Heard the latest joke about the current financial crisis?
The Democrats did it.
Actually, that's not a joke, but it's the sad excuse for one that corporate capitalist apologists are pushing. Ann Coulter even put out an entire rant with the typically subtle title "THEY GAVE YOUR MORTGAGE TO A LESS QUALIFIED MINORITY. Other lessor minds, from Rush Limbough to the Wall Street Journal, concur.
The twisted thinking goes like this: in the late 1970s fair housing advocates pushed through the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, to stop banks from discriminatory practices like "Redlining" (the term comes from banksers who would use a red marker to mark off the minority neighborhoods on a city map to show where they refused to lend). Jim Campen discussed the act back in 1997. (The Act was reformed in 1995 and 2003). Right-wing pundits are now claiming that the law forced banks to give mortgages to "unqualified" minorities who are now all defaulting on their mortgages.
Simple story, but there's one problem. It's not what actually happened.
Writing on the Public Citizen's Consumer Law & Policy blog, Alan White wrote this response: