Is Hispanic family unity being targeted by banking interests?

A disturbing comment on an interview with Patrick Deneen:

My brother once worked for a bank in the American Midwest. He was present at a meeting in which the board, all serious, believing Christians, discussed the need to increase lending opportunities in the Hispanic community by breaking down family ties. The Hispanic habit of communal saving and paying in cash was incompatible with the growth of bank profits.

Latino family breakdown is a problem enough as it is. Writers like Heather MacDonald are keen to warn about the family problems of Hispanic immigrants, especially as their children or grandchildren assimilate to the toxic wasteland produced by the pop culture industries.

This comment suggests there are more subtle business pressures on the Latino family, pressures which may also have been applied to all families.

The American consumer economy constantly tries to remove private economic functions into the public market, where they can be monitored, taxed, and made more efficient in quantifiable terms.

But the family should not be a mere locus for consumption. The good habits and strong bonds formed in extended familial financial planning surely have an importance we don't recognize until they are gone.

I would appreciate any leads to material about the anti-family strategies of the banks, which may not even realize how destructive their work can be.

Family dysfunction link to welfare causes kerfuffle in Colo. legislature

Last week when Rep. Spencer Swalm (R-Centennial) discussed the problem of family formation and welfare expenses. This inevitably sparked another minor controversy in the state legislature.

"Don't have kids out of wedlock," he said from the House floor. "If you're married, if at all possible, trya to stay married. Those are ways to lift families out of poverty."

He added that intact families do better than broken families, whose children are " almost guaranteed to be in poverty."

Democratic House Speaker Terrance Carroll reinterpreted the comments as an insult to "every single person who lives in poverty, who works their butt off every single day just to keep their head above water."

Democrats then pointed to Speaker Carroll's outlier success as not very convincing disproof of Swalm.

Bored by typing internet comments and not-quite-finished blog posts, I tried my hand at writing a letter to the editor. The Post now limits writers to 150 words, but my reply was published yesterday:

State Rep. Spencer Swalm’s commonsense anti-poverty advice to marry before having kids provoked ignorant outrage. The link between the decline of marriage and the rise of poverty is well-established.

Hollywood feminism pretends marriage can be ignored or redefined at will. But the traditional family is best for men, women and children.

Intact families benefit everyone. Americans were once forthright in preparing young people to be good husbands and wives. We told them to avoid premarital sex because of its moral, emotional and biological consequences.

Now, like an uncaring absent father, we just tell them to get condoms, abortions and welfare packages. We praise poor single mothers more than the hard-working housewives and upstanding husbands whose taxes support them.

Let’s build a family-friendly economy, politics and culture that reward those who have done right, or people will just keep doing wrong.

The word limit is excellent at encouraging confident writing, but it also risks reducing comments to bumper sticker sentiments.

Unfortunately, the Post cut my plug of Allan Carlson and ProFam.org, one of the best resources on the state of the family and family policy I know.

Carlson has discussed the social conservatism of the New Deal, much of which would be anathema to the party activists today.

While socially conservative government policy may have once been native to the Democrats, it is now homeless. Even Republicans who do not tend towards morally autistic libertarianism are incapable of designing social policy and a bureaucracy capable of benefiting married motherhood and fatherhood.