Feel the Meme.....

It is bubbling up underneath the bailout analysis and discussion, and it will rear its ugly head in all of the dank corners of the rightwing blogosphere. The meme is that the credit crunch, the collapse of the ridiculously levered banks on Wall Street, and the severe decline in the value of your home is not due to rapacious bankers, lenders and brokers, but because of.....blacks!

The general thought process is that because Clinton (of course) and the Democrats insisted that home ownership should be available to those who had been traditionally left outside of the lending process, and often explicitly discriminated against, the banks were forced to begin reckless lending to lower income and lower credit borrowers, in particular, minorities and, gasp, blacks.



Here's a taste of the meme:

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

We can argue all that we want about the chicken and egg here, but the chicken and egg are the boom in securitization that Wall Street led and the artificially low interest rates that Chairman Greenspan left in place after 9/11, not the absurdly racist notion that black and minority home ownership are to blame. Keep an eye on this, it will enter the conversation over and over again, until it meanders towards conventional wisdom on the right.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin gives it a little twist, and blames it on the other dark skinned culprits....

It’s no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave - Loudoun County, Va., California’s Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters - also happen to be some of the nation’s largest illegal-alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.