Diddling While America Burns
| Fri Jul. 18, 2008 12:00 AM PDT
This must have been how the peasants felt, watching Nero fiddle a merry tune while Rome burned.
Gasoline approaches $5 a gallon, runs on our banks are just barely averted, the war on terror drags on and on and what are we obsessed with? A magazine cover, now that the New Yorker's suddenly embraced satiric ones, and Bernie Mac's barely funny jokes at an Obama fundraiser. Imagine...a comedian making luke warm fun of the probable next Prez's marital woes. Heavens!
Do our problems seem so insoluble that we don't know what else to tackle but inanities like this? The only good that can come of this puerility is the fodder it provides for those of us who teach journalism (students, see: what not to do). It's twaddle like this that makes good journalism so much more precious. Wanna feed your brain instead of swaddle it in crap, wanna encourage journalists to produce more of it? Here are three items not to miss.
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First, check out this bloggingheads.tv discussion between Michelle Goldberg and Rebecca Traister, two of my favorite young, outside-the-box feminist journalists. They expand my thinking and piss me off in all the best ways.
Then read this article in this week's New Yorker, instead of just about its cover. It's an utterly fascinating, very detailed history and analysis of a young Obama making the journey from idealistic neophyte to squinty-eyed professional politician.
I'm somewhat afraid of him now, even as I realize that only after such a process could anyone, let alone someone like Obama, be a stone's throw from the Oval. If you want to really understand the man who may well be our next president, a president in some of the most perilous times we've ever faced, don't miss articles like this one.
You can't read, or listen to, these while you're driving, and you might just have to miss that TMZ video of some stupid celeb buying cheez doodles, but it's well worth it.
If you really want to do your job as a thinking adult and voter, read this Nation piece by Kai Wright. She, too, did something that I just love to hate: She's forcing me to admit that maybe, just maybe, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote this about the mortgage debacle.
The subprime crisis isn't simple. It isn't about wanna be Donald Trumps buying McMansions. Rather, it wasn't just about that. I had plenty of working class relatives, as early as the 80s, making fools of themselves and losing their homes refinancing at terms they refused to understand and spending the money on trips to Bermuda, shoes and big screen TVs. But now it's clear that there was a clear pattern of deception, hard sell, and outright fraud in these loans. And that they were specifically targeted at poor, elderly blacks, and black neighborhoods.
You have to read all the way to the end for the proof I found most staggering, but the fact remains that blacks depend, to a far greater extent than others on their home equity as the basis of what scant wealth we hold as a community, and there was a concerted, ruthless effort made to defraud us; check out the parts, near the end, about how the Yellow Page-sized mortgage documents were forged to show retirees who were actually pulling in $2000 a month as fixed income being shown to have monthly incomes of nearly $5000.
Grandma and Grandpa Washington didn't prepare those documents, IndyMac did—then sent ruthless MBAs to their ghetto homes to pressure them into signing. Entire black communities have been decimated, our future generations bereft of any low-dollar amount inheritance ever in the offing (1 in 4 whites receive a bequest while only 1 in 10 blacks do. Even then, blacks get only half as much).
I have more reading to do on all these issues, but wading through the mega pixels of brain-killing nonsense we readers seem to prefer has me more determined than ever to do so.
Comments
Debra,
Why is it that virtually everything you blog about has to come down to how whitey is beating down the black man? That is the kind of thinking that just fuels the fire of race wars. I find it hard to believe that the mortgage parasites consciously targeted blacks - they were targeting EVERYBODY. Yes, the lower socio-economic classes get hit the hardest, and urban areas have so many more potential victims, but it's not always about race.
Some good reading suggestions here.
I just want to point out, though, that the current obsession with the New Yorker cover and Bernie Mac's jokes are not just frivolous; they are manifestations of post-Swiftboat fear. I almost called it paranoia, but there's too much good reason for such concerns. Will a fatal anti-Obama meme worm its way into the national consciousness? Everyone wants to know! I personally don't think so, but after the Kerry Swiftboating, and the Gore flip-flopper, Love Story, internet, earth tones innuendos, it seems reasonable to worry. We cannot allow another candidate to become ridiculous in the public's eye, so the current mood is hyper politically correct.
Submitted by CSC (not verified) on Fri Jul. 18, 2008 3:53 PM PDT.
You're darn right there was fraud going on. The FBI stated two yrs ago that 80% of mortgage fraud was done by the industry itself. In the book, "Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud," (Roberts/Dollar) the authors also stated this could not have happened without the industry's involvement. Everyone from builders to real estate agents, to lenders to appraisers was getting in on creating the bubble. How quickly we forget that many builders have been investigated and fine by HUD, Beazer is still under investigation, many appraisers say they were blackballed if they didn't inflate appraisals, and everyone wanted to just make the deal. NO ONE was looking out for the home buyer, even in some cases not their own real estate agent, or the home inspector their agent urged them to use. Inspectors who were honest were often called "dealbreakers" and blackballed. Builders set up their own mortgage co's and got in on it too. What puzzles me is that all these experts in the industry and government, all the investors and so on, did LESS due diligence than any consumer is expected to do. None in the industry or regulatory positions can honestly claim they "didn't see it coming." I volunteer for a consumer org and we saw it coming. Unfortunately no one in a position to stop it while they could, was interested in doing anything when it was "just" consumer groups and consumers who were issuing the warnings that this is what it'd come to. Many in this industry should go to jail, but I bet most will just pay a fine without admitting wrong doing, like so many of the builders have paid to HUD.
Gary, you seem to have taken all of the other points raised by Ms. Dickerson and disregarded them, focusing instead upon the attempts by mortgage lenders to defraud blacks and people of colour. Just because she points out these truisms does not mean she is making the case for "the man" stepping upon the necks of the most vulnerable, which economically have always included blacks, the elderly, and those living in poverty or near-poverty. It was true as long ago as just before my birth that people of colour were prohibited from fully engaging in economic advantages that others in society were able to utilize. That mortgage lenders were willfully using these methods to keep particular segments of society from being as prosperous as they might have been otherwise, is worth noting. That there are those who want to disregard these truisms in no way lessens the reality.
Your post seems to indicate that we would be better off as a society if Ms. Dickerson and others like her who raise awareness of these tactics were to ignore them completely. This is, of course, wishful thinking. I would venture to say that no one is going to start a "race war" based upon this information, of which people of colour are already aware...even without evidence, it is something we suspect because we've been there before. If you were truly interested in this issue, you might do better to decry the practices of the mortgage lenders and work to enact legislation that exacts meaningful retribution for those who were victimized.
Ms. Dickerson, I applaud your efforts to become more attuned to great sources of journalism that provide us with more in depth analysis of the situations in which we find our nation. Thank you for making a cogent attempt to help us all to become more engaged citizens.
I just ran across this blog and what a crock of BS. I have worked in mortgages for 20 years and never once I have attended a meeting or seen a memo that instructed anyone to target anyone. Some losers were hired and abused the products. Some irrational lenders put out products that never made sense at all for anyone. I never in my career wrote an option arm loan or any other junk product. My customers are still buying homes and doing just fine. A good deal of my clients (more than 50% are minorities). The old saying goes something like you can't cheat an honest man.
