I wrote up a comment critical of the post over there but it did not get past "moderation." It was long, maybe that's why. Here's the end of it:

Anglachel has posted on this subject several times. She makes the point that Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) lending is getting a bad rap. She includes a citation from a Wikipedia entry:

Defenders of CRA disagree, pointing out that half of all subprime loans were made by institutions that are not subject to CRA and another substantial share of subprime loans were made by subsidiaries of banks that do not fully come under CRA. They estimate that the substantial number of riskier loans banks were forced to accept by CRA were not enough to be a problem.

In this same post Anglachel provides four links to detailed explanations about the mortgage industry by Calculated Risk blogger Tanta including What is Subprime which Anglachel describes as a "[l]ong, fascinating uber-nerd post, a must read." Anglachel passes on the warning from Tanta that "the subprime crisis is nothing compared to the Alt-A and prime crisis entering the market now."

There have been too many other things on that blog that really upset me.

As to the Community Reinvestment Act (Jimmy Carter) and the Fair Credit Act (LBJ), Bill Clinton and Janet Reno were VERY aggressive in enforcing them. In fact, I put it to readers the reasons of the economic good times of the Clinton years was all the capital that was poured into underserved communities that then went right back into the economy.

On of the reasons minority communities have been disporportionately affected by the subprime meltdown is predatory lending practices that were stepped up during the Bush years.

It is really really really important that people understand that right wing ideology and a parasitic business model are 100% to blame for the present crisis and that it had nothing to do with anti-discrimination laws.

So it's a twofer for them. But a number of folks on the right or their stenographers have started claiming the problem with this mess isn't all the white boys on Wall Street, it's all the fault of the minorities. Howard Fineman has already used this to try to blame this entire mess on Bill Clinton (and it is weird to see alleged Hillary supporters using this bullshit reasoning when it basically passes a lot of the blame to her husband). In addition, Glenn Greenwald took down the National Review for suggesting WaMu's failure was caused by having such a racially diverse workforce.

If anything, minorities were victims in this mess in that they were more often moved into subprime loans than white folks were even though a lot of them qualified for regular old mortgages. Not that Howard Fineman or the National Review can probably envision black and brown people qualifying for the same kinds of loans they do.

But the new GOP position is that all of this wasn't caused by Wall Street's greed, including pushing minorities into more expensive subprime mortgages when they qualified for regular ones. It was Clinton and the Democrats fault for thinking minorities should be able to get mortgages to begin with. And given that Hillary Clinton has been focused on helping the homeowners rather than the banks, she doesn't seem to be blaming the victims. Why a site supporting her would do so, I have no idea. But it does not reflect well on it.

Well done, Mandos for catching and taking another attempt at this bullshit down. Although I agree with Anglachel below that there's no evidence that this article is something Hillary would agree with. If anything, she's one of the few in Congress trying to help the borrowers (that would include all those minorities) and not just the banks.

Mandos,

This is an outstanding post until the final paragraph and the last sentence: "But if Hillary Clinton actually ever planned to endorse this point of view, and this is really a point of view that's compatible with PUMA goals, then minority politics dodged a bullet with the RBC shenanigans."

W.T.F? If Hillary endorsed something that is the opposite of her stated policies, we should be glad for the RBC shenanigans for saving minorities from what we *imagine* would be her behavior, not what she has always said and supported?

First, where in the Confluence article does the author state that Hillary supports what she said? I have searched the page (and the comments) to try to find assertions (let alone evidence) that HRC supports this stance.

Second, where in your post do you provide evidence that HRC has said or done anything to indicate she is in agreement with the opinions presented in that Confluence post, aside from the concluding ad hominem swipe?

I have been doing quite a bit of research on this very issue recently because of the way in which Bill Clinton's defense of minority lending is being used by the Right to try to pin the mortgage debacle on the Democrats.

You are too smart for that last sentence to be an accident, Mandos.

