The Kroog Versus Dick Armey

I've been fighting the stupid, ignorant right wing racist smear that poor minorities caused the meltdown because of the Community Reinvestment Act for the better part of a year now. Paul Krugman catches Dick Armey not only using the smear again, but building off the lie to say that poor minorities will also be the cause of the next meltdown because of Obamacare.

In the midst of a seriously disgusting interview with Dick Armey, the former House majority leader offers his analysis of the financial crisis:

But at what point do we allow the government to order people that you must sell your product to this person or that person, irrespective of any good judgment? We saw what happened in housing when they ordered banks to make loans to people who weren’t qualified. Are we now going to have the same destructive influences in health care because we’re going to order doctors to provide services and so forth?

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But it doesn't matter, because anytime somebody points out Dick Armey's rich friends trashed our economy through the securitization of mortgage loans that were given out through greed and wishful thinking, folks like Armey will turn around and say "Well if the people we gave loans to weren't so goddamn poor and paid us back, you'd have your nice economy. The Dirth F'ckin Hippies made us make those bad loans."

As I said a year ago:

But gosh, it sure is fun to blame Democrats, poor black folk, and the Community Reinvestment Act for the crisis, and to rewrite history and pretend banksters were all forced to make billions in bad loans to people they knew that were broke instead of admitting a huge pecentage of folks given loans under the CFA -- minorities -- were in fact in much better financial shape than the average subprime borrower.

Still doesn't matter to assholes like Dick Armey, however. The "poor minorities broke the global economy" lie will never die as long as people refuse to correct it.