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For more than two hundred years, America’s vast resources and industrious population amassed the largest pile of wealth in history. Now, the forces that generated that wealth are disappearing, but it is still there for the taking. Everybody is maneuvering to get a piece.

What’s one of the best ways to carve out a profit for oneself? Easy. Take advantage of America’s quiet love of affirmative action.

Most Americans do not realize the full extent to which a racially based spoils system is fundamentally embedded in American economic life. They know about affirmative action in school admissions (though many mistakenly believe affirmative action is a “tiebreaker” as opposed to an enormous boost for the recipient). But the racial spoils system in America reaches much further and deeper into the very marrow of our Regime. Countless employers adhere to a racial caste system in order to avoid running afoul of federal civil rights investigators. And especially since last year’s “racial reckoning,” hundreds of major companies are pledging to hire contractors and make purchases based on skin color instead of simple merit. This representative announcement from Apple is just one of many:

Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Thursday the iPhone maker will increase spending with black-owned partners in its supply chain and seek to increase minority representation among the firms it does business with.

Cook made the remarks in a video posted to Twitter announcing a $100 million racial equity and justice initiative in the wake of the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. [Reuters]

To get access to big government contracts and set-asides by major corporate actors, you need to be the right race. So, how is that decided?

For that, you can turn to a little known organization called the National Minority Supplier Development Council. The NMSDC’s goal is to help minority-owned businesses secure more business contracts, through relationships with both government and hundreds of major corporate partners, ranging from Facebook and Google, to Ford and GM, to Walmart and Coca-Cola.

How do you win a spot at NMSDC’s table? By convincing the organization’s officials that you deserve one of its coveted official Race Card™s to play for fun and profit. How does the NMSDC decide if you’re worthy of their coveted Race Card™? Simple: The group defines a minority as “an individual who is at least 25 percent Asian, Black, Hispanic or Native American.” To do that, one literally must submit a driver’s license, a passport, a birth certificate, or the birth certificate of one’s parent or child in order to prove one has the “right” racial group. And the NMSDC has a clear definition of who is right, and who is wrong:

There is a stark difference between knowing that you are an ethnic or racial minority [and] demonstrating through documentation that you are one. The most common way for applicants to demonstrate their ethnic or racial background is by producing the birth certificate or death certificate of a parent or grandparent during the certification process. The minimum documented proof of ethnicity requirement for any of the ethnic minority categories listed below is 25%.

Groups that qualify as racial or ethnic minorities

Asian-Indian		A U.S. citizen whose origins are from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Asian-Pacific		A U.S. citizen whose origins are from Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Trust Territories of the Pacific or the Northern Marianas.
Black		A U.S. citizen having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.
Hispanic		A U.S. citizen of true-born Hispanic heritage, from any of the Spanish-speaking areas of the following regions: Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean Basin only. Brazilians (Afro-Brazilian, indigenous/Indian only) shall be listed under Hispanic designation  for review and certification purposes.
Native American		A person who is an American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut or Native Hawaiian, and regarded as such by the community of which the person claims to be a part. Native Americans must be documented members of a North American tribe, band or otherwise organized group of native people who are indigenous to the continental United States and proof can be provided through a Native American Blood Degree Certificate (i.e., tribal registry letter, tribal roll register number).

Groups not certifiable are those whose origins or heritage are of or from:

Iberian Peninsula		Spain, Portugal
Asia Minor Region		Peninsula between the Black Sea & the Mediterranean
Persian Gulf		Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Europe		All European countries
Northern Africa		Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, etc.

Got that? 100 percent white Mexicans are minorities, but Albanians, Moroccans, and Iraqis are not, and that’s just how it is.

After submitting one’s racial evidence, a business is subjected to an in-person visit by an NMSDC inspector, to make sure that the minority “owners” are really running day-to-day operations, and that the minority “owners” really look like minorities. If you live in New England, your eligibility to be classified as oppressed may be decided by someone like Peter Hurst, the surprisingly pale “black” CEO of NMSDC’s New England affiliate:

Why do you want to be certified as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE)? Easy: Because right now, in supposedly “white supremacist” America, there are limitless opportunities to receive explicit racial preferences for your business as long as you are not a member of the wrong (i.e. white) race. Hundreds of corporations are on the hunt for “diverse” suppliers to hit diversity quotas, and any business with an MBE certification has permission to join the feeding frenzy.

NMSDC is well aware of this. In fact, they’ve even encouraged members to submit video testimonials about the racial handouts they’ve been able to receive thanks to the company’s certification. Consider this testimonial from Argent Associates CEO Betty Manetta:

Revolver invites its readers to dwell upon the daily hate and discrimination Manetta must face living as a person of color in the United States.

