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Video: Subprime loans “affirmative action” - Andrew Cuomo

By Ed Morrissey


Another lengthy video attempts to highlight the beginnings of the subprime loan disaster, and it’s well worth watching.  Andrew Cuomo, then Bill Clinton’s HUD Secretary, held a press conference on April 6, 1998, explaining a settlement reached with a major bank on a lending discrimination case based presumably on the CRA.  Cuomo brags about how “this administration will enforce the law”, but he also makes a very telling admission about the $2.1 billion in subprime loans that the bank would offer as a result of the settlement:

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They would not have qualifed but for the affirmative action on the part of the bank, yes.

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He then admits that there would be “higher risk”, and a higher default rate, on the loans the Clinton administration forced this bank to make. He also admits that the action forced this bank to lower its standards on loan qualification as a remedy to supposed discriminatory action in the past by relying on income and equity requirements. Cuomo describes everything wrong with subprime lending and reveals the government’s efforts to distort private lending markets to force “fairness” in outcomes.

The financial world did not collapse because of 15,000 loans from this one settlement, but this case did not exist in isolation.  Cuomo held this press conference as a warning to all lenders that the Clinton administration intended to enforce the CRA broadly with all lenders, and in fact he explicitly stated this.  When that didn’t free up credit as quickly as Clinton desired, he and Congress mandated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime paper — which Cuomo baldly admitted was riskier and would have a higher rate of failures — and to turn them into mortgage-backed securities, which they marketed as low-risk investments based on implicit government backing.

This did what the heavy-handed enforcement of the CRA could not: it made lenders enthusiastic about subprime lending.  Why?  They could make short-term profit on every mortgage regardless of the borrower’s ability to repay, because Fannie and Freddie would buy them anyway.  With the risk removed from lending, subprime loans became quick-buck rackets for all lenders, predatory or not.

The second half of the video relates what we already know about Barack Obama.  He sued Citibank to force more subprime lending, and his ACORN partners did the same elsewhere, initiating actions like the one Cuomo heralds here as a great breakthrough in affirmative-action lending.  Obama bears responsibility at the edges for the beginning of this disaster, and more for his inaction while in the Senate as Alan Greenspan warned them of the coming collapse.  Most of this falls on the Clinton administration and Congress in 1998-2000, who set this brush fire alight and then kept the firefighters at OFHEO at bay by calling them racists.

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Andrew Cuomo in 1998: Subprime Lending "Affirmative Action;" Proudly Hails Mau-Mauing Banks Into Reducing Loan Requirements as Great Advance for Nation

On the one hand you don't want to demagogue the issue.

On the other hand, the issue inherently underscores a major tension between the parties, and the races, since 1998: The Democrats' overarching drive to do certifiably insane things, like letting murderers out on weekend furloughs from prison, in response to constant agitation from minority pressure groups. And all the quite predictable consequences that flow from such policies. No one would ever suggest letting murderers out of jail for weekend rape-fests if almost all prisoners were white. There would be no reason to suggest such a lunacy. It is only when race is a factor do we begin seeing such insane policies not only proposed seriously, but enacted.

And no one would have thought it was a good idea to eviscerate all prudence from the mortgage process had we only been talking about poor whites. The answer would have been, "Um, duh, they can't afford these loans, that's why they're not getting them; what are you, insane?"

And again, once race is injected as a factor insanity becomes government policy.

Yes, the Democratic initiative did help minority homebuyers (and lots of white credit-poor homebuyers too, who wound up being the main beneficiaries of the push, simply because there are more poor whites than poor blacks in the country).

But at what cost? (Incidentally, Ed's post is Must Read All the Way Through.)

Our politics is constantly being distorted by this issue. And note that, as usual, many politicians were willing to go along quietly with a risky scheme with perfectly foreseeable consequences for fear of being called "racist" if they objected.

Well, here we are now.

We really did lots of good putting credit-poor homebuyers into homes they couldn't afford, didn't we?

And the kicker: Because this issue necessarily raises racial issues, McCain and the Republicans have been afraid to call the Democrats out on it, permitting Barack Obama -- who actually sued CitiGroup to ease its lending requirements in order to get credit-poor minorities mortgages -- to actually profit from the disaster he himself made....

