At the height of the 2008 economic collapse, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the elimination of a discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” was responsible for instigating the meltdown.Bloomberg, of course, was full of shit. Redlining was a racist policy banks had of not making loans to minorities and to people living in minority neighborhoods.
“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’”
What is going on, right now, is Bloomberg is reaping the benefit of the donations/bribes that he has been making for the last several years. When Mikey comes calling for support, it's really easy for recipients to overlook Bloomberg's racism and misogyny because the checks cleared.
Which goes to show that Bloomberg's not operating in Texas: You can't be a real Texas pol if you can't take a man's money, drink his liquor, fuck his wife and then still vote against him.
Well, making loans to "those" people was a major component of the crash, "those" people being anyone they could get to slow to a walk and sign the paperwork.
ReplyDeleteAfter they figured out how to package mortgages into "financial instruments" and sell them as "mortgage backed securities" they could make money on any mortgage whether it was sound or whether it defaulted, and the poor schmucks who should never have had mortgages were coached on how to lie on the applications to get them approved.
They called it "predatory lending" and it was how Elizabeth Warren got into politics, and it grew out of George W. Bush's "ownership society", an attempt to make the growing housing bubble cover for the weakening economy while he remained in office. It didn't work.
It was so Byzantine and corrupt that when the bogus mortgages started going bad and being foreclosed upon, the people struggling to stay in the houses they couldn't afford often couldn't find out who was holding the paper on their loans in order to negotiate with them.
The whole process wiped out several trillion dollars of ordinary citizens' wealth and resulted in no legal consequences for the perpetrators that I am aware of, and in fact one despicable creep who got filthy rich off of thousands of foreclosures is now the Treasury Secretary.
But as for Mikey, stopping predatory lending with redlining is a lot like stopping a fever with a bullet, and as a motherfucking billionaire, he damn well knows it.
-Doug in Oakland
Even I qualified. Got a good laugh at that. Smelled funny though, passed. Good thing, barely anyone reads it now but nobody's gonna' read Underwater on the High Desert.
ReplyDeleteAwwww, Comrade, you blown the gaff on Southern politicians, the GOP and Trump with that revelation of what a Texas pol can pull off. Who knew? And who is the deplorable base gonna believe, you or their deaf,dumb and blind 'awareness'? I wonder, could there be an antonym for 'woke' that could be used on them?
ReplyDeleteComrade EB —- Props to the late Molly Ivins for the quote.
ReplyDeleteAlso attributed to Jesse Unruh, a California politician.
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