Economy

Racism, 2 October 2008

Memo to conservatives: STOP LOOKING FOR NEW LOWS.

I'm guessing you, as a casual observer of politics, thinks that as games go, the "blame game" is easy to play. Just blame someone else! But it's not that simple. Like anything, there are tweaks and nuances you can use to elevate the blame game from a garden-variety tactic to an insidious art form of evil.

One such tactic is to blame someone shortly before or after denouncing the blame game. This week, John McCain got this down to two sentences. Legend says that if any politician manages to decry the blame game while blaming their opponent for playing the blame game in a single sentence, anarchy will reign across the land.

But the most important part of playing the blame game is finding the right person to blame. If you're casting the blame, you want to blame someone as far away as the guy who did it, YOU, as you can possibly manage. And if that person can't respond, it's even better. And if it's an entire group of people, none of whom can respond, well, that's when you get into art. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"And I quote. While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was President Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules. And in doing so, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potential mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse. The rewrite that was done, back in 2000, made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder. Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another. So loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else." - Michelle "Batshit Crazy" Bachmann, Minnesota's worst congresscritter, quoting from Terry "Not The Intentionally Funny One" Jones' wingnut article in Investor's Business Daily.

The context was, of course, the current financial crisis. Jones' point, which Bachmann went out of her way to read into the record, is that progressive policies to reduce racial discrimination in lending led to the subprime mortgage crisis by rewarding banks for lending money to brown people. When the brown people, being lazy and shiftless, failed to pay the money back, BOOM, crisis!

If it weren't so fucking appalling, you'd almost have to admire it. Here you have quite possibly the single greatest fuckup by rich, powerful white conservatives in the history of rich, powerful white conservatives, and who do the rich, powerful white conservatives throw the blame on? Poor, powerless, melanin-rich beneficiaries of liberalism. Never mind that banks participating in the Community Reinvestment bank have fewer bad mortgages than banks like Bear Stearns and WaMu, or insurers like AIG, who didn't participate in the program. This isn't about facts, this is about blaming those at the bottom for the excesses of those at the top.

It's the same shit they pulled after Katrina, which is just barely hanging in the top five biggest fuckups by rich, powerful white conservatives. Bush was having birthday cake with John McCain. Michael Brown went out to dinner. The response was botched, the rebuilding is still botched, and whose fault was it? The lazy, looting, poor minorities who didn't get out when we told them to, of course! Why, you'd think that they mistrusted rich powerful white people for some reason!

Now, this is pretty fucking reprehensible. But it is possible to take this concept and ramp it up to a point where it moves beyond reprehensible to a level of redonkulousness worthy of a jaw-dropping, silent stare? I believe it is.

"I really thought this was a joke, but it’s not. WaMu’s final press release, before it sank beneath the waves: 'WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer—Again... The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also awarded WaMu its second consecutive 100 percent score in the organization’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which measures progress in attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers.'" - A post by Mark Krikorian at National Review Online.

Krikorian denied that he was implying Washington Mutual's diversity policies were the cause of its downfall - a claim that would be a lot easier to believe if I didn't now tell you the TITLE of his blog post: "Cause and Effect?". One thing you may notice about that title - it includes both the words "Cause" and "Effect", and references a common concept called "cause and effect" in which a cause leads directly to, or "causes", an effect. So, you know. Fuck his douchebag backpedaling right in its hate-hole.

If you're wondering why they're pulling this shit, it's very simple. They did it. They know they did it. They're pretty sure you know they did it, and they're pretty sure you're pissed off that they did it. And they're hoping to distract enough of us so that when we finally save up enough to head down to the hardware store for tar and pitchforks, they've got a chance in hell of surviving. It's a good strategy if you judge it on effectiveness and leave the ethical taint out of the equation entirely.

Oh, and when we suggest that maybe rich people are hurting poor people and should be stopped from doing that, you know what they call it? Class warfare. Thanks, douchebags!