Obama-smearer extraordinaire Stanley Kurtz, as many of you know, is the one of the main motive forces behind the ridiculous Obama-William Ayers smear. Unsatisfied with that failed trope, he's decided, along with a number of his rightwing shill pals, to try to pin blame for the Wall Street greed orgy and subsequent flameout on ... you guessed it: Obama and minorities in general.
A pack of rightwing shills to try to shift blame for a huge fuckup by their allies (who, as a class, profited from the entire debacle to a huge extent) over to minorities is like the KKK blaming lynching on uppity negros.
link chock full of of hideous lies
In a NYPost op-ed, Kurtz's headline reads:
O'S DANGEROUS PALS
BARACK'S 'ORGANIZER' BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES
WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.
That's right, let's pin the Wall Street crash brought about by unfettered greed and unregulated robber baronism on risky lending to minorities done to avoid being targeted by angry community organizers.
Shorter version of Kurtz's thesis: It was the n*ggers' fault. Oh, and the liberals, too.
Kurtz goes on, contempt for Obama, blacks in general, and the reader dripping from every line:
[C]ommunity organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
THE seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Commu nity Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
It's amazing that Kurtz pins the origin of this crisis on a law enacted 31 years ago, but says not a single word about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act, passed a mere nine years ago. That, my friends, is the thing that brought this entire crapstorm about.
Funny thing, though: wikipedia has this to say about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and its effect on the Wall Street meltdown:
In congressional testimony in 2008, University of Michigan law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Bill Clinton,[37][19] stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA. Another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. He stated that institutions fully regulated by CRA made "perhaps" one in four sub-prime loans. Referring to CRA and abuses in the subprime market, Michael Barr stated that in his judgment "the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight". [38]
In a Bank for International Settlements ("BIS") working paper, economist Luci Ellis concluded that "there is no evidence that the Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for encouraging the subprime lending boom and subsequent housing bust."[39]
According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. She states that most CRA loans have been responsibly made, and are not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.[40]
In 2008, Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial services entities on CRA compliance, conducted a study of loans made by institutions covered under the CRA. The study found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans to other parties.[41]
Ellen Seidman, former director of the US Office of Thrift Supervision during the Clinton administration, who works at the New America Foundation,[42] has stated that the CRA did not have an effect on the United States housing bubble.[43] She noted that CRA banks were particularly warned to make responsible investments, and cited one of her own speeches as an example.[44]
I'm personally disgusted by this shallow and transparent replay of the Dolchstosslegende, only this time instead of "Jews" they substitute "Blacks".
Letters to the NYPost editor refuting, rebuking and debunking this extraordinarily offensive racist tripe would, I think, be in order here.