Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 10/10/2010 7:51:00 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
"Predatory lending aimed at racially segregated minority neighborhoods led to mass foreclosures that fueled the U.S. housing crisis, according to a new study published in the American Sociological Review." That's how the Reuters story of Oct. 4th, "Racial predatory loans fueled U.S. housing crisis: study," opens.
The "new study" is an academic article titled, "Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis," which was written by a graduate student at Princeton and his professor.
Inasmuch as the "new study" further diverts attention from the real reasons for the foreclosure crisis, and advances racism as a cause, the piece is becoming a smashing success within the "mainstream" media. Not only was the banking industry greedy, but new evidence shows that its "predatory lending" policies were in fact racist as well.
During the primaries and race leading to the 2008 presidential election, gas prices happened to skyrocket and shortly thereafter the giant housing bubble burst. It was like the breaking of a piñata, scattering candies everywhere for Candidate Obama. With a little help from the news media, the bubble's burst couldn't have happened at a better time.
Acting with lightning speed the Democrats and their media created the non sequitur narrative. It was Bush's fault! The free markets failed because the reckless cowboy refused to regulate the banking and financial industries.
Never mind that those were already highly regulated industries -- and no one has yet revealed the regulations that Bush opposed that would have prevented the bursting of the artificial bubble.
Also pay no attention to the fact that the Democrats had controlled Congress since 2006 and had resisted repeated requests for tighter accounting of Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae. The likes of Barney Frank assured us that everything was hunky-dory with the government-backed lending system.
And, lastly, if we are to accept the narrative, we must forget about Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act, the instrument from which the government created the artificial bubble. The Act is little more than liberal feel-good, social engineering that levels the playing field for low income minorities. According to liberal thought (see the words of former HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo) institutional racial discrimination was the reason banks were not approving enough loans for minorities.
The federal government therefore had to intervene. The Clinton administration revived and enforced the Act in the1990s with vengeance; and with a little help from groups like ACORN, minority loan approvals reached all time highs.
Application of the Act was done in the name of the right to "affordable housing." Affordable housing really meant that everyone has a right to get a mortgage on a home. At the threat of ACORN members getting crazy in bank lobbies and with the coercion of federal law, traditional qualifications for getting loan approvals (verifiable income levels, sufficient down payments, standard credit histories, etc.) were thrown out the window.
What the federal government forced upon the mortgage industry was like the screeching of fingernails on a chalkboard to the principles of the free market system. No businessman in his right mind would approve loans, in the name of social justice, for those who couldn't afford them. So ridiculous was the practice that the government had to create an entire system to back the devalued mortgages generated by liberal, economic justice policy.
Prior to the bubble's burst the bankers were the good guys so long as they were lending to people who really couldn't afford homes. The government's manipulation of the markets led to trading in worthless paper and derivative hedging by greedy Wall Street investors. But in the heyday of easy loans, easy money and rampant corruption at Freddie and Fannie, the Democrats were happy and content.
So long as home prices were going up and equity was accruing, the artificial markets seemed almost real. The subprime loans seemed to work. It went on for many years. But after gas prices began hovering at $4.00 per gallon, waves of mortgage defaults crashed throughout the country. Once the system collapsed a new set of facts was needed -- and reality was quickly turned upside down.
Even though the mortgage industry was forced to make "risky loans" to meet government quotas the bankers became the bad guys. Risky loans were blamed on the free market system. Capitalism had failed.
The mortgage people were suddenly guilty of selling "predatory loans" to innocent minorities. Liberal Democrats had authored, implemented and maintained the irresponsible lending policies which led to the financial crisis. But after the burst, we saw the most culpable Democrats, Obama, Dodd and Frank, et al, blaming the Republicans and capitalism.
The best fiction novelist in the world couldn't make this stuff up. How the establishment left was able to turn the entire situation on its head is beyond belief (in the aftermath, we even witnessed a surreal Dodd-Frank reform bill). And now we have a "new study" to show that the practice of "predatory loans" was likely based on racial discrimination!
In the piece (the new study) the authors first note that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 didn't work out so well and minorities continue to "live under conditions of hyper segregation" in the big inner cities. Declines in the black population in communities in "New York, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, and Washington," have been "minimal or nonexistent."
I guess we're supposed to attribute the "segregation" problem to racial discrimination and not the government welfare policies that have crippled an entire segment of the black population.
From there the authors tell us that "a careful reading of recent scholarship on segregation and mortgage lending shows that racial discrimination occurred at each step in the complex chain of events leading from loan origination to foreclosure."