Thankfully, Betty has the NMSDC to help! As she notes at the start of the video, Argent has been NMSDC-certified as an MBE since it was founded. Manetta, who moved here from Argentina in 1963, credits the certification with allowing her business to grow to more than $400 million per year in revenue, which she explicitly says it would not have reached without receiving preferential treatment based on her… um… “skin color.”

There are many videos on NMSDC’s website like the one above. For instance, there is another testimonial from Annette Quintana, the “Native American” co-founder of Istonish Inc., an IT services company.

Incidentally, NMSDC’s website also brags that they are the best organization to be certified by because their rigorous process makes sure that no palefaces will be allowed to muscle in on the economic space set aside for minorities:

CREDIBILITY

NMSDC’s rigorous certification process requires that minority businesses in our Network are at least 51% minority-owned, operated and controlled. Eligibility is established by conducting a series of screenings, interviews and site visits. This distinguishes NMSDC from other organizations or entities who publish directories allowing for “self-certification” as their standard.

Stringent standardization also identifies bona fide minority businesses, helping purchasing agents report expenditures as well as vendor utilization rates. These procedures help to quantify overall performance and progress.

Oh, and naturally, getting MBE-certified also requires a non-refundable $2000 fee paid to NMSDC.

For private businesses, NMSDC’s imprimatur is all one needs in most cases. But they aren’t the only ones handing out money based on skin color. The federal government is too.

For years, the federal government has awarded contracts preferentially to small businesses as long as ownership is majority-female or “disadvantaged.” How does the federal government define who is “disadvantaged?” According to the Code of Federal Regulations, business owners are automatically presumed to be “disadvantaged” if they are:

Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans (Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, or enrolled members of a Federally or State recognized Indian Tribe); Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, The Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru); Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal).

According to the American Community Survey, Indian-Americans have a median household income of more than $135,000, the highest of any ethnic group in the United States. Filipino-Americans and Taiwanese-Americans are both above $100,000 as well (white Americans have a median household income of $67,000). No matter! The real purpose of the regulation is to exclude and punish white Americans, not uplift the downtrodden.

The situation is rendered more absurd by the next part of the Code of Federal Regulations, which explains how one might be labeled as disadvantaged even if they are cursed with being white if they face “unequal treatment in hiring, promotions and other aspects of professional advancement,” or if they experience “denial of equal access to institutions of higher education.”

Of course, at this moment such “unequal treatment” in hiring, promotions, and school admissions is flagrantly the norm in huge swaths of American society. Revolver invites readers to speculate on the odds of a white American getting a “disadvantaged” classification by citing med school admission rates by MCAT score.

Is there corruption in this process? Does America lose wars in the Middle East? Of course there is corruption everywhere. Billions of dollars are at stake and they are being doled out based on skin color and made up classifications like “Hispanic,” a label that runs the gamut from Yucatan Amerindians to green-eyed scions of conquistadors.

With so much money at stake, based on categories that are easy to abuse, it would be shocking if businesses didn’t endlessly try to scam the system. Consider this obscure scandal from 2019:

An Olathe, Kan., man who conspired with others to control construction businesses that received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government contracts, pleaded guilty in federal court today to defrauding the government with respect to contracts set aside for service-disabled veterans and certified minorities.

Matthew C. McPherson, 43, waived his right to indictment by a grand jury and pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Roseann Ketchmark to an information that charges him with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and major program fraud.

By pleading guilty today, McPherson admitted that he participated in a conspiracy from September 2009 to March 2018 to obtain contracts set aside by the federal government for award to small businesses owned and controlled by veterans, service-disabled veterans, and certified minorities. McPherson, who is neither a certified minority nor a veteran, was the owner of an established construction company in Topeka, Kan. (identified in court documents as Business C) that was not entitled to compete for those federal contracts.

McPherson and his co-conspirators controlled and operated Zieson Construction Company. The business was formed on July 9, 2009, with Stephon Ziegler – an African-American service-disabled veteran – as the nominal owner. Zieson’s primary business was obtaining federal construction contracts set aside for award to small businesses owned and controlled by service-disabled veterans or certified minorities. However, Ziegler did not control the day-to-day operations or the long-term decision making of Zieson. McPherson and his co-conspirators actually controlled and operated Zieson, and received most of the profits from Zieson through the respective business entities.