The Left is attacking Bill Clinton for relaxing lending standards and refusing to acknowledge his role in extending credit to previously excluded poor and minority neighborhoods. The Right is attacking Bill Clinton for forcing the banking industry to be accountable for its lending practices to poor and minority neighborhoods and refusing to acknowledge their own role in removing oversight of lending standards. I have read nothing on or by Hillary Rodham Clinton to indicate that she is in disagreement with Bill about the need to ensure credit is available in poor and minoritiy neighborhoods, though I have read plenty from her in the last year that she clearly wants to regulate the predatory practices of the lending industry.

Care to put your last sentence into the context of HRC's actual policies, and not what you imply she might have done were she to embrace the position of the author of that article? Please defend your implicit claim that the RBC rigging of the nomination was a good thing because HRC promotes anti-minority lending policies.

Anglachel

Sorry, I agree that that last bit wasn't clear. I don't mean to paint Clinton herself with perfidious intent, but to mock an image of her that some of the PUMA movement projects on her. I'm on my handheld now and will clarify on the post itself when I get to a real keyboard.

I don’t mean to paint Clinton herself with perfidious intent, but to mock an image of her that some of the PUMA movement projects on her.

It's everywhere, it seems.

too many pumas have obama derangement syndrome these days. too many of them have morphed from being hillary supporters to being obama haters.

and a number of pumas do stress that their movement is no longer about hillary, at all, so i think it's a mistake for any of the rest of us to conflate what pumas want with what hillary wants.

I love this job!

Moderation at The Confluence is automated according some arcane rules of the software. The usual step is to just ask to be let out of moderation; someone with the power usually takes care of it in a minute or two. I'm thrown in moderation all the time bc my comments are usually long.

I read the post and thought it was interesting; I almost blogged about it here because I'm not as knowledgeable as a lot of folks here are on the economy and I wanted to read some counterpoints. What I read, and really probably projected onto that article was that banks et al exploited the rules encouraging minority and lower-income lending to push crap mortgages out there on everyone. I didn't blog about it though, because it was posted at The Confluence and I didn't want to get into another thread where there's a big discussion about how stupid, wrong and useless PUMAs are. Hmmm.

As for the snark about mocking an image of her that some of the PUMA movement projects on her, you could try using the mockery when PUMAs are actually doing that; in that post and the 100+ comments, Clinton is mentioned only once, unrelated to the main post, and as for Obama-hating, Obama is barely mentioned.

A lot of PUMAs are, yes, very hostile to Obama (I wonder why), but a lot are not. It's become too easy a sport, taking shots at PUMAs (I understand that now that PDS is waning? at TL, PUMA-hunting is the new big thing) and varnishing them all with one big brush by zeroing in on one post or one comment.

I'm a PUMA and I don't really care about Obama, except as an avatar of the fundamental problems with the Democratic Party as a whole. In fact, if it were just that he was a weak candidate with no evidence of capacity for leadership, I'd probably vote for him. But he's not, he's intertwined with the fuckedupness of the whole party, which has become something I can't find it in myself to support. (and no, still not voting for McCain, either)

And I'm not the only one. There are lots of discussions as well as action going on about the economy, attempts to lobby anyone in Congress who will listen not to screw us over (again) throughout PUMA's internet sites (which is kind of remarkable, when you think about it, given how thoroughly the Democratic Party has rejected anyone or anything that smacks of either Clinton, and how roundly Obama, his supporters and the DNC have flipped us the bird time and again). And that's just in the midst of this whole crappy economic 'crisis'; otherwhere, PUMAs are trying to put together political action lobbying for all the things that get listed here as liberal goals.

Although, if you're wanting to mock PUMAs for continuing to think Clinton would have been a much better nominee than Obama, well then, I am very guilty of that, esp. this last week, eg, HOLC vs. 'call me if you need me'. So go ahead on that score. But at least try to mock me/us for something I/we said instead of taking random shots. That's just kind of crap.

toward solving poor people's problems.

There are no clean hands with this debacle. The Dems are in it deeply, which is a big part of why they're eager to just do a deal and get it behind them before anyone starts slinging blame around. The Rs took a mistake and turned it into a catastrophe; in a distribution of blame they get by far the greater share, but they have no shame so they're happy to drag it out and make sure the blame gets shared. I don't expect to see any DC heroes in this one.