You see, "high levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities' minority neighborhoods."
Hmm. Why do you suppose "segregation" creates "a natural market for subprime lending?" A subprime mortgage happens to be a type of loan for people with poor credit histories. Think there's any connection between poor credit ratings and government dependency? Perish the thought.
Prior to the politicizing of the mortgage industry, people with poor credit histories were turned down for home loans. "Pay your bills, stay at your job, save your money and come back and see me in a few years," was the advice of the banker before ACORN and social justice came along. Subprime loans were an accommodation for people who shouldn't have gotten loans in the first place.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the "new study" is the section in which the authors essentially call blacks in the inner cities stupid. We're supposed to believe that because "pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charge high fees and usurious rates of interest," exist in "minority areas . . . minority group members are accustomed to exploitation and [are] frequently unaware that better services are available elsewhere."
So, the mortgage crisis was not caused by the government forcing lenders to grant loans to those who really didn't qualify, but by "predatory lenders" who targeted inner city minorities who were just too dumb to know that better services were available elsewhere.
The level of dishonesty associated with the liberal media (and academic) narrative of the mortgage crisis is astounding and if the general public ever gets the facts the Democrat Party will be in peril for decades to come.
Read it,its an excellent piece and that will teach me to not go by the title alone.
The soft sciences are a joke.
Worthless degrees for those that have a hard time with math.
It’s a home for people that would rather make their living talking and dreaming up crap like this.
bttt
Two notes-
1. Obvious solution - make it illegal to capture race information on mortgage forms. Without this information - lenders can’t discriminate. (Of course - left will hate this - because what they really want is discrimination.)
2. The Global Warming fiasco demonstrates the degree to which even technical sciences have become politicized. Soft sciences like sociology - at this point - are destroyed. The ybring no value, due to political self delusion.
The word has come to mean something entirely divorced from its definition, however, so it's useful to point out that efforts to combat racism or "anti-racism" are at fault, here.
To do otherwise is to blunder into a trap waiting to be sprung by knee-jerk leftist reactionaries. Pity we're reduced to co-opting and subverting the silly word games they play, but it's come to that and worse.
Dinesh D’Souza, Dartmouth ‘83 and Laura Ingraham, Dartmouth ‘85 are doing their best to return a conservative voice to Dartmouth. And pardon a father's pride, but my oldest daughter graduated between these two notables [she was Dartmouth ‘84], and managed to learn to think for herself and not just follow the crowd. I am very proud of her.
But, back to my main theme: the sociology department was biased to the left, not as far as Columbia University, but biased none the less. They offered “evidence” against the death penalty saying it did not lower crime. [They could never argue that it prevents recidivism!] And, we now see that it has led to criminals murdering witnesses since they will not be executed themselves.
The Democratic Left insisted that houses be offered to those, who by traditional standards, could not afford them. They used ACORN tactics by threatening banks that did not do as they were told. When the “house of cards” collapsed [excuse the pun], the Dems pointed fingers at everyone but themselves. They lied about how it happened, who caused it, and how to fix it. Talk about revisionist history, Barney Frank, who said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were fine, blamed their collapsed on Pres. Bush, who had tried to address the problem but was thwarted by Barney Frank et al.
As I pause, I see I am too impassioned over this to write concisely and my fingers are beginning to tire. So, I will discontinue my rant by saying the moderate left, which includes many sociology folks, view the facts through the prism of their politics. The far left just outright lies.
We need to return to the roots that made this country great: smaller government and smaller taxes. AND FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY!
Vote in November to demand financial responsibility and political accountability.
[Perhaps you might leave a teabag in the voting booth to remind the next voter.]
This is a great example of the failure of compassionate conservatism. The thanks Republicans get is accusations of racism.
President Bush Mortgage Speech 2002(Helping those w bad credit buy houses)
Early in George W. Bush’s first administration, a home ownership initiative was introduced, sometimes referred to as the Blueprint for the American Dream, to close the homeownership gap by 5.5 million minority families. Along with this homeownership initiative, there were other policies implemented to dismantle barriers to homeownership in minority communities.” from :
The Great American Mortgage Scam & The Latino Community
Written by an egg head and an egg head wannabe, neither of whom likely had a real job.
AND don’t forget the ponzi called “fiat”.
A credit bubble ALWAYS ends badly. Every time it’s tried.
Bush apparently thought he had hit the Philosopher's Stone. The boom/bubble. Getting rich in America is easy. Until...
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