Not just Coulter & Malkin

Maria Niles — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:47:12 -0500

The "it's the minorities fault" meme is spreading across Fox News and other conservative media and was actually read into the Congressional Record by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

What the media are missing about the financial crisis; Out of the spotlight, Haiti still suffers

Kim Pearson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:17:31 -0500

Last year during a C-SPAN hearing on the subprime mortgage crisis, Sen. Charles Schumer said that he wished that the news media would report that a significant percentage of the black and Hispanic borrowers who got stuck with subprime mortgages actually qualified for conventional mortgages. I never found a link to the tape, so I didn't blog it. But Georgetown University law Prof. Emma Coleman Jordan has the goods on the role that racism played in creating this mess -- and the questions we should all be asking about the government proposal to get us out.

Coleman Jordan's posts are particularly relevant now that conservative pundits Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin are pushing bogus claims that the subprime mortgage crisis happened because, as one headline on Coulter's column put it, "They gave your mortgage to a less-qualified minority." Actually, Michelle Malkin said that "illegal immigrants" were to blame. Classic scapegoating.

Let's be clear: as the Center for American Progress notes, most of the consumers affected by the subprime mortgage crisis are white. However, last October, Coleman Jordan noted:

African American borrowers have been especially hard hit. Recent studies from New York University researchers, pro consumer non profits such as Acorn and the Center for Responsible Lending and the NYT analyses of mortgage data show
that even at higher income levels, black borrowers throughout the
country were far more likely than white borrowers with similar incomes
and mortgage amounts to receive a subprime loan.

In that column, Coleman Jordan argued that if the administration could have mitigated this crisis by acting sooner:

If
the government had stepped in initially to protect borrowers when the
problems were first spotted in minority communties, the general
crisis, that now threatens the interdependent world economy, might not
have grown to its current dimension.

As Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier might put it, this is an example where poor people and people of color were the canaries in the mine. Instead of looking at the problems in minority communities as a warning for the larger society, we Americans have an unfortunate tendency to miss the connections.

Last week, Coleman Jordan, who wrote some of the California's consumer protection banking laws, laid out her view of what it will take to fix the problem:

The way to get out of this mess will require four things: public
recognition of the scope and scale of the backlog of home
mortgage-related defaults, return to basic human connections in home
mortgage lending, aggressive consumer protection, and insistence on
generous capital cushions (rainy day funds set aside to buffer
unexpected losses).

Today, she presented an incredibly clear and concise summary of the bailout proposal, along with a thought about what happens now:

This dramatic repudiation of the bailout legislation now calls into
question the entire Paulson conceptual approach in which an
astronomical sum of money is authorized to buy toxic, mortgage-backed
debts that have no known valuation.

I'm going to be reading the good Professor as this mess unfolds. If Ms. Coulter and Ms. Malkin were interested in being constructive instead of scapegoating, perhaps they might give her a read as well.

___________________________

Meanwhile, while we are trying to figure out how deep our financial crisis will go, the world is ignoring a humanitarian tragedies unfolding in Haiti and India. Sokari at Black Looks has blogged the media's lack of interest:

By the end of the week the number of Haitian dead had risen to 500 and
now it is estimated that at least 1000 have died. The number of
displaced is in millions. It’s not just Haitian stories that are dull
and not worth the words on the paper.

Actor and humanitarian Mia Farrow traveled to Haiti on behalf of the United Nations and issued this appeal:

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Not just Coulter & Malkin

What the media are missing about the financial crisis; Out of the spotlight, Haiti still suffers