Seemingly overnight, Mike Bloomberg has vaulted into the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates, thanks largely to having spent almost half a billion—with a B—dollars presenting himself to American voters. Despite his seemingly overnight success, the former New York City mayor has been around a long time, and has said and done some things that are now, rightfully, being scrutinized with a great deal of care.
In 2008, Bloomberg weighed in on what had plunged our country into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Given that President Barack Obama spent most of his first months in office focused primarily on solving that crisis, its cause is a matter on which a potential president’s take is of the highest importance. In multiple ways, Bloomberg’s answer was an abject failure, mirroring some of the most brain-dead, thoroughly debunked zombie myths right-wingers have spread (and which they are, in good zombie fashion, still spreading). In fact, it was only marginally less ignorant than the commentary offered by Donald Trump’s favorite race-baiting radio host, Rush Limbaugh.
On Sept. 17, 2008, Bloomberg sat on stage at Georgetown University and, when asked about the “root causes” of the 2008 crash, offered a hot take that was wrong on many levels.
It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, “People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.” And then Congress got involved—local elected officials, as well—and said, “Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.” And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.
First things first. Redlining was one of the most egregious examples of systematic, nationwide racial discrimination our country perpetrated during the 20th century, something that took untold billions of dollars in wealth right out of the pockets of African Americans and Latinos. Bloomberg somehow managed to define redlining for his audience without even mentioning race. As Color of Change president Rashad Robinson said, this is highly problematic.
Redlining specifically targeted black and brown communities and has been part of all the ways in which systemic exclusion from wealth and income has hit communities of color. The fact that [Bloomberg] and his campaign would try to redefine this rather than talk about how they’re going to solve it speaks to not just a level of tone-deafness about this moment that we are in, but a really deep dismissal of the pain that has caused so many families and so many communities.
Second, when Bloomberg talked about Congress getting involved and “pushing” in a particular direction, he was referencing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, which was enacted to counter redlining and related practices, as well as other measures taken in order to ensure that people seeking a mortgage who lived in a low-income neighborhood—disproportionately Americans of color—were treated equitably by mortgage lenders. The myth (here’s one of the earliest examples, published in February 2008) that this push for equity in lending played any kind of substantial role in causing the 2008 economic crash has been utterly disproven. As Paul Krugman explained just last week, a stake has been driven into its heart—at least for anyone concerned with facts and data.
Rather than pin the responsibility for the 2008 crash where it belongs, Bloomberg instead has blamed the victims of the crisis. “It’s been well documented that the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color,” Debra Gore-Mann, president and CEO of the Greenlining Institute, told the Associated Press. “People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”
So that’s Bloomberg. How about Limbaugh? Let’s start with what both men’s remarks have in common, namely blaming the CRA for the 2008 crash. As I documented in my most recent book, Limbaugh did this with great regularity. For example, on Sept. 29, 2008—12 days after Bloomberg spoke at Georgetown—Limbaugh began a segment of his radio show by asking, “So what got us here? Well, you can say ‘white guilt’ got us here, political correctness got us here, or a combination of all those things.” He also claimed that the CRA "was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods.” That sure does sound a lot like what Bloomberg said.
The host further spouted that civil rights activists (even naming Obama at one point, because of his connection to ACORN) had been taking advantage of the poor, defenseless banks. In Limbaugh’s words,
That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN … to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘subprime’ loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers. Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with (these community redevelopment things) ...
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions. Think of ACORN as a thousand Jesse Jacksons, in terms of shaking down companies and institutions.
In Limbaugh’s fevered, racist mind, the CRA and candidate Barack Obama—not the Republicans who controlled the legislative and executive branches for most of the years leading up to 2008—had caused the crash. Oh, and also a bunch of black people bullied banks and stole their money—read: white people’s money.
This, of course, is what the right wing always does: After fat cats and multimillionaires push through policies that favor their own interests and end up crushing middle- and working-class white, black, and brown Americans (i.e., everyone), people like Limbaugh convince the white people who got crushed that it was the fault of Americans of color—rather than the real culprits. That’s the only way to keep large numbers of those whites voting Republican. As Berkeley Law professor Ian Haney López’s research has demonstrated, challenging that deception is the most effective way for Democrats to win a chunk of those white voters back, while also firing up the black and brown voters who saw through it all along.
Even after the U.S. was emerging from the crisis, Limbaugh continued to harp on the effort to bring equal treatment to the mortgage lending market. Here’s what he said on Oct. 6, 2011: “Now the Obama regime, as we speak, is making banks go into minority neighborhoods. The subprime thing is being rerun. This time, not just loans to the poor. They have to open branches in poor and dangerous neighborhoods. The regime is forcing this.”
Let’s be clear about this: Limbaugh is actually decrying efforts to make banking more accessible and ensure that banks don’t discriminate. And he’s saying that President Obama is going to step up that effort by “rerunning” the CRA and then some, which, according to the host, will plunge America into an even worse economic crisis. Why would Obama do this to our country, you might ask? Limbaugh’s answer is: because he only cares about helping “minorities”—and screw everyone else, i.e., white people. That, my friends, is how you race-bait.
It’s important to recognize the difference between Limbaugh’s rhetoric and Bloomberg’s comments. The latter, wrong as he was about the CRA, redlining, and the 2008 crash, never went as far as the ultra-racist radio host did—on more than one occasion. Again, Limbaugh:
Let us not forget, Barack Obama, back in the old days, sued Citibank for redlining. It was one of his two lawsuits as a lawyer. Obama, back in Chicago, sued Citibank for redlining. Now, Barack Obama as president has said that the banks snookered people into these mortgages….
It was ACORN’s primary function, but these shakedowns are a classic of the Reverend [Jesse] Jackson. And this was a shakedown of the banking industry, is what this was. The subprime mortgage thing was a shakedown. ACORN and others upset, it’s not fair poor people couldn’t have houses, too…..
