I wasn’t planning on writing more about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but too much info has been coming down the pike to ignore. Plus, I found the video below, and felt I had to share it.
First up: Silicon Valley Bank donated nearly $74 million to #BlackLivesMatter and associated causes.
A newly published database from the Claremont Institute has revealed that the since-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.
In an August 2020 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion report, SVB declared “we are on a journey committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in our workplace, with our partners and across the innovation economy.”
The bank revealed that they had donated $1.6 million to “causes supporting gender parity in innovation,” as well as $1.2 million to support “opportunities for diverse, emerging talent in innovation.”
In SVB’s 2021 Proxy Statement, the bank wrote in relation to racial and social equity that “the calls to end systemic racial and social inequities following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had a profound global impact.”
“We responded by expanding opportunities for dialogue, including hosting over 40 small group ‘Conversation Circles’ in which over two thirds of our employees participated in discussions about racial equity issues.”
The statement continued to say that the bank’s “DEI-focused ‘town hall’ meetings for employees were in response to our recognition of the need for greater transparency and dialogue around the racial representation of our workforce and the innovation ecosystem.”
In addition, the bank, provided “opportunities for action, mobilizing our employees and clients to join in community service through Tech Gives Back, a week of volunteer events focused in part on racial equity, social justice and access to the innovation economy,” and partnered with “Act One Ventures to launch The Diversity Term Sheet Rider for Representation at the Cap Table initiative, which advocates for venture capital firms to include in all of their term sheets a pledge to bring members of underrepresented groups into deals as co-investors.”
A 2020 letter from CEO Greg Becker stated, “In recent months, we’ve expanded our philanthropic giving through corporate donations and employee matching programs. These programs focus on pandemic response, social justice, sustainability and supporting women, Black and Latinx emerging talent and other underrepresented groups. You’ll find examples of these programs in this report, ranging from workforce development to affordable housing.”
In 2020, the bank launched its Missions program, “a software platform designed to engage employees to act in support of the causes they care about most such as voter education and racial justice and equity,” which saw employees donate $400,000 for “justice and equity for Black Americans.”
According to the Claremont Institute, an additional $250,000 was allocated by the SVB Foundation to support grants for social justice organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, and National Urban League.
SVB additionally partnered with 44 organizations focused on furthering DEI in innovation and invested in relationships with historically black colleges and universities, and hosted internships and provided tuition assistance for students from “underserved communities.”
In a Corporate Responsibility Report from 2021, SVB pledged to donate $50M in its diversity and inclusion programs and partnerships, “with a focus on women, Black and Latinx individuals.”
In May of 2021, SVB announced a proposed five-year, $11.2 billion community benefits plan in collaboration with The Greenlining Institute, an M4BL, or Movement For Black Lives, member. The Claremont Institute wrote that “that plan includes $75M in unspecified charitable contributions (also not included in our total).”
Social Justice is bad enough by itself, but it’s also a marker for those incapable of thinking clearly enough to focus clearly on their main jobs.
And now this video, which slams “Stupid Valley Bank” for its egregious stupidity and slams It’s Pat, which is these days is almost like a Hispster move (“It’s a pretty obscure bad movie, you’ve probably never heard of it”).
He also thinks the crisis is just beginning…
Tags: Democrats, Economics, George Gammon, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Bank, Social Justice Warriors, video
Meanwhile, which bank comes to the rescue of SVB in UK? HSBC.
Remember them???
https://geopolitics.co/2017/03/21/fbi-dir-james-comey-board-member-of-hsbc-clinton-foundation-drug-cartel-launderer/
[…] up the political legacy of Pope Francis, and Huge protest sign drawn on Havana street BattleSwarm: More On How SVB Screwed The Pooch Behind The Black: Red China’s Long March 11 rocket launches classified Earth observation […]
[…] CERTAINLY WERE WOKE AND… YOU KNOW THE REST: More On How SVB Screwed The Pooch. “Social Justice is bad enough by itself, but it’s also a marker for those incapable of […]
Prof. Reynolds has a pointer this morning to a Fortune piece on how a former hedge fund manager smoked out the problems some weeks back (and probably made a killing shorting SVB).
https://fortune.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-svb-short-seller-william-martin-twitter-2-months/
What’s eerie about reading this article is how similar SVB’s collapse has been to the infamous 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (anybody else remember that outfit?). And there’s some passing mention in there that sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (remember those?) have played a role as well.
Of course, the lefties are off and running with their usual playbook of making up some fictional story that aligns with their (malign) priorities, getting media outlets to repeat it over and over, and then citing all the “chatter” as “proof” (sic) that their manufactured story must be the only truth – soon I guess as usual to be followed by this “proof” meaning that all other explanations must by definition be wrong. Their cover story is that all this has been due to a lack of regulation (mais bien-sur), which means that orange-man is really to blame (mais bien-sur)…
I think you give them too much credit with your title – I don’t think that they think that they screwed up. Everything is going according to plan, even if it is plan B instead of plan A.
Their well-connected depositors will be made whole, their prominent board members get a pass, Yellen publicly admits that other, smaller, deplorable-oriented banks won’t get the same bailout, indeed they will have to pay for the bailouts that they are not eligible for.
