The race-obsessed Democrat Party’s attorney general chose Jacksonville to be the site of its latest attack on capitalism and racial harmony. Merrick Garland, the corrupt attorney general, personally got involved in the case, quite likely as part of Democrat President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
Garland accused a local bank’s officials of racism, in effect. He bullied Ameris Bank into paying a $9 million settlement.
Most of the local media went for it hook, line and sinker, reporting it as if the bank had been found guilty of the crime of “redlining.”
The bank is not guilty and said as much in a statement.
“We strongly disagree with any suggestion that we have engaged in discriminatory conduct and are confident in our efforts to provide equal access to affordable mortgage products in the Jacksonville community and all the markets we serve,” Ameris CEO Palmer Proctor said in a news release.
“We cooperated fully with the Department’s inquiry and have entered into this settlement to avoid the distraction of litigation and because we share the Department’s goal of expanding access to homeownership in underserved areas,” he said.
No bank, no matter how sound financially, could take on an entity with a $6 trillion budget and plenty of enmity. Especially with the thrashing it would get from the media. Eye on Jacksonville addressed the redlining issue previously.
The Justice Department has run the same scam in Houston, Memphis, Philadelphia, Camden, Wilmington, Newark, Los Angeles, Columbus, Tulsa and Rhode Island — and dozens of other cities are targets.
Ameris was accused of not having any banks in neighborhoods where the majority of the residents who have chosen to live in the neighborhood have black skin. Yet, to our knowledge no law requires banks to be located according to skin color.
It would make little difference in any case. Many banks are closing branches because customers do business online these days rather than in person. If you are online it doesn’t matter where the bank is located.
The government claimed fewer people with black skin were getting mortgages than people with white skin. But mortgages are issued on the basis of the ability to repay, not skin color. The government likely could not prove that the bank had refused to make a loan to a creditworthy person with black skin.
It was all political farce, designed to show that Biden and the Democratic socialists are fighting for people with black skin, which is the opposite of the truth. The reason many people with black skin are poor is because Democrats have been enacting policies that keep them poor for the past six decades. Democrats are pandering to a voting bloc that is beginning to shrink.
