Blaming Wall Street’s victims

People are furious at the trillion-dollar handout being given to Wall Street by Bush and Congress. So what are the capitalist media mouthpieces doing?

They’re targeting the victims who are being swindled out of their homes. These professional liars are accusing Latin@ and Black people of fibbing on their mortgage applications.

“They gave your mortgage to a less qualified minority” was the headline of a piece by columnist Ann Coulter, who once called for bombing mosques and forcibly converting Muslims. This title mimics a notorious 1990 TV ad for the late Senator Jesse Helms that claimed African Americans were being unfairly promoted.

The Wall Street Journal claims the Community Reinvestment Act helped detonate the crisis. “This 1977 law compels banks to make loans to poor borrowers who often cannot repay them,” it wrote in a Sept. 22 editorial. “Banks that failed to make enough of these loans were often held hostage by activists when they next sought some regulatory approval.”

Is this wealthy rag suggesting that people have to hold billionaire bankers hostage in order to get results?

Michelle Malkin actually blames undocumented workers for the wave of mortgage foreclosure in a Sept. 24 New York Post column. Malkin wrote a book that defended throwing Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II.

Behind these smears is the bigoted assumption that people of color can’t save or budget their money. This lie ignores the fact that in the 1970s the majority of Black families in Baltimore and Detroit owned their own homes.

Despite unbelievable odds, hundreds of thousands of African Americans bought farms following the Civil War. Much of this land was then stolen from them through fraud, often aided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Now millions are facing foreclosure and eviction.

Bias in lending is just as vicious as racist hiring policies or housing discrimination. A generation ago banks routinely denied mortgages and other loans to people in Black and Latin@ communities in a practice known as “redlining.” This term came from the maps hanging in lending offices with red lines drawn around neighborhoods to be boycotted. The banks would suck up money from the checking and saving accounts of Latin@ and African-American families but refuse to lend to them.

Community organizations across the country took aim at these racist banks and forced Congress to outlaw redlining. Besides the Community Reinvestment Act, Congress was compelled to pass the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in 1975.

How can these laws, passed more than 30 years ago, be held responsible for Wall Street’s current meltdown?

Stanley Leibowitz, University of Texas at Dallas economics professor, wrote: “The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives decided it needed to be ‘fixed.’... The shift began in 1989, when Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants.” (New York Post, Sept. 24)

If “the mortgage market was humming along just fine,” then why did the savings and loan banks implode 20 years ago?

This current blame-the-victim campaign will boomerang. Subprime mortgages are no bargains to borrowers who have to pay higher and higher interest rates. Though Black and Latin@ homeowners were proportionally more likely to get these usurious mortgages, white borrowers received 55 percent of them. (Wall Street Journal, July 23)

The subprime mess is reminiscent of utility shutoffs. Millions of families every year have their lights and heating cut off because they can’t pay skyrocketing utility bills. Seven children and two adults died in a February 1994 Baltimore fire caused by candles. Their electricity had been shut off three months before.

While a higher percentage of families of color are disconnected, poor whites also get shut off. Campaigns against utility rate hikes and cutoffs, like those waged by the Baltimore All Peoples Congress, were able to unite Black and white workers against the super-rich utility monopolies.

The same thing is happening in the struggle to save people’s homes, as ten thousand families a day are being foreclosed. White farmers joined workers of color from Detroit in the Sept. 17 Lansing, Mich., demonstration to demand a moratorium on foreclosures.