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From HUD's website

The American Dream Downpayment Initiative (ADDI) was signed into law on December 16, 2003. The American Dream Downpayment Assistance Act authorizes up to $200 million annually for fiscal years 2004 - 2007. ADDI will provide funds to all fifty states and to local participating jurisdictions that have a population of at least 150,000 or will receive an allocation of at least $50,000 under the ADDI formula. ADDI will be administered as a part of the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, a formula grant program.

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From what I can tell he didn't really pass any legislation during his eight years would stop it.

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Don't you think it is a little disingenuous to try and blame this one all on the democrats?

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We've now entered a new stage of the financial crisis: the ritual assigning of blame. It began in earnest with Monday's congressional roasting of Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld and continued on Tuesday with Capitol Hill solons delving into the failure of AIG. On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.

The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, "Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity." The subtext: If only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto put it, "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

Let me get this straight. Investment banks and insurance companies run by centimillionaires blow up, and it's the fault of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and poor minorities?

These arguments are generally made by people who read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and ignore the rest of the paper—economic know-nothings whose opinions are informed mostly by ideology and, occasionally, by prejudice. Let's be honest. Fannie and Freddie, which didn't make subprime loans but did buy subprime loans made by others, were part of the problem. Poor Congressional oversight was part of the problem. Banks that sought to meet CRA requirements by indiscriminately doling out loans to minorities may have been part of the problem. But none of these issues is the cause of the problem. Not by a long shot. From the beginning, subprime has been a symptom, not a cause. And the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act is somehow responsible for poor lending decisions is absurd.

Here's why.

The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA likewise didn't apply. There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt.

Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.

Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.

On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it's difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients' money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman Bros. to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default-swaps business with abandon because Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton's fault?

Look: There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.

At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis."

Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.

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wildchild68 said:

No man, you don't understand. Every single problem ever can be traced back to the democrats, and only the democrats.

Phred's taught me a lot.

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Seuss said:

Should Obama win, watch for him trying to take away people's guns... it will be the first sign of his true purpose. 

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Thank you. Got a link for that?

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This program is not part of the eventual problem, but instead a partial amelioration of the eventual problem. The biggest problem was with mortgages handed out with no down payments at all. Clearly a lender who got a downpayment in addition to the collateral of the property itself is in better shape (not perfect shape, but better shape) than a lender who got no down payment at all. To the lender, it doesn't matter whether the borrower's grandmother coughed up the nut for the down payment or Uncle Sam.

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Not in the slightest. The impetus for subprime mortgages was all driven by the Democrats. Calls for the reigning in of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were decried by Democrats as "racist" and resisted strongly. Several threads here have the same YouTube video posted with excerpts from these hearings, showing Maxine Waters and Barney Frank and Chris (?) Meeks and other black Democrats defending FM and FM to the hilt and playing the race card on Repubs calling for stricter oversight of FM and FM.

It was an idea born of the Dems, nurtured by the Dems, and defended by the Dems. The only thing Repubs can be blamed for is knuckling under for fear of being called racist.

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Phred said:

Daniel Gross is an ignorant buffoon, as the article of his you so helpfully provided proves. I urge the entire audience to read this nonsense so they can see a textbook example of a Libbie living a completely fact-free existence trying to spin a separate reality out of thin air.

Once again, you are late to the party. There are several threads here offering irrefutable proof that banks were bullied into giving out risky loans in order to satisfy CRA requirements, by both government bureaucrats and law firms representing "disenfranchised" borrowers. More articles still showing how Fanny May and Freddie Mac were directed to buy up these crap loans so banks wouldn't be so balky at issuing them.

Did there come a time when some lenders finally abandoned all caution and stopped resisting? Of course. That's not the point. The point is that the banks should never have been maneuvered into that position in the first place. And the only reason they were is because of Affirmative Action.

You can stick your fingers in your ears and squinch your eyes shut all you want, but the fact of the matter is that lenders didn't just all decide one day that all the ironclad rules of sane mortgage lending that had worked well for centuries should be disregarded. The government stepped in and changed the rules of the game. Deny it till you're blue in the face, it makes no nevermind.

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Shins said:

While you guys argue over who's responsible for what, the "men behind the curtain" are laughing as they further consolidate thier power

can't you see they're both responsible?  they are  2 hands of the same body.

