E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Putting 'diversity' and 'equity' first nearly crashed the economy
[NYPOST] What would it take to get back to excellence and competence as the only criteria for employment?
Never happen. The dull and the incompetent would screech too loudly and the professional followers would hop on board for the ride over the cliff. Was it the law-abiding who demanded we defund the police?
Perhaps it would require the bridges to start falling down.
They're only built to last for so long. Back when I worked for the gubmint, maintenance was always the first thing that got... cut uhhh... pushed to the outyears.
Though I suspect that if they did, then certain people would claim they’d only fallen because of "structural racism."
Endemic structural racism.
Still, this week we had a good reminder of just how over-tolerant we have been of this insane, anti-excellence agenda. Because although the bridges haven’t yet started to collapse, the banks have.
Wasn't there a bridge that went not all that far back? In Wisconson or one of the flyover states nobody ever goes to but Publicans.
And one reason is that the banks in question prioritized equity over excellence.
Well, obviously you can't hire for competence. That would be unfair to the stupid and the ham-handed and politicians' relatives. And donors.
The DIE agenda constitutes an absolute obsession with exact representation (or preferably overrepresentation) of women at senior positions, including board positions in American companies. This obsession with female representation is only an issue with high-status jobs, of course. Board seats, Hollywood star pay and so on.
Empirical results don't count. I saw a remake of David Copperfield a year or so ago. Everybody was a different race: The guy who played David Copperfield with from India. Agnes' father appeared to be Chinese. Agnes was black. Dora was white, since she was a 'tard. So also was Steerforth, since he was a cad.
There is no movement that I am aware of that is pushing for equal female representation among road-layers in America. Funny that.
It's probably been at least thirty years since a woman couldn't get a job wearing vest and holding a flag. I don't recall any driving steam rollers and riding shovels. Surely it should be a 50-50 split?
But for at least 15 years, diversity has been everything.
But... but... Surely diversity is our strength?
After the last financial crisis, in 2008, the then-head of the International Monetary Fund came up with a cutesy line.
Wait for it...
If Lehmann Brothers had been Lehmann Sisters, Christine Lagarde used to claim, then perhaps the global financial crisis might not have happened.
Further proof that diversity makes you stupid.
Well, that is a lot of balls, as the New York Post showed this week with the tale of Jay Ersapah. Ersapah is a woman
Which should qualify her right there...
and held the role of head of risk management at SVB.
From her name and her looks, she's non-white. That makes her doubly, maybe even triple qualified. Plus, she calls herself a queer person of color.
But if Ersapah spent any time trying to manage risks, I don’t know how she did it because her more full-time job seemed to be to promote woke nonsense inside SVB.
Ahah. Applying what she learned on collitch.
For instance, as The Post revealed, Ersapah spearheaded such initiatives as a month-long Pride campaign, a blog emphasizing mental health awareness for LGBTQ+ youth and was co-chair of the SVB European LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group.
Somehow being a flaming heterosexual, I never had need of a Pride Month and never will...
At such shindigs, Ersapah would talk about what it was like to be "a queer person of color and a first-generation immigrant from a working-class background."
Being colorless myself, and only the offspring of a second generation immigrant on my mother's side, the fact that I regard all this as nonsense is disallowed. I was obviously born with a silver spoon in my mouth. My Dad bought it at the company store when he got off shift at the mines.
By the standards of our day, Ersapah is an absolute winner.
Empiricism aside, mind you.
A winner of the intersectional grievance studies search for the most oppressed person.
One night around midnight, the union thugs came by and shot up our house. We had a big old round oak table and my mother grabbed me and hid us behind it. My Dad hid next to the window (not a good idea, given the walls' lack of armor plate) and returned fire out the open window. Sure glad we had all that privilege to protect us. Now, I don't remember that story, but I can recall it because I heard them tell it so many times. I can see the flame erupting from my Dad's pistol because my mother described so thoroughly and often. On a digression from the same stoopid subject, you don't see a lot of lady coal miners, do you? It might not even be 50-50 in the boardrooms, the sexist bastards.
The ethic of our day dictates that such a person not only has a right to any and every position, but that their very being there will bring untold (and unspecified) benefits to the company.
That's why the coal companies have so many woman in their boardrooms.
Well, what a shame that the one thing Ersapah can’t identify as is "competent."
Oh, sure she's competent at... something or other.
If she were competent, she might have been better at what should have been her main role — which was to manage risk.
There are multiple approaches to risk management. She just made her own up.
Something which she and the bank as a whole were clearly inept at.
The problem is that it's not just one bank in one location. They're all connected in one way or another.
Not least because SVB was lending long and borrowing short — an unbelievably elementary error that banks have been studiously avoiding since the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s.
Well, if you throw away the rule books and start without any preconceived prejudices, that's the pathway to success, ain't it? I recall hearing a series of managers (in a single afternoon!) saying things like that as they were throwing the Peter Drucker approach to management out the window.
But look at the things that obsessed the top brass at SVB and you can see that their eyes were on other balls.
Never heard of Management by Objectives (the Next Big Thing after Peter Drucker) unless the managing they were doing was toward other objectives than banking.
Among the failed bank’s board, only one member had a career in investment banking.
An organization will keep chugging along despite incompetence or even malevolence at the top if it's big enough. Think Obama-Biden through Biden-Whatsername. Eventually it will fail.
The other board members were mega-donors to the Clintons and other top Democrats.
My surprisemeter's busted again.
One was even an improv performer.
Tell us he wasn't a mime. No, dammit! Don't mime your answer!
By modern standards the board did everything right. It had the right Democratic politics — clearly loathing half of the country. It even donated a staggering $73 million to Black Lives Matter groups.
They have excellent taste in real estate.
And this wasn’t just some expensive tokenistic thing.
No! Reeeeeeeally?
The bank’s own promotional materials stated that "SVB is committed to creating a more diverse, equitable, inclusive and accessible environment within SVB, within the innovation ecosystem, and in our communities.
So how'd that work out for ya?... Never mind.
"At the heart of this commitment is our effort to foster a more inclusive culture and increase racial, ethnic and gender representation."
Why?
The bank boasted that it wanted to use its resources to "break down systemic barriers."
Yup. Gonna chuck that old Peter Drucker crap and start fresh.
All very nice, and clearly all pretty disastrous.
But they'd all been to college, hadn't they? Even the mime!
Last time the global economy almost crashed was in part because of banks making loans to people on the basis — among other things — of their race.
The U.S. economy is closely connected to most of the other economies in the world. An itchy bottom in Washington requires Preparation H in Europe, maybe surgery in Kazakhstan.
But a responsible bank should not issue a loan solely because of someone’s race, sex or sexuality.
Just goes to show what a racist-sexist homophone this writer is. There's no better guarantee of financial stability than the color of a person's skin or the way he/she/it wears a dress.
It should look simply and solely at whether the person can repay the loan — whether it is for a mortgage or a business.
Now, I'm sure there are lots of good reasons the bank got stiffed.
Make a priority of anything else, and you are not "managing risk."
Who sez so?
You are creating it.
"But in college they told us..."
"Shuddup."
"And stop calling her a silly bitch. You'll get us sued!"


Posted by: Fred 2023-03-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=661717