Focus.
That’s the one thing that too many American institutions cannot do these days. Companies, government agencies, and professional groups neglect their basic duties.
Instead, they chase the shiny objects of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, and search relentlessly for racism under every rock. Yesterday’s managers have become today’s magpies.
What could go wrong?
Everything.
Defunct Silicon Valley Bank had no chief risk officer between April 29 and Jan. 3. That’s when it wolfed down Treasury bonds whose value slid while the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates. Silicon Valley Bank also should have broadened its customer base, rather than till Big Tech’s narrow soil.
SVB did have a chief diversity officer on duty. It also loaned to shaky clean-power companies.
SVB’s board might have demanded more corporate attention to these matters, but what did they know? Only one member had a clue about banking—former Barclays Investment Bank executive Tom King.
SVB did cultivate friends in the Democratic Party. This proved handy when it derailed last week. At a velocity inversely proportional to its disdainful response to the East Palestine, Ohio, catastrophe, the White House raced to SVB’s rescue and guaranteed all of its deposits above the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s $250,000 legal threshold.
If this were such a great idea, Congress should have passed such a law. Instead, Pharaoh Joseph I simply waved his scepter.
So let it be written. So let it be done!
Failed Signature Bank looked like a university sociology department. It spent insufficient time on such mundane matters as asset management.
However, on Oct. 20, Chairman Scott Shays co-hosted a company gathering called “Know Your Pronouns” along with Finn Brigham a “genderqueer trans masculine person.” Signature Bank also produced videos with singing staffers covered in feathers. (Really.)
California should focus on its $22.5 billion budget deficit, citizens stranded behind massive snow drifts in the San Bernardino Mountains, and a fleeing population. Instead, Sacramento is crafting a statewide scheme for slavery reparations. Estimated cost: $640 billion.
San Francisco should focus on its vagrancy crisis, open-air heroin use, and rampant social disorder.
Boring!
Instead, far-Left officials act as if they were in Selma in 1953, and the Golden Gate Bridge morphed into the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They are busy hallucinating a bizarre and severely divisive reparations bonanza that would give eligible blacks seven-figure checks, debt forgiveness, $97,000 annually for 250 years, and homes for $1 each.
Potential price: $232 billion, or 16 times this year’s $14 billion city budget.
“Let me get this straight,” radio host Larry Elder wrote via Twitter. “A black college-educated San Franciscan, with money in the Silicon Valley Bank, gets full reimbursement though his deposit exceeds FDIC’s $250K limit, receives $5mil in reparations, AND gets student debt loan forgiveness. Is this a great country or what?”
The Pentagon should focus on China’s mounting menace. Instead, it is pouring time, energy, and morale into hunting down white nationalists in the ranks, wherever they are. Rather than scan the skies for Russian bombers, the Air Force seeks at least four new DEI chiefs. Salary: Up to $183,500.
Never mind that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is black. The former four-star Army general and millions of other black GIs have excelled in uniform, both enlisted service members and officers.
The military is arguably America’s least racist, most color-neutral institution and has been since President Harry Truman, a Democrat, integrated the armed forces in 1948. So, Austin & Co. treat our beloved service members as if they lived in Mississippi in 1962.
The American College of Surgeons should focus on safer, more effective medical procedures. Instead, it now aims to “confront racism in surgery.” An ACS leadership retreat showcased critical race theory guru Ibrahim X. Kendi.
The United States is crumbling, in large part, because radical leftists from coast to coast refuse to do their jobs so they can battle the racist ghosts of yesterday.
Americans suffer badly while political and business leaders take their eyes off the prize and pretend that Martin Luther King Jr. never lived and George Wallace never died.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.