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zappaisgod said:

Because they had a government guaranteed sucker to buy their paper.

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Just because it aimed at giving people a 10,000 dollar down payment, doesn't mean it didn't increase the number of bad mortgages out there.

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So the fact the fed kept interest rates artificially low for the past decade doesn't really have anything to do with this crisis does it. Or maybe the fact....<snip>...fails to address the questions posted above.

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Interest rates were artificially low because the market had been completely distorted by government interference. These things have a ripple effect, you know. It cannot be otherwise. You cannot completely destroy the very foundation of prudent lending without there being repercussions.

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I have never said every other actor down the road acted out of the purest of motives, I have only pointed out correctly that if the Dems hadn't strongarmed banks to loan to people no sane banker would have agreed to loan to absent government coercion, none of the rest of the things you mentioned would have happened. Hell, none of the rest of them would have been possible. The root cause of the crisis was Social Engineering. The few people who did predict the ineviI have never said every other actor down the road acted out of the purest of motives, I have only pointed out correctly that if the Dems hadn't strongarmed banks to loan to people no sane banker would have agreed to loan to absent government coercion, none of the rest of the things you mentioned would have happened. Hell, none of the rest of them would have been possible. The root cause of the crisis was Social Engineering. The few people who did predict the inevitable result were either ignored or shouted down as racist fear-mongers.table result were either ignored or shouted down as racist fear-mongers.

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Banks were giving risky loans to people of all races and income levels.

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By low interest rates, I meant the interest rates as set by the Fed.  The Fed is the foundation of prudent lending, as malinvestment is far more likely when the rate the banks can borrow at is sent far lower then the market would dictate it.  Do you think if the fed didn't keep interest rates low throughout the duration of the housing bubbling, the banks would have been so anxious to lend? 

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Again if you look at the subprime loan demographic data non-minorities compose a significant portion.  And of that portion many borrowers have above the median income for the area they live in.

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If the banks had kept their high risk lending to only poor minorities, and prevented the rampant speculation that occured due to upper income investors this would not be a crisis that is bringing the world economy to a halt.

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The quotes that explain the entire financial meltdown

For those who want a smoking gun to show the genesis of the financial collapse, this short sequence from a longer video I posted this week will do it. Clinton HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement of a lending discrimination complaint with Accubanc, a Texas lender whose prerequisites for mortgages came under attack from “community organizers” at the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission and the city of Dallas. I clipped out this sequence to underscore its importance:

** sorry, guys, this is not a YouTube video - I don't know how to embed it. Click to go to Allahpundit if you want to watch**

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CUOMO: To take a greater risk on these mortgages, yes. To give families mortgages that they would not have given otherwise, yes.

Q: [unintellible] … that they would not have given the loans at all?

CUOMO: They would not have qualified but for this affirmative action on the part of the bank, yes.

Q: Are minorities represented in that low and moderate income group?

CUOMO: It is by income, and is it also by minorities? Yes.

CUOMO: With the 2.1 billion, lending that amount in mortgages — which will be a higher risk, and I’m sure there will be a higher default rate on those mortgages than on the rest of the portfolio …

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Here, in fact, is the genesis of the problem, the ideology that created the monster.  Cuomo, the Clinton administration, and Congress believed they had the right and the power to determine acceptable risk for the lenders, rather than lenders determining it for themselves in a free market.  Even while imposing risk standards on lenders, Cuomo admits that he expects a higher default rate on the new loans — which is why the lenders didn’t want to write them in the first place.

In other words, the CRA didn’t get used to fight discrimination, but to force lenders to give money to high-risk borrowers for political purposes.  And Cuomo knew it.

That was the political arrogance at the heart of the collapse.  However, the CRA was more a sideshow than the actual problem.  When Congress decided that enforcement alone wouldn’t generate enough mortgages to boost their political fortunes, they had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eliminate the risk entirely for lenders through the purchase of the subprime loans.  Without that risk and with almost-guaranteed short-term profits of subprime loans, lenders went wild while Fannie and Freddie repackaged them as quasi-government bonds for investors.

While Democrats like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi keep blaming “greed” for the collapse, it was Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd building that “greed” into the system in order to drive the subprime lending market.  And it was Democrats like Frank, Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Lacy Clay who suggested that regulators like Armando Falcon were racists for blowing the whistle on the Ponzi scheme they created.

