RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://news.investors.com/121313-682910-hud-targets-surburan-zoning-as-racially-exclusionary.htm

Stanley Kurtz wrote all about this last year in

Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities by Stanley Kurtz (Aug 2, 2012)

“The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to expand its view of discriminatory housing practices to include local zoning rules to control building in suburban neighborhoods, a New York county official battling the federal agency warns.

Rob Astorino, the Republican executive of Westchester County, says his Manhattan suburb illustrates what the rest of the country can expect under a sweeping anti-discrimination regulation HUD is expected to finalize by Christmas.

“The battle for zoning in Westchester County (will be) the battle everywhere,” Astorino said Tuesday during an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) briefing on Capitol Hill.

HUD has cut off $17 million in funding to Westchester for refusing to sue local municipalities to modify zoning ordinances to accommodate more subsidized housing. HUD claims the ordinances, which like almost every locality in America, set limits on building density, are racially “exclusionary.”

“HUD has said that even quarter-acre (lot) single-family zoning, in their view, may very well be discriminatory and perpetuate ‘segregation,'” Astorino said. “And (it) must be looked at, and even maybe attacked.”

Disparities Vs. Discrimination

Over the past few years, Westchester, one of the toniest communities in America, has built 400 affordable-housing units in mostly white neighborhoods. It’s under federal orders to build 350 more at a total cost of $51 million.

But HUD’s not satisfied. “This is about changing every block, every neighborhood to the viewpoint of federal bureaucrats at HUD,” Astorino said.

Under the Obama administration, housing officials no longer limit their view of housing discrimination to overt acts such as landlords and Realtors steering minorities away from predominantly white areas. They now consider any race-neutral policy that has the “effect” of creating “disparate access” for minorities to good jobs, schools and other suburban “assets” to be a racist “barrier.

The South African reality differs from the Western lore.http://www.nationalreview.com/node/366317/print

‘Go safely Umkhonto. Umkhonto we Sizwe. We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them — kill the whites.” These are lyrics from the anthem of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” The organization is better known as the MK, the military wing of the Marxist African National Congress (ANC). The MK was established by its commander, Nelson Mandela, to prosecute a terrorist war against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime.

Mandela had been out of prison for about two years in September 1992 when, fist clenched in the “black power” salute, he was filmed singing the anthem with a number of his comrades. Interestingly, but not ironically, as Mandela and others repeated the refrain about killing Boer farmers, it was a white man who stood next to him, similarly clench-fisted and singing. The man’s name is Ronnie Kasrils. A Soviet-trained terrorist who helped Mandela found the MK, Kasrils was a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

So was Mandela. No surprise there: Communism was, and remains, the animating ideology of the ANC. That makes it the enduring tragedy of South Africa.

I admit to finding this week’s Mandela hagiography tough to take. It was, to be sure, predictable. As we’ve observed time and again, once the culture and the institutions of opinion have been surrendered to the Left for two or three generations, you cannot be too surprised to wake up one day and find that the United States is no longer the country you’ve so confidently described as “right of center.” Still, while high-wattage fawning was to be expected in the mainstream media, the conservative press, too, tripped over itself to praise Mandela. That was disheartening.