These Bastards Are Crafty

Man, I was watching cable news the other night and I swear I wrote at least three blogs in my head.

As I learned more and more about the potential bailout and the maneuvering by the Bush administration to turn this disaster into a boon for their cronies, I just started fuming. But, my anger went to a whole new level when Pat Buchanan hit the screen.

Earlier in the day, I'd heard that conservatives had come up with their strategy to deflect blame for the crisis away from their deregulation ideals, and towards a familiar target. Pat confirmed all the rumors.

They're blaming the niggers.

It really shouldn't have been surprising that conservatives blamed "minorities" for the financial crisis, but I must admit that I didn't see it coming. I thought they were going to have to take the hit, and maybe divert some of the blame to Democrats who also favored deregulation. Instead, these slick suckers managed to flip the script and say that the only reason banks collapsed was because they were forced to make loans to minorities who didn't deserve them. It's the Affirmative Action defense with a financial twist!

I told y'all they were crafty.

Of course this new talking point is being repeated by every Conservative given air time, it's being beaten into the ground at Fox News and pretty soon it will be accepted as fact by most Republicans. One thing about conservatives is that they stay on message and they know how to get their message to the masses.

Too bad the message is built on lies.

Sure, sub-prime mortgages were a huge factor in the banking collapse and those loans were held disproportionately by minorities. But, that's not the fault of federal guidelines about discriminatory lending. The federal standards were enacted not to encourage banks to give loans to minorities who didn't qualify, but so that they would give loans to qualified minority applicants. Bankers had a bad habit of denying minorities loans while at the same time granting loans to white people with the exact same qualifications. They also had a tendency to offer minorities higher interest rates than white applicants.

Instead of correcting their discrimination, banks decided that the best solution was to create a new standard for lending that would justify them charging ridiculous interest rates. These relaxed standards allowed them to make sub-prime loans, but they also allowed them to give white applicants way more money than was justified. Shoot, one of the key components to the housing collapse in California was that banks were giving something called "good faith" loans where applicants for a mortgage self-reported their income, and the bank did nothing to verify those figures.

Now do y'all think black folks were getting "good faith" loans?

I don't think so.

Anyway, the conservative talking points are easily countered if you have a basic understanding of the banking crisis and a willingness to challenge popular assumptions about Affirmative Action. Unfortunately, most reporters do not have both. I saw Rachel Maddow go after Buchanan, but she didn't use the same angle I just did. She just pointed out that the core problem is still deregulation, which meant that the convo basically turned into a shouting match between she and Pat. She didn't see that he was fundamentally misrepresenting what caused CEOs to loan money to minorities. It wasn't liberalism, it was greed tinged with racism.

Anyway, I just wanted to arm ya'll in case you run across a conservative trying to advance this hogwash all while encouraging us to give Henry Paulson and George Bush a blank check to fix the problem. Don't let them fool you.

They may be crafty, but when your house is built on lies, it cannot stand for long.