The Democrats decided, as Michelle says, that mortgages were a civil right, and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayers a dime.  How well is that working out, America?  And now, the question you have to ask yourselves is this: Do you want the nation’s economic policies run by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank for the next two years?

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It's all interrelated. You cannot possibly make as fundamental change as dropping the requirement for a down payment for the largest purchase the vast majority of people will ever make in their lives without causing repercussions everywhere else in the market.

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Would the Fed have set the interest rates they way they did in the absence of such things as MBSs? No, they wouldn't have. The subprime mortgage phenomenon resulted in major, MAJOR behavioral differences in the investment fields. No rational observer can deny that. My point is - and has always been - that absent the massive coercion exerted by government and NGOs (such as ACORN) who engaged in mau-mauing lending institutions into doing fiscally insane things, they would not have done fiscally insane things.

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Of course they do! Look, you still don't get it. The rules of the game were changed! By government! I really don't know how I can express this more clearly.

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Answer - you can't. And guess what? Fanny Mae or Freddie Mac will take his mortgage off your hands, too! No one here is claiming the only bad paper floating around is that which started life as a mortgage held by a ghetto-dweller.

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The CRA (not so much in its original relatively mild form as enacted in the Carter years, but in its beefed-up form from the Clinton years) was a paradigm-shifting piece of legislation. Fluctuating interest rates are not paradigm-shifting events. Interest rates go up and down all the time.

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Every now and then one of them might have been sued or fined, but that would have been it. What really accelerated the mess was when the government got tired of investigating and fining and suing the non-compliers and decided it would be easier to just direct FM and FM to buy the shit paper off the banks. Once that aspect of the equation was changed, the banks acquiesced. Why wouldn't they?

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The sudden increase in buyers triggered a boom. You've got a lot more people looking for houses, therefore housing prices rise. So buying property, then selling it for a profit a year down the road makes sense. Of course investors (as opposed to people just looking for a house in which to live) will get on board. And when these investors go looking for a mortgage, they are naturally going to demand the same deal Leroy down on the corner got - no down payment, adjustable rate, the whole nine yards. And the bank is going to give him those terms because -
- if they don't he'll take his business to someone who will
- he's a far better credit risk than Leroy
- the bank is not going to hold the paper anyway, FM and FM will.

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This is ALWAYS what happens (to varying degrees, of course) when government interference in the markets - the government action is based not on good financial sense, it is based on "justice" or "protecting the innocent" or some other claptrap, and it is mandated through the implied threat of force. This interference cannot help but result in deleterious effects; if people are doing something only because they are forced to do so, it is something it would have made no sense to do in the first place. If it did make sense you wouldn't have to force them to do it.

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The Fed lowered interest rates to prevent a recession after the dotcom collapse.  Greespan stated this numerous times.  In fact if you look at a graph of Fed interest rates vs the number of risky loans lent you will see a striking correlation.

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A bank can refuse a risky loan to rich white person, with no danger of being strong armed by the government.  In fact if these loans are really as "financially insane" as you claim it would be in the banks best interest to limit the loans only to those minorities that MUST receive them by law.

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Again you still haven't shown that loans given by banks under CRA rule have a higher rate of default then those loans.

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Fannie and Freddie actually had pretty strict standards on the loans they would take.

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Again there were plenty of private firms that existed without any government backing that were more then happy to buy up the risky paper.

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You are trying to say that a law enacted in 1995 led to a boom almost a decade later.

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No bank, not a single one was required to give the risky loans they did.

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Seuss said:

> The printing press went into overdrive in the mid 90's and has only accelerated since then.

Then inflation would have risen out of control.  Try again.

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Normally inflation would run wild. However, the US dollar is not a normal currency. It is the world's reserve currency which means that most of those excess dollars are being "soaked up" by foreign governments.

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Seuss said:

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Normally inflation would run wild. However, the US dollar is not a normal currency. It is the world's reserve currency which means that most of those excess dollars are being "soaked up" by foreign governments.

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So, you think the US mint started printing lots and lots of money, and, um, shipped it overseas to keep inflation down?  Interesting.  I'll give you another hint, since you are stuck on this idea of a printing press... "fractional reserve".

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Of course "printing press" is a figure of speech.