And they went to the banks, “You’re gonna make loans to these people and if you don’t, we’re gonna put you in jail, or we’re gonna investigate you, we’re gonna do something, we’re gonna make your life hell.” And it’s exactly what happened.
If Wall Street had had their way, there wouldn’t have been a subprime mortgage collapse in the first place because they wouldn’t have made these loans. If pure capitalism had actually been at work here, been allowed to run its course, the banks would not have been making loans that they didn’t want to make, but that wasn’t a factor. You got Clinton, [U.S. Attorney General Janet] Reno, Cuomo — don’t forget, Andrew Cuomo as Clinton’s HUD secretary was big on this Community Redevelopment Act, which was a subprime mortgage instigator.
And we wonder why millions of white conservatives believe that white Americans are the ones being discriminated against.
On Jan. 10, 2013, Limbaugh decided he’d further miseducate his audience by incorrectly defining redlining for them:
Now, this story, it’s an AP story, says the following: “Lenders will be required to verify and inspect borrowers’ financial records.” You know what Obama and the Reverend Jackson and the Democrats used to call that? Redlining. When the banks would look at people’s financial records and determine whether or not they could pay ’em back, if they couldn’t, they’d line ’em out in red, and they wouldn’t get the loan. And of course the civil rights crowd yelled, “racist, racist, racist,” because minorities were among the largest group not being given loans, and they said this wasn’t because of their inability to pay. It’s because people are racist at the banks. So they changed the rules and give ’em the money.
But Obama and the Reverend Jackson used to call these new regulations redlining.
That’s. Not. Fucking. Redlining.
After you’re done screaming at the computer, please also recognize that, once again, Limbaugh claimed that black people are lying about racism and exploiting white guilt in order to get money they don’t deserve. That hateful fantasy, in a nutshell, is modern conservatism.
Bloomberg’s remarks at Georgetown have, unsurprisingly, become a major campaign issue. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has offered multiple powerful responses, including a primer on redlining wrapped around a wonderfully subtle jab at the mayor.
In addition to that concise redlining recap, Sen. Warren also addressed the totality of the former New York mayor’s remarks, arguing that they demonstrate his sheer unfitness to be the nominee of the Democratic Party for president. “A video just came out yesterday in which Michael Bloomberg is saying, in effect, that the 2008 financial crash was caused because the banks weren’t permitted to discriminate against black and brown people," Warren declared at a Feb. 13 rally in Arlington, Virginia. "That crisis would not have been averted if the banks had been able to be bigger racists. And anyone who thinks that should not be the leader of our party.”
In response to the criticisms being hurled by Warren and others, Bloomberg campaign spokesperson Stu Loeser said that his boss was simply “saying that something bad—the financial crisis—followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor.”
Sorry, Stu, but that’s a load of CRApola, as anyone who reads the remarks can see. At Georgetown, Bloomberg was asked about the “root causes” of the crisis, and the mayor said, “It all started with pressure on banks” to reverse redlining and make “more and more loans.” He didn’t just say that one thing followed the other. Bloomberg said that the “good thing” caused the “bad thing.” And that is simply false.
Most recently, during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, Bloomberg again had to answer for those comments (and plenty else). To say it didn’t go well for him is an understatement. Warren was the first to bring it up, when, about 10 minutes in, she accused Bloomberg of supporting redlining—something which, to be fair, was not evident from his Georgetown comments.
Warren next hit Bloomberg over the other part of his remarks, contrasting his falsehoods with her morally righteous actions: “When Mayor Bloomberg was busy blaming African-Americans and Latinos for the housing crash of 2008, I was right here in Las Vegas literally just a few blocks down the street holding hearings on the banks that were taking away homes from millions of families,” she said. Former Vice President Joe Biden piled on Mayor Mike as well, pointing out that the “greed of Wall Street, not redlining” had caused the economic crash.
Shortly thereafter, moderator Chuck Todd asked Bloomberg directly about Biden’s comments, stating, “You seemed to imply that … stopping redlining somehow contributed to the financial crisis.” The mayor, echoing the aforementioned comments from his spokesperson, replied, “That was exactly wrong.” The record, however, clearly proves otherwise.
Bloomberg also proclaimed that he had a long record of being “against redlining.” So he’s against deliberate government-sanctioned racial discrimination that caused great financial harm? Yipp-frickin-ee. Then, to his credit, the mayor added that redlining “is still a practice in some places and we’ve gotta cut it out.” Nevertheless, this was just one of a number of exchanges in Las Vegas that left Bloomberg looking very much out of step with Democratic values, and with the realities that voters face. It just cemented the idea that, while he rode out the 2008 crash in his billionaire bubble, Warren was on the ground, fighting for vulnerable homeowners.
Bloomberg at Georgetown parroted some of the worst right-wing lies about the “root causes” of the mortgage crisis that sparked the Great Recession. On the facts, he couldn’t be more wrong. By blaming efforts to fight discrimination for causing the crash, Bloomberg’s false statements eerily parallel the pablum spewed by the guy who, along with his orange-hued buddy, earlier this month tarnished forever the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow. To be sure, Bloomberg’s falsehoods about redlining and the Community Reinvestment Act were not accompanied by the same kind of hateful race-baiting rhetoric that Limbaugh used. That, however, is a pathetically low bar to clear.
I may not be a highly paid political consultant of the kind with which Bloomberg has surrounded himself. However, I’m pretty confident that “I’m not as much of a race-baiter as Rush Limbaugh” isn’t exactly the kind of slogan around which one builds a successful campaign for president.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas). Some of the material in this post is excerpted (in some cases with slight alterations) from the book, with full permission from the publisher.