by assigning each of its members his own comfortable, even lavish, dacha somewhere in the countryside. I have no doubt that -- in that Great Dacha in the Skies where Stalin and and his circle now abide -- they are dancing kazatzkies at the glorious news that an American president is converting the United States to the Soviet model. Ain't progress grand?