Sometimes Paranoia is Wise

Honestly.  It is somewhat heartening to know that my racial paranoia is grounded in reality.

Mark Krikorian, writing for the National Review Online's blog The Corner, has a snotty "Hmmm.  Coincidence?" post about WaMu's failure and their strong practice of diversity.

This concept has been picked up and there is a dash toward the end zone:  blame for the present financial crisis should fall on ill-abled minorities buying houses in the sub-prime market, bolstered by the Community Reinvestment Act.

Rep. Michele Bachmann said as much during a Senate hearing on Thursday.  From ThinkProgress:

During a Senate hearing on Thursday, Rep. Michele Bachmann pinned blame for financial crisis on President Clinton, “blacks,” and “other minorities.” To make her point, she read from an article written by Terry Jones in the right-wing publication Investor’s Business Daily. Jones criticized the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and said Clinton was misguided for pushing “homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.” Watch Bachmann’s speech, followed by sharp criticism from Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) here.

Yeah.  She actually said that out loud in the Senate, for God's sake.  I'm feeling awfully strange fruity.

This theory has been debunked by conservative UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge:

When you look at the data, it’s true that minorities are slightly over-represented in the sub-prime mortgage market. Yet, whites (non-minorities) received 72.5% of subprime mortgages. Blacks got 16.2% of subprime mortgages, which isn’t all that different from the 12.4% of the general population that blacks comprise. The Hispanics about whom [ed.-my favorite minority minority hater Michelle] Malkin is so hysterical got only 6.2% of subprime mortgages, significantly less than their 14.8% of the general population. But you don’t find an analysis of that data at blogs like those of Malkin or Krikorian.

I cannot bring myself to link to Malkin.  Google her.  By the way, that's over-represented in relationship to percentage of the whole U.S. population, not in sub-prime loans.

So, if I understand Rep. Bachmann's concern, it is the 16.2% deadbeat subprime Negroes and Messcans that tipped the scale into this mess, not the 72.5% of whites.  Are we assuming that the whole 16.2% Negroes and Messcans were deadbeats?  Well, of course they were.  They would have to be for this mess to be happening.  And the whole 72.5% of whites were not...obviously.

In what they are saying, though, I think it is not the deadbeat minorities that are being totally blamed, but the Act compelling banks to lend money to them.

See, here is where dominoes start falling in my head.  It is a given to me, racial paranoia firmly in hand, that the umbrella white male ruling class will, for the most part, not do the right thing unless compelled to do so or unless they get something substantial out of it.  As I see it, every gain in equality garnered by minorities, women, homosexuals, has to be legislated to death before an inch of territory is relinquished.  They don't do it unless you make them.

If banks, successful high-falutin' ones, had in their core principles, a socially (not socialist) responsible business mandate to assure home-ownership for all people, structured in a way that was satisfactory to the lender as well as the borrower, then the CRA would not have been necessary.  Don't talk to me about how they couldn't do it.  Somehow they come up with exorbitant salaries for executives.  Knock off a million or two and give some little folks a loan that can be paid.  This is an example and I'm sure very unsophisticated, but again, I'm in the "I refuse to believe" roundhouse.  Of course it could be done.  It's just that it wasn't part of their business model to do so.

So CRA was created to make it so.

That is the fundamental difference, I suppose, between conservative thinking and liberal thinking.  I agree with Sen. Obama.  From their point of view, you're on your own.  That is, of course, until $700,000,000,000 is needed.  Then we're all in this mess together.

And it's the negroes' and messcans' fault.

UPDATE:  Read this Ta-Nehisi Coates blog entry, particularly the comments.  They have a much more sophisticated grasp on the insult than I.