Late in the Clinton presidency, Andrew Cuomo was in way over his head as Secretary at Housing and Urban Development. He pushed liberalization of mortgage terms [NSFW! Village Voice] with the good intent of helping poor people own a home. Commercial banks were all for it, wanting Freddie and Fannie to commit their funds to lower-end, riskier mortgages which would keep the higher-end, safer mortgages for them.

But with increasing home values looking like a trend that would never stop, greed at the banks tempted them to apply the same "flexible" qualification policies that F&F had legitimized but to bigger then still-bigger mortgages with middle and upper middle class customers. The bigger notes at higher eventual rates looked like a gold mine, and the downward spiral began. People like Frank and Dowd facilitated the process by allowing and/or not pitching a fit over and stopping the laxness in rules and diminishment in oversight - a rising stream of PAC donations from the banks and investment funds greased the skids with both political Parties.

Cuomo got a lot of commercial banking political connections and support out of the deal, which eventually led to his current job as New York AG. He gets paid now to investigate people for doing what he helped enable, albeit unwittingly; ruling class rules apply to him as well as them.

All might have been well for years to come if BushCo hadn't squandered treasure on Iraq and sucked so much money out of the middle class. As those at the lower middle of the income spectrum became squeezed, they couldn't keep up their payments especially in the face of recent rising costs for gas and food. Simultaneously, the market for housing stalled and then fell so the earlier available option of refinancing and consuming equity to retain ownership has evaporated.

Today, 13% or so of all US first mortgages are sub-prime amounting to about $850 Billion. By the end of 2009, in the bottom of the coming recession, a third to a half of those will be in foreclosure. The next wave of collapse will be from the Alt-A mortgages, also known as No-Doc paper; they total over $1 Trillion and an estimated 70% of owners exaggerated their income and may not be able to meet obligations. F&F hold over $500 Billion of Alt-A mortgages, and defaults on them accounted for half of their 2Q08 losses.

Another 10-15% of US housing carries high-interest second and third mortgages that with a deepening recession will create another, more severe wave of foreclosures that will penetrate the upper middle class. As high as 15% of all US housing mortgages could be in default by the end of next year. Anticipating this collapse is what has tightened the credit markets; nobody with cash in hand now wants to lend into the face of what will be a serious and possibly massive economic collapse.

This trillion dollars will not avoid the coming recession. What it will do is shift the highest-risk paper, the paper with the least real worth, off the books of commercial lenders. We will own the mess, collectively, so the losses will be socialized. The surviving companies will have better balance sheets, keeping their stock prices and dividends up and securing the wealth of the top 1% - people like Paulson whose net worth is $600 million, and the corporatists who control the whole of the Republican Party and more than half of the Democrats. It also buys them some time to move their assets smoothly to other investments, or cash which they can use to pick up distressed, undervalued properties during the recession. Win-win-win for the wealthy, lose all around for thee and me.

Cuomo wasn't trying to destroy the US economy, just help people own a home. What he didn't understand, along with the rest of the Clinton administration, is that there are better ways to do it. Reduce the original cost of a home is one way, by increasing density and shrinking the footprint; engineering the economy to raise wages is another. The choice of increasing debt in hopes of a windfall, betting borrowed money on the Come Line, is tempting for poor people - witness the popularity of the lottery - but it is never a reliable wealth-building strategy.

The Republicans took that foolishness and used it as a means to a theft, as though someone had handed them the keys to the vault and asked them to keep an eye on the money. The decisions of the Clinton administration were naive and foolish. The decisions of the Bush administration were - and are - those of a massive criminal organization.

Another soon-to-be-much-discussed smart rich-kid solution that didn't work out is the Chicago school debacle from Ayers and the Annenberg. (I don't blame Obama for that one; it was all in place when he came on board, he was hired to do a specific job and he had no control over - or understanding of - the flawed premise.) How anyone supposedly skilled in educational structure management could have thought that success would come from replacing a corrupt and bloated administrative structure with a bloated parent-council structure completely ignorant of administrative skills but powered by frustration, anger and revenge, is beyond me.

