White flight

I saw this swirling around the intertubes yesterday, but thought it was probably a trial balloon that will get shot down in a heart beat. Namely, the financial meltdown you may have heard about. Well guess what, it's the fault of "minorities."

Apparently though, this idea has gone mainstream.

Now note yesterday's Wall Street Journal op-ed hints at the same thing: we're in the mess we're in because Congress mandated banks slather low-income folks with home loans they couldn't afford.

Then there's John McCain the other day in Green Bay, claiming "At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

"Lie" is too polite a word for what is going on here.

First of all, even if Fannie and Freddie were the most awful companies in the history of the planet, its books chock-a-block with non-performing loans none of the financial contagion—none of it—would have happened had greedy financial institutions invented the risky securities that used mortgages as their foundation, via procedures that created economic incentives to write non-performing loans. We explained that a long time ago, here. Second of all, as we explained yesterday, loans that fulfilled the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act, performed better than the average mortgage.

Third of all: the part that makes you sick to your stomach. The pattern being drawn across the right—the Big Lie so notorious it's hard to belief they'd even dare it—is that this financial mess is something black people have done to white people.

Truly sick.

As we get closer to the election they fear they're going to lose and lose big, in the midst of a collapse that is also a collapse of their deregulatory ideology, the masks are coming off and the rank racism that has been at the core of the Republican Party's rise for the past 40 years is coming to the fore.