Viewed from SVB’s perspective, how is that screwing up?
I see this as a continuation of our folly with regards to what should be termed “elite selection/training/evaluation”. We don’t have a word for the concept, but the Romans used to call their equivalent the cursus honorum. The idea was that there was a path to leadership, running along the various positions in the Roman government. It worked fairly well during the early Roman Republic, but became increasingly corrupted and ineffective further into the Late Republic and early Imperial times. Then, it didn’t matter at all.
We’ve got our own version of it, and the unpleasant fact is, we’re at about that point of “increasingly corrupted and ineffective” that the late Republic was at sometime around the time of Sulla and then Caeser.
I can tell you about the time that it went off the rails, too: Woodrow Wilson’s maladministration. Anyone wondering where the various 20th Century totalitarians got their ideas about how to run things, see “Wilson”. He pioneered all sorts of things, like propaganda, the secret police, mass political movements and on and on. He was an early believer in eugenics; Margaret Sanger was one of his favorite people. He segregated the formerly desegregated Federal government; he was a proponent of the KKK; you name it, he started it. The Nazis sent people to study what he and his coterie did, and in fact, went away saying things like “We could never get away with this, in Germany…”
One of the early things that they did, which a lot of people miss, is that Wilson and his crew of idiots basically institutionalized this idea of “college degree equals virtue”. Before WWI, the idea that a college degree meant you were uniquely suited to be an officer in the military was pretty much nonexistant; a militia officer, upon which wartime armies were generally founded upon, was an elected position. The imposition of a college degree as a prerequisite started with WWI and Wilson, along with the idea of IQ testing.
So, the deadly cycle of “test, educate, test, educate some more, test, put into positions of power” got going. Nowhere along there do you see any concept in there at all that people should, oh, I don’t know… Demonstrate actual skill and aptitude for a given job? That there ought to be real-world performative assessments made? That objective standards, external to the academy, ought to be incorporated?
We thought we were establishing a meritocracy. What we actually established was this bizarre “autistocracy”, filled with testably smart people who’re really rather a bunch of dolts when it comes to practical things.
The tests don’t really map out to real-world intelligence. There’s something missing there, a quality of wisdom and judgment that you can’t capture with a two-hour written test in a classroom. That’s the essential quality missing from many of these people, along with humility. They live inside their heads more than anything else, and they do not possess the slightest understanding of “how it really works” out in the real world. Those are the people we’ve put in charge, and their self-created little fantasy worlds are driving a lot of what you see going on in society today. They think, they ideate, but they do not take that next step that a wise man would, which is to observe and respond to how the world treats their efforts. They all just keep on keeping on, doubling down on every one of their idiot ideas. Look at the Marxists and the Communists: Nowhere do you see a working, functional society based on Marxist ideas. Nowhere; the number of failures of collectivism are near-infinite, going back to well before Marx. The early Christian church had scores of cults and creeds that embraced Marxist ideas before Marx even existed; none of those survived. The Pilgrims tried to “hold all things in common” during the well-known early failure years of their efforts on this continent. They’d be a forgotten footnote, had they persisted in their folly.
Yet… All you hear from these well-educated dolts is “Well, that wasn’t real Communism… That’s never been tried…”
They don’t dwell in the real world. At. All. And, we’ve been cozened into putting them in charge. Personally, I’m coming around to the idea that a college diploma on your wall ought to be rather more of an embarrassment than anything else, because it’s an indicator that you’re too f*cking stupid to see the inherent fraud in the system, the lies that say the credentials are actually meaningful.
I’m not going to say education is a bad thing, either. What I’m saying is that what we’re doing isn’t education or scholarship; it’s some sort of autistic game that we’ve been playing since at least 1900, and it ain’t working. If you think it is, just examine the roots of this crap we’re looking at, right here. The calls are coming from inside the house, and the problem is that nobody wants to pay attention to that fact. This cultural self-destruction was seeded back in the day of Wilson, and we’re only now reaping the harvest.
Smart is as smart does. Smart is not just passing the tests. If what you are doing looks smart, and yet does not work? You are not smart, and neither are your policies.
If only inflation harmed black people- maybe their DEI hacks would have paid attention to it.
If only the things that they think “harm” black people… Actually did. As opposed to those things that they think are “good” for them, and which actually do rather more harm than anything else.
The average black American has been more screwed over by people trying to “do good” than they have been by the people who originally enslaved them. Mostly by insulating them from the actual effects of their bad choices, and preventing them from learning from them.
Oh, and the provision of cheap, easy, and legal abortions? Yikes. Some projections show blacks making up 18-23% of the population of this country, if abortion hadn’t been legalized. The numbers are closer to 12%, which would be rightfully accounted as ethnic cleansing or genocide were it accomplished by any other means.
Of course, opening up the borders and bringing in all the Central American and Mexican illegal aliens ain’t going to do anything to push those numbers up. Given the work already accomplished by the cartels, I would presume that we’ll be seeing Mexican levels of black demographics before too long, like down in the low single digits.
Never, ever trust the your actual enemies (Democrats) with your future. That’s the essential mistake blacks have made, and they’re paying for it.