The difference between “de jure” and “de facto” legislation is not one of semantics – if a law is discriminatory on its face, it is called “de jure.” However if an enacted law has the effect of being discriminatory, it is called “de facto.” Most de jure laws are thankfully illegal in the United States, however de facto discriminatory legislation is rampant throughout this country, with the effects often not seen for years, if not decades, on the populace.
This means that if a President or sitting Legislature passes a bad discriminatory law, the damages usually aren’t seen until a long time in the future, long after that leader has left office, usually after he has made millions if not billions in the private sector, using his past laurels as an American politician.
This is the ultimate mark of a true scoundrel – and unfortunately characterizes the vast majority of our political leaders.
The combined effect of this morass of discriminatory laws, regulations and ordinances, coupled with the actual encouragement of police departments to recruit low IQ racist applicants while rejecting higher scoring ones, or the awarding of complete and total immunity for unethical, dishonest, or politically motivated prosecutors and judges who selectively prosecute and punish based on racial/ethnic/political grounds, whether federal or state, ensures a Josef Stalin-style police state more reminiscent of the days of the SS/Gestapo NAZI political dragnet targeting political dissidents and minorities, than what the Founding Fathers probably envisioned. As famed criminal defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate aptly stated, “The average US Citizen now commits at least 3 felonies per day unknowingly.” And as Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s Secret Police Chief said, “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Adding to this mix are recent admissions by FBI Chief James Comey that racist organizations have been infiltrating police departments for decades. Or that FBI Agents have been lying for decades in order to falsely convict people who may be innocent.
Because of this de facto American-style of segregation, not open and state-sanctioned, it has outlived the openly de jure segregationist state of South Africa which had an official governmental policy of apartheid, and because of its open and explicit state action, made it vulnerable to local and global anti-segregationist forces.
For example, when past Housing and Urban Development Commissioner Andrew Cuomo passed sweeping legislation reducing the credit requirements for people to buy or mortgage a home, this allowed tens of millions of minorities and poor people, who could not afford to buy a home, to buy into a financial albatross trap around their neck, and when the economy started to sputter in mid 2008, the vast majority of those people who couldn’t afford a house anyway, began to default, and then a huge avalanche of defaults ensued, causing the housing bubble to burst. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs actually betted against the people, and set up “credit swap derivatives” based solely on the cynical prediction that this housing mortgage bubble crisis would occur, and then they sickeningly made money off of this.
Adding insult to injury, then President Bill Clinton, bowing to pressure from ex-Goldman Sachs big-wigs Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Gene Sperling, who were in his Cabinet at the time in “government service,” repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, thus dissolving the wall between private checking/savings accounts of the people, and the wild and crazy gambling antics of the investment banks. This allowed these big banks to place high-stake, high-risk global investments using the American taxpayers’ hard-earned money. But of course, even though Bill Clinton dissolved Glass-Steagall in 1999, the American people of course did not feel its after effects until December 2008. And Andrew Cuomo was involved with HUD from 1993 to 2001, a full 7 years before his housing bubble mortgage crisis hit the fan.
Similarly, the Violence Against Womens’ Act (“VAWA”), written by then Senator Joe Biden and passed by then President Bill Clinton in 1994 seemed harmless, if not helpful, to battered women at that time, but the Trojan Horse of this very bad legislation allowed corrupt and racist local law enforcement, con-artist women, activist corrupt judges, money and power-hungry feminist womens’ groups, and others with a political agenda in the district attorneys office, to use the federal law’s ability to summarily suspend anyone’s 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 13th and 14th Amendment Rights whenever a complaint was made that someone engaged in some type of domestic dispute, even if no violence or evidence was found, arrest and charge that person, and then throw them into the abyss of the criminal justice system, where dishonest and unethical prosecutors, or activist judges “on the take” from various special interests and lobbying groups, could selectively prosecute or dismiss the case at their whim, with little to no recourse, or remedy for the accused. This means that after 20 years, marriage is at an all time low, more domestic violence has taken place, more children are growing up without parents, the Child Protective Services have grossly enlarged and are now being accused of being vehicles for child abduction/abuse/sexual trafficking, and other horrific crimes. Furthermore, the very fabric of the American family has been broken down into damaged components, while the “state machinery” operates to keep couples apart, even if they want to reconcile, thus further breaking down families and exposing innocent children to the wolves of providence and predators.
Bill Clinton also passed the newly amended federal Child Support Enforcement Act in 1994 which also summarily tossed good men into jail without a trial or inquest, suspending their drivers and professional licenses, even if they missed a few child support payments due to disability, loss of a job, bankruptcy, personal tragedy, or other unforseen event. The effects of these two above laws re-instituted the Debtors’ Prison in America, and many would argue that Slavery was in fact re-instituted as well, in violation of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest triumph, the 13th Amendment prohibiting Indentured Servitude and Slavery. Many a con-artist in American society has taken advantage of these two laws with the full force and brute power of the state against that targeted individual. The same story applies to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, sponsored by U.S. Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, which bill was also originally written by then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, passed by Congress, and signed into law by then President Bill Clinton. And again, these laws target racial minorities much harder than their white counterparts.