All done, probably $200 million spent and not a lick of demonstrable improvement can be shown for the students, many good teachers and decent low-level administrators were systematically driven out, and the infrastructure ended up worse than when it started. Improving education by raising teacher salaries wasn't considered, because to Ayers and his cronies the teachers and their curricula were the problem. Stupid and arrogant are the words for it.

(Full disclosure: I loath Bill Ayers.)

The last people who should be blamed in all this, for the mortgage disaster or the Chicago school debacle, are those at the low end of the economic structure; they bought a dream, sold by people who should have known better, and they will now be the ones who will pay twice over and end up with nothing to show for it.

...that the American people win given the options provided to us, whether the options be presidential candidates, proposals, or anything else, at the moment. Perhaps, the question should be rephrased "whom do you want to lose less?" and even then the question maybe barely answerable.

It is precisely posts like the one you flagged, which can be found through-out the PUMAsphere, which have soured me entirely on the whateverthehellitis and the people who are part of whateverthehellitis.

What it most certainly is not is a liberal/progressive movement, and from my perspective it has become the mirror image of all it raged against during the primary, a period when I read The Confluence regularly, with both interest and sympathy.

The post is based almost entirely on rightwing sources, and it mangles much of the history which it seeks to clarify, as Bringiton helps to point out.

I'll have more to say on this in the future, but I also want to thank Anglachel for pointing out the confusion underlying your final point, and you for correcting it with speed and grace.

Of more interest even than the post are the comments, which at some point most of you should take the time to read. They speak of a mind-set that cannot produce liberal progressive results. In comment after comment, frustration is expressed that this killer material isn't getting out there. Apparently, PUMAS don't pay attention to anything outside of Pumaville, because the material has been all over the right blogisphere.

Final irony: Mr. Raines has much closer ties to the Clintons than he does to Obama, or to congressional Democrats. Also, notice the attitudes expressed towards the Congressional Black Caucus and someone like Maxine Waters.

Please note; I am not saying that either Clinton is responsible for Raines tenure at Fannie Mae. Dare I also point out the manner in which commentators make a hero of McCain, and manage to disappear the entirely relevant story of Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, and his role as a lobbyist for Fannie and Freddie.

and ignorance of the things PUMAs are doing that are exactly what they are being criticized for not doing.

To the extent there is dominant thinking on the economic mess among PUMAs, they are backing Clinton's HOLC plan. I'd say 'big surprise' except I guess it is a big surprise to some. Here's a post discussing it just today, by the same author you feel represents PUMAs. Here's another (including a cross-link to Lambert on HOLC), another (cross-linking to the same Anglachel posts that have been linked to here), another, and some more (Clinton's media appearances discussing the 'crisis', within a larger post about how unenthused her supporters still are about Obama, fair warning).

What makes even the ad hoc update still pretty crap is not that you didn't emphasize the 'if' sufficiently the first time -- that's just a somewhat more creative way of saying 'I'm sorry if you were offended' -- it's that you're implying that PUMAs are (again) racist and against affordable housing based on one post and one comment.

But since picking out one post or comment out of hundreds is cool as a representation of all PUMA opinion, then here's a rebuttal (just because I object to the game doesn't mean I can't play it too):

People owning their home is a good thing. It provides for stable housing costs that allow us to get ahead, participate in our consumer economy more fully and get the kids through college. Then you retire, and your home is paid for. You got repairs and taxes and that makes it a lot easier for the family to contend with aging parents.

I say all of this because you cannot expand the number of people who own homes by building new houses at the high end of the market. You can only dramatically expand the amount of home ownership by building to the bottom of the market. Most of the people over 30 who can afford to buy a home, do so. The people who don’t own homes, usually can’t afford to buy them. Use new technology to build low cost homes, and you can increase our nation’s economic stability and fire up a huge round of investment - but that’s not what we did.

I’m angry that low income people got seduced into buying homes they couldn’t afford thinking they’d be forever priced out if they didn’t move now. I’m angry that we don’t do anything in the higher priced markets to create more affordable housing that can be purchased by people who are paid local market wages.

It’s been a bullshit economy since 2002.

As for ACORN and pushing supposedly right-wing memes on that score, I don't have a specific opinion because I haven't yet looked into it in any detail. But one thing I do know, and think pretty much everyone should have learned by now, just because an organization is connected to Democrats and has a 'good' goal doesn't mean it is free from corruption or playing the same kind of power kiss-ass politics as yes, even Republicans.

