12-01-2008, 12:24 AM
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#16 (permalink)
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immoral minority
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I'm still thinking that the manipulation of the housing market was a big factor in it. People had a bunch of money they wanted to have grow at 8%-11% and housing was the way to do it (until oil came along).
I read this on Slashdot a few minutes ago and thought that it describes my feelings on this pretty well.
Quote:
I live in Manatee County, Floriduh, one of the places Real Estate Madness hit hardest and that has, hence, been hit hardest by its end.
I do not recall seeing a whole lot of poor and/or minority taxpayers pulling mortgage frauds in order to buy little houses for themselves in not-great neighborhoods like East Bradenton.
I do, however, recall seeing lots and lots and lots of speculators and slumlords, the vast majority of them good white Republicans, bidding up the prices on little working-class houses to the point where none of the people who actually do the Real Work (trash collection, policing, teaching, retail sales, etc.) could possibly buy them. And oh weren't those white Republicans just so proud of the Free Market System and big on boasting about how much money they were making and on laughing at the suckers who actually worked at jobs like teaching or writing for newspapers or cleaning the streets or doing carpentry instead of being Investors, as if Investors were the highest possible form of life and should be bowed down to by all others.
'Course then a local mortgage company called Brasota went broke because it was essentially a ponzi scheme -- and shockingly, it was not run by poor and/or minority working liberals but primarily by (I know this is hard to believe) Rich White Republicans, hardly any of whom lived in the neighborhoods where they loaned mucho bucks to "investors" who didn't live in them, either.
And some local banks have failed, and a lot of local businesses, and now all the Rich White Republicans who ran their ponzi schemes and created their silly tulip-bulb bubble, except with houses, are running around blaming Democrats and liberals who thought that, just maybe, it might be a good idea to stop Rich White Republicans from discriminating against poor and/or minority workers when it came to making home loans.
The CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) that is being blamed by the Rich White Republicans for the collapse of their house of cards was all about ending discrimination in mortgages. Those Free Market Rich White Republicans had long had a bad habit of happily approving loans for white people in white neighborhoods while denying loans to black people in black neighborhoods even if the black people happened to have more stable jobs and wanted to borrow less than their white equivalents.
Listen, Rich White Republicans (and libertarians/Somalians and the rest of your crowd), if you want to see who created the current economic crisis, get a mirror and look in it. Don't keep trying to blame your problems on the blacks or the Jews or the liberals or whatever other group you're in the mood to victimize this week. It wasn't a "homosexual agenda" that created the obviously-insane (and unregulated) derivatives market, and it wasn't pro-choice agitators who ran the rating companies that assigned silly-high values to "bundled" mortgages.
Y'all ran our country for a good while, and basically you screwed it up big-time.
Quit whining. You had your chance. A lot of you got rich, and many of you will stay that way.
But don't try to pass your failures off on others. Man up, and face the fact that most of you got most of your money from some sort of scam, and that you have no right to complain now that you've been caught out.
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