Bill Clinton recently admitted in April 2015, more than 15 years after he left office, that mass incarceration on his watch “put too many people in prison.” He went on to further state that poor whites and minorities in America were victimized as a result of America’s unparalleled rate of imprisonment due to the horrific laws that he enacted. Ibid. More than 2 million people are still held in captivity in prisons and jails, giving the country 25% of the world’s prison numbers despite having only 5% of its overall population. Id. Bill Clinton’s drug enforcement laws of 1994 created a crime bill that laid down several of the foundations of the country’s current mass incarceration trends vowing to be “tough on crime” with his “triangulation” policy of creating incentives to individual states to build more prisons, put more people behind bars and to keep them there for longer, introducing a federal three-strikes law that brought in long sentences for habitual offenders, creating “truth in sentencing” states which sentenced people to long terms in prison with no chance of parole being rewarded with increased federal funds, and the Clinton COPS program, ie, the “Community Oriented Policing Services,” where federal money was provided to states to allow them vastly to increase the number of police officers on the streets and consequently resulting in more arrests and convictions of poor whites and minorities. Id.
In terms of real estate, buying homes and leases of property, the real estate market is notorious for working with local, city, state and federal “urban planners” to literally, under the color of law and authority, “zone entire areas” to create the de facto result of segregating whites and other minorities from living, working, or going to school together.
According to the seminal study “Spatial Segregation and Neighborhoods” by Carl Nightingale, “during the 1890s, the word segregation became the preferred term for the practice of coercing different groups of people, especially those designated by race, to live in separate and unequal urban residential neighborhoods. In the southern states of the United States, segregationists imported the word originally used in the British colonies of Asia—to describe Jim Crow laws, and, in 1910, whites in Baltimore passed a “segregation ordinance” mandating separate black and white urban neighborhoods. Copy-cat legislation sprang up in cities across the South and the Midwest. But in 1917, a multiracial team of lawyers from the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mounted a successful legal challenge to these ordinances in the U.S. Supreme Court—even as urban segregation laws were adopted in other places in the world, most notably in South Africa. The collapse of the movement for legislated racial segregation in the United States occurred just as African Americans began migrating in large numbers into cities in all regions of the United States, resulting in waves of anti-black mob violence. Segregationists were forced to rely on non-statutory or formally nonracial techniques. In Chicago, an alliance of urban reformers and real estate professionals invented alternatives to explicitly racist segregation laws. The practices they promoted nationwide created one of the most successful forms of urban racial segregation in world history, rivaling and finally outliving South African apartheid. Understanding how this system came into being and how it persists today requires understanding both how the Chicago segregationists were connected to counterparts elsewhere in the world and how they adapted practices of city-splitting to suit the peculiarities of racial politics in the United States.”
These neo-segregationists escaped allegations of housing discrimination due to the relative lack of interest and enforcement of civil rights laws by the local, state, and federal government. Some claim that organizations like the NYS Division of Human Rights often do nothing more than provide an illusion of enforcement, while simply notifying or tipping off the offender so that they can cover themselves, and then retaliate against the complainer. In 2008 by a bipartisan federal commission on housing equity found that in the United States only about twenty thousand out of an estimated four million acts of housing discrimination receive any official attention in any given year.
As was described above, when in 1999 Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act dissolving the wall between investment banks and the peoples’ hard-earned money, three de facto racially discriminatory and apartheid-causing results occurred: predatory “subprime” loans to poor minorities; mortgage-backed securities consisting of predatory loans bundled with other loans and re-sliced into highly lucrative “tranches,” and “credit default swaps” meant to insure the mortgage-backed securities.
These three apartheid-spawning spiderwebs trapped huge numbers of minorities and poor people into bad mortgages using grossly fraudulent practices with guaranteed defaults.
Furthermore according to Nightingale, black people were more than 2-3 times as likely as white people of the same income to be steered into subprime loans even though 2/3 were eligible for standard mortgages that on average cost $100,000 less over the life of the loan. The resulting racial disparities in housing foreclosures widened the large inequalities in wealth on either side of the American color line. Ibid. Furthermore, according to Nightingale, “in 2008, as the American mortgage bubble burst, bringing on a global recession, U.S. whites possessed a staggering ten times more wealth on average than blacks of equal income, largely because of segregation in the American housing market. Four years later, as Obama finished his first term, the black-white wealth gap had doubled to twenty to one.” Id.
Reflecting on the above, it is no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the United States of America, through the de facto manipulation of its laws, especially in the last 20 years, in the laboratory-like settings of the family, criminal, and civil courts, both federal and local, as well as in its House of Representatives and Senate, and capped off by the Executive Branch, has devolved into a fully functional Apartheid State. Not on its surface, but in its practice. And this is the essential difference between a de jure apartheid state, and a de facto one.
And as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe so eloquently stated, “None are more hopelessly enslaved, than those who falsely believe they are free.”