I read the main part of you post with interest, as I've read many posts relating to the economic situation on many sites with interest, trying to get a handle on it all (unfortunately I've come to the conclusion we're going to get fucked over by whatever comes out of Congress and all the blogging and citizen advocacy in the world isn't going to do much more than rearrange deck chairs). It's just too bad that even now, putting out interesting analysis can't be done without taking a lot of cheap shots.

PUMAs are just as hungry for information, some sort of wisdom, and some sign that our fearless leaders are going to take a shot at leading as the rest of the political blogosphere (and the world, for that matter). It's too bad that you just gave up on posting a counterpoint over at TC, if you care about setting out a straight record rather than grabbing the opportunity to imply that PUMAs are race-insensitive and against affordable housing.

(Sorry, working multiple jobs and hardly ever an off day right now, so late to the party on this one. )

I realize The Confluence is sort of the flagship site where the movement was christened, and I love a lot of what some of the posters have to say, but I can't argue that this one wasn't wrongheaded, or that both some of the comments and the lack of critique weren't disturbing. Hell, my s.o. read that post before she read this one and told me how upset she was over that post, and she's a self-identified PUMA also.

I think part of the unanimity of praise on that essay, tho, may have been because the poster said it was her first official post, so a lot of people who would have otherwise been quicker to criticize let things go. But blaming this mess on being too helpful to minorities and the working poor? Or the poor in general? That is ridiculous and offensive.

Of course, as much as I'm disturbed that a lot of PUMA's seem to be buying into Republican talking points (still and all, a lot are not, there is no one set of "PUMA goals" as far as overall policy, and using this essay as representative of all PUMAs is no different than tarring all Obama supporters with an essay which said that former Hillary supporters who were now supporting McKinney were insulting African Americans by making McKinney their second choice), I'm more disturbed about what the elected democrats are doing with the bailout plan.

Lastly, ITA w/a lot of what bringiton said above, w/the addendum (unless I missed it) that some sort of meltdown was inevitable regardless of what anyone did with lending regulations, as long as people's real earning power went down while prices went up and more and more goods were purchased on credit, etc (and yeah, I know, even most liberal economists and all the official #'s say people as a whole are not losing relative earning power, especially to the degree I'm talking about; but I'm convinced the official figures are fudged even if I can only speculate how --not counting various sorts of things that should count in inflation statistics; playing games w/unemployment figures in various ways, etc -- and everyone but the doomsayers have been overly pollyannish about this for a while).

Valhalla, it's clear a censorship policy is in place there, automation or not. I had the same experience as cmike, posting a long rebuttal to the Liebowicz piece which was moderated out. No profanity, no ad hominem.

I won't re-write it here, but the basic thrust, other than the point which has been made quite eloquently here by others that Liebowicz is using tendentious arguments and avoiding the conclusions of his own facts to promote a right-wing meme, is that securitization is at the heart of the crisis.

Which is why I agree for the most part with bringiton's comment, with the exception of this:

All might have been well for years to come if BushCo hadn’t squandered treasure on Iraq and sucked so much money out of the middle class

Securitization was a giant Ponzi scheme, embraced all too willingly by the financial industry because the rewards were so great and the risks nil. Risk was passed ever upwards in the financial food chain until it arrived finally at the large pension plan investors and the insurance companies (like AIG). It worked so long as housing prices climbed, which was never sustainable,no matter what the economy did or didn't do. Sooner or later it was going to come crashing down. Congress has shown just how risk-free it really was, rescuing the financial companies from their losses by socializing the risk.

It's also why the bailout plan won't work. Without restoring the ability of bankruptcy judges to cramdown the mortgages, foreclosures will continue to climb, and banks will simply lay off their lousiest securities on us, with no hope that they will ever regain value. They can't regain value, because they are based on worthless assets.

was moderated out if it was refuting Liebowitz and detailing the devils of securitization.

An honest, fact-based debate is not prohibited at the Confluence.

I love this job!

that I hope will be allowed to live.