Sure, it's a reflexive conservative technique, but it's tried and true, and after all, there is a black guy running for president. The easiest way, after all, to obscure the fact that conservative deregulation policies are at the heart of the credit crisis is to blame black folks, and doing so has the added advantage of making the guy running on the other ticket the reason for the meltdown. Investors' Business Daily sets the tone:
To hear today's Democrats, you'd think all this started in the last couple years. But the crisis began much earlier. The Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers, mostly in minority areas.This line has been echoed by Neil Cavuto and Lisa Schiffren (who you might remember from such racist insanity as "miscegenation is a product of communism"). As Robert Gordon explained back in April, this is hooey. But even if 100 percent of bad debt had been produced by people of color, the reason for the financial collapse is that debt was chopped up and marketed as mortgage-backed securities to financial institutions all over the world. If the debt hadn't been sold, making many people very rich, the bad debt wouldn't have been integrated into the rest of the financial system and it would have just led to the collapse of the original institutions providing mortgages. In other words, it wasn't the debt itself; it was the very lucrative selling of the debt that got us where we are today.Age-old standards of banking prudence got thrown out the window. In their place came harsh new regulations requiring banks not only to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers, but to do so on the basis of race.
But never underestimate the dedication of conservatives to using white resentment as a political tool, or the resolve of the party of personal responsibility in blaming everyone else for their problems. Never mind that those who got rich off of selling the bad debt will remain rich, while the people who will lose their homes are not rich and may end up quite poor.
--A. Serwer
