"It Wasn't Banks, It Was Blacks"

So says Dennis Sewell in that organ of metropolitan, urbane Cameronism, The Spectator.

Thank God for the Taki-owned, Buchananite American Conservative:

Who’s to blame for the unfolding financial crisis? According to many conservatives, poor black people and, of course, Democrats.

National Review Online indicts President Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act for the meltdown. The CRA emboldened community organizers—like you-know-who—to force banks to make loans to uncreditworthy minorities, you see. Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily blames Clinton’s “multicultural housing policy” and his mandates to increase home ownership among blacks and Hispanics.

But as economist Michael Barr points out, about half of subprime loans came from mortgage companies that were unaffected by CRA’s mandates. Perhaps only a quarter of all subprime loans were made by banks governed by “multicultural housing” policies. Nothing excuses politically correct credit, but did community organizers really force lenders to infect all financial markets by repackaging their bad mortgages into securities? Did poor blacks invent credit default swaps?

Of course not. While these so-called conservatives criticize the misguided do-goodism of Democrats past, they ignore the present Republican administration that is pioneering socialism for the rich.

Bush proposed an “ownership society,” saying that Americans would prosper when they were given more economic freedom and accountability. Now the same administration insists that prosperity depends on bailouts, that accountability means disaster.

Instead of Americans owning their own homes as free individuals, the Bush administration has made all of us collective owners of the worthless banks and lenders that ruined the real estate market. Never have so many owed so much to so few.

Give me the conservative Old Right over the capitalist New Right any day.

And at least we can now see full well who the real racists are.