The Federal Reserve creates most of our money through debt creation.

The US is a safe, stable democracy and as such our currency is in demand by foreign governments. We don't "ship it" anywhere.

Seuss said:

> The Federal Reserve creates most of our money through debt creation.

Great!  Now, where did the debt come from?

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Interest rates rise and fall all the time. And yes, people do things when interest rates are low that they don't do when interest rates are high, including borrow money. But interest rates are not the cause of this mess.

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You miss the point. The loans to "white people" are LESS risky, especially when FM and FM are happily buying up as many as the banks bring to them.

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Irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the ratio of defaults was.

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No they didn't. Or we wouldn't be where we are today.

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Again, I admit once the bandwagon was rolling along nicely, others finally hopped on. But no subprime mortgages, no bandwagon. And subprime mortgages were created in response to the CRA. I'm not saying things were not exacerbated by a general piling-on at some point down the road. I am stating - correctly - that the root cause was social engineering by Dems.

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No, I am saying that when the Clinton administration started getting serious about enforcing the revised CRA, from 1998-2000, and when activist groups started bringing lawsuits against banks (see my earlier thread on this), and when FM and FM were directed to buy up just about any mortgage, the boom accelerated.

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1.The act did not force banks to make loans with no downpayment
2.The act did not force banks to make interest only loans
3.The act did not force banks to not check credit score, verify assests or check income.
4.The act did not force GSEs to buy loans with the characteristics described above

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Seuss said:

> The Federal Reserve creates most of our money through debt creation.

Great!  Now, where did the debt come from?

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Yossarian22 said:

But keep on scapegoating the poor and minorities.

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All banks that lend to the public.

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They didn't really have a choice.  Once the ball got rolling, they either go with the flow, or borrowers start going to the bank next door.  I'm not trying to take blame away from the banks here, but looking at why the banks started to do this, you have to go back.  Had the government not started mucking around in the banks business, using the carrot and stick on the banks to influence their lending practices, then none of this would have ever happened.  You are trying to blame the rolling ball for the problem rather than blaming the person that started the ball rolling in the first place.  I'm not excusing the banks, but their hands were pretty tied.  Go with the flow and take the carrot, or go against the flow and take the stick.  Not much of a choice.

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Again, the CRA is the starting point of the chain of events... that which initiated all the rest.  Lots of other 'bad things' happened, but if you trace it back to a single starting point, it was the CRA.  (Not really the CRA, but the changes that Clinton made that went into effect in 96 if we want to be specific.)  There were many other contributing factors that occurred later and both Republicans and Democrats are at fault, but had the changes to the CRA never been made, then none of the other stuff would have happened and we wouldn't be having this debate.

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What do you all suggest we do to fix this mess that we all MUST agree that we are in??

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GabbaDj said:

I blame ALL of this on petrodollars, 911 and hollywood.

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johnm214 said:

Yossarian22 said:

But keep on scapegoating the poor and minorities.

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GTFO with that


Phred and the other CRA opponents have never, to my knowledge, stated that blacks as a group are responsible for this- nor any other race.


By raising stupid claims of racism you denigrate real demonstrable injustice in society and reinforce the views of some that their whinning about race is justified because of these "everything is racist" folks.


The issue is people that didn't pay what they owed, and banks that lended to them (and the people that lended to them, in turn).  This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with public policy.

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johnm214 said:

Yossarian22 said:

But keep on scapegoating the poor and minorities.

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GTFO with that


Phred and the other CRA opponents have never, to my knowledge, stated that blacks as a group are responsible for this- nor any other race.

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zappaisgod said:

johnm214 said:

Yossarian22 said:

But keep on scapegoating the poor and minorities.

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GTFO with that


Phred and the other CRA opponents have never, to my knowledge, stated that blacks as a group are responsible for this- nor any other race.

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Thank you.  Clearly the racist here is Yossarian who assumes that any reference to bums and deadbeats means minorities.  Nice going, Yossarian, what you have done is fall prey to the nefarious tyranny of diminished expectations.  In your fucked up world view anything substandard is de facto minority.  Which is the well- spring of your paternalistic fascism.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a towering example of a vanishing breed, the Democrat thinker, understood this back in the 60s when he rightly predicted the destruction of the black family as a result of welfare.

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