As some of you know, I used to drive around town with a license frame that said, before someone tore it off, “The Poor Are Not The Enemy.” I wish I had it back. I’d send it to Idaho Values Alliance’s Bryan Fischer, who opines that the mortgage crisis is the fault of bleeding-heart liberal Bill Clinton and the poor Blacks and Hispanics he tried to introduce into the housing market.
Fischer, who seems to embrace as traditional values race-baiting, bigotry, and the uttering of absolute nonsense, says that the federal government, under Clinton’s directive, gave “logic-defying,” “race-based” loans to people who, in turn, forfeited on their mortgages. In Fischer’s world, the current economic crisis is the fault of lower economic classes attempting to solidify their financial and societal standing via the purchase of their own homes. Greed, corruption, reckless deregulation, predatory lending, and a nation strapped by the burden of a war and shackled by tax cuts evidently play only a minuscule part of the crisis; the real culprits are first-time homebuyers who dared to avail themselves of the American Dream, and did so with the understanding that they might even be treated fairly, if not exactly welcomed.
“Race-based loans” were actually federal programs designed to build on a largely stable economy by expanding home ownership to people who historically were either discriminated against or otherwise cut off from their share of the financial pie. These programs were intended to help lift lower-class people out of economic disenfranchisement, achieving their goals through the free market, the sacred temple of the Religious Right. But Fischer and his ilk see only dunderheaded liberalism and the slimy societal goo of affirmative action-type programs, and the chance to add ammunition to the cultural wars and the tension between the Haves and the Have-Nots proves irresistible once again to Idaho’s Vicar of Values. That most of those losing their homes to foreclosure are not ethnic minorities seems lost on him, as does the undeniable connection between the Reagan-era drive to almost completely deregulate the economy and the sorry mess it’s in now.
I’m not sure how Fischer defines “values,” but sidling up to the greedy and powerful while blaming the victims of the housing collapse doesn’t seem to illustrate a real commitment to all that’s good and right and decent, while shameless race-baiting tells us much more about Fischer than about moral values or economics. Clearly, some people took loans they shouldn’t have; clearly, some banks provided loans that virtually guaranteed default. Until we want to make this crisis a product of white male greed, let’s leave the race of those suffering out of it.