Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter Part 80

Ahh, Foreclosuregate, America's personal hell that keeps on giving.  Via BooMan, we see that yes, despite the bleating of the one-percenters that all the damn poor people caused the crisis, there are banksters who freely admit the system was rigged and that there was no way they could lose, banksters like Jim Theckston, who worked for Chase in Florida.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

Oh yes, and despite the idiotic drumbeat of "minorities broke the economy!" from the usual suspects, the most awful thing about the system was that it was designed to prey on minorities, designed to be a fatal blow to the already staggering black and Latino middle-class, and it performed that job admirably.

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

So yes, once again in our post-racial world it's blacks and Latinos getting screwed while the banks got trillions in zero-cost loans to cover up their greed.  Yes, poorer, less-educated people of every race got stabbed in the throat by these vampires, but as usual the truly devastating stuff hit blacks and Latinos...and these bank executives are still happily being bank executives and not in jail, because it was all legal.

These assholes murdered the middle-class and got away with it.