GOP Preach Selective Self-Discipline

by Froma Harrop - March 24th, 2009 - Detroit News

Government programs promoted homeownership to people who could not afford to buy a house. And, yes, there were reckless, greedy, lazy and/or dishonest borrowers.

But to the conservative punditry, the true villain was a 1977 law that stopped banks from discriminating against creditworthy homebuyers who lived in minority neighborhoods. The crazy subprime activity didn't go into high gear until almost 30 years later, when most of the bad loans were not subject to Community Reinvestment Act rules. Nonetheless, conservative bullhorns framed the meltdown as some racial preference gone wild.

This is a lie. Froma Harrop steals a page from the Obama deceit handbook and ignores the real reason libertarians and conservatives were incensed about the crisis. In the process she sets up a straw man that libertarians and conservatives DID SOMETHING THEY DID NOT DO and uses that lie to attack her opponents.

The reality is that during the Clinton years the CRA was changed to allow U.S. Attorneys and HUD to threaten criminality to any bank lending officer if they did not meet unrealistic and fraudulent goals of how many loans were required to be made to blacks. Even if blacks were given loans at the exact same standards as whites, a bank officer could be threatened with fascist goon overtones if the same percentage were not approved no matter the credit worthiness of the applicants. If sufficient blacks did not meet the standards, that was ruled racism, not equality of treatment. Essentially loan officers were held accountable for failures in the black community to advance economically as fast as our government deemed appropriate.

The lie that 30 years of the CRA did nothing to help blacks get loans, and that the perception of the law was not altered by the actual changes in the law to allow abuses by government goons, is the latest straw man among the liars of the liberal left. No "conservative bullhorns framed the meltdown as some racial preference gone wild" about a law that had been around for 30 years. There was an abusive use of new rules to blackmail banks into granting bad loans. Why is that not a reasonable complaint? Why will liberals not stick to the truth? Why is a lie always needed to slam conservatives for acts they are not taking?

This changed CRA law was not alone in causing the home boom and bust. Since most of the sub-prime disaster was confined to several states where refinancing to other than minorities created most of the problem, it is not true that libertarians and conservatives complained solely about the CRA contribution. However the liars of the liberal left will never deal with truth. Straw man lies and contemptible mis-statements are always the recourse which allows them to duck their accountability for government corruption that caused an economic disaster in our nation.