Think briefly about the absurdity of the above story. McPherson was convicted of fraud, of stealing millions from the U.S. government (and by extension American taxpayers), yet there is no allegation anywhere from the DOJ that he actually defrauded the government of a service. As far as the DOJ’s statements reveal, McPherson performed all the construction projects contracted to him. There are no allegations of shoddy work, deficient materials, or systematic overcharging. No, the only crime alleged against McPherson was a racial one. He was guilty of profiting while white.

These sorts of prosecutions happen routinely in modern America. Also in 2019, a company pleaded guilty to falsely pretending to hire minority contractors to do work on a project, when in fact they were simply cutting out the “work” part and paying a minority contractor to do nothing:

Nichter Construction, Inc., pleaded guilty before Erie County Court Judge Sheila A. DiTullio to one count of Offering a False Instrument for Filing in the First Degree, a Class “E” felony. … Nichter Construction entered into a contract with DASNY on November 5, 2015 to perform building improvements at the Buffalo Psychiatric Center in Buffalo, New York. The total value of this contract was approximately $350,000.

Under Article 15A of the New York State Executive Law, Nichter Construction was required to have a minimum of 13% minority business participation in the project. Nichter recruited William McClendon of McClendon Asphalt Paving to purportedly be the projects minority business participant. Nichter submitted various documents to DASNY falsely claiming that McClendon was performing plumbing and electrical work on the project at a cost of nearly $44,000. … McClendon Asphalt Paving performed no work on the state project. McClendon, who was never seen at the job site, was to be paid a fee by Nichter, solely for the use of its identity in order to give the false appearance of minority business participation.

In 2018, several business owners in Milwaukee were convicted of fraud for running several construction companies through non-white straw owners in order to qualify for racial set-asides. In 2013, two Arlington, Virginia businesses executives received prison sentences for using an employee with Portuguese heritage as a figurehead “disadvantaged” owner. In 2016, a contractor on the new World Trade Center was convicted for paying kickbacks to minority-owned front firms while his company did all the actual work itself.

Some of the race hustling involves amusing extra steps. Right now, the U.S. Department of Defense operates a “mentor-protege” program in which large companies “mentor” a smaller one to incorporate them into the supply chain. You might think the military’s vitally important mission means it would focus only on effectiveness instead of on social engineering and racial preferences, and since this is 2021 America, you’d think wrongly. Naturally, to qualify as a “protege” company one must be a “disadvantaged” company, and once that classification existed it was inevitable a company would simply invent a fake protege to get a contract.

An Alabama-based construction company has agreed to pay more than a million dollars to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by fraudulently representing that it was mentoring a minority-owned small business under the Department of Defense’s mentor-protege program.

According to a Department of Justice press release, in 2003, Caddell Construction agreed to mentor Mountain Chief Management Services, a Native American-owned company, under the DoD mentor-protege program. Caddell informed the Army Corps of Engineers that it would use Mountain Chief as a subcontractor on two Corps construction projects.

According to the government, that’s not what happened. The government alleged that Caddell never mentored Mountain Chief and that Mountain Chief never performed any work on the projects. Instead, Caddell used Mountain Chief as a pass-through entity to obtain payments for the time and costs Caddell claimed to have spent in mentoring Mountain Chief. [SmallGovCon]

Not every case is criminal in nature, though. Consider this civil case from January, in which a subcontractor complained about not getting a fair cut for providing the brown face for a billion dollar Army contract:

Ad agency DDB Chicago “exploited” a smaller, minority-owned New York shop in a “classic bait and switch” in an effort to win a $4 billion U.S. Army contract, a lawsuit alleges.

Hero Group, which does business as Hero Collective, alleges in a complaint that it had a bargain with DDB Chicago. Hero would help DDB win the 10-year contract, and DDB would award Hero “significant work” as a subcontractor. … DDB was required to subcontract about 40 percent of the work to small and certified minority businesses, according to the complaint. Hero is both. [Crain’s Chicago Business]

This is the reality of economic life in America. The 14th Amendment may explicitly prohibit unequal treatment under the law, but that amendment has been thrown in the garbage by the nation’s courts. Now, we have a new, unwritten constitution of racial spoils. On the basis of this legal regime, cartels have emerged to leverage “civil rights” laws and racial justice mobs that are too intimidating to take on directly, but whose cooperation can be bought for a price. Such is the importance of these cartels that it is simply impossible to understand how modern corporate America truly functions without first understanding the interplay between such racial spoils cartels and business.

As shocking as this report on America’s “race czars” is, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Revolver has just begun to unravel this tangle of thorns. Stay tuned.

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