HOW MULTICULTURALISM AND DIVERSITY IDEOLOGY CREATED THE U.S. MINORITY MORTGAGE MELTDOWN
The bulletin is a shortened version of a shocking column by American writer Steve Sailer. This column alleges that the Bush government's efforts to get the minority Hispanic vote were a major factor in the current U.S. economic meltdown.
Mr. Sailer recounts a series of events starting in 2002 when the Bush government targeted the Hispanic population in order to bring Hispanics into the Republican party. Under the slogan, “compassionate conservatism”, it introduced a number of measures. One of these was aimed at increasing home ownership among Hispanics. Bush used the term, “Home Ownership Gap”, to refer to the fact that Hispanic and Black home ownership was significantly lower than that of whites. To Hispanics in particular, (Blacks and other minorities also–5.5 million people altogether), it presented the dream of owning a home.
The ways that he used to achieve that goal are familiar to readers: removing down payment requirements, loosening regulation, creating the impression that the U.S. gov't would stand behind this plan, and making mortgages available to people whom bankers would have traditionally regarded as serious credit risks. However, it did nothing to increase the ability of these low-wage earners to repay the money loaned to them. In fact, its failure to enforce laws against illegal immigration and its unwillingness to lower legal immigration resulted in more competition for the jobs of many Americans. Low-wage Americans, in particular,were victims.
Mr. Sailer's column is striking because of the evidence that he presents. He demonstrates clearly that this disaster began as an effort to solicit the ethnic vote. As Mr. Sailer says, conservative pundits in the mainstream media have now begun to repeat what he has been saying for over a year.
Mr. Sailer provides a large number of extremely damning excerpts from President Bush's speeches. They demonstrate that the ideology of multiculturalism and diversity (in this case, the effort to make the body of home owners more multicultural and diverse) had ignored more logical measures to assist low-wage earners and triumphed over common sense.
It is significant that the multiculturalism and diversity issue triggered such a wide-ranging economic collapse and that its effects are spreading into so many other countries.
For obvious reasons, this issue and its consequences are particularly relevant to Canada at this time.
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HOW MULTICULTURALISM AND DIVERSITY IDEOLOGY CREATED THE U.S. MINORITY MORTGAGE MELTDOWN
(This is a shortened version of a column by American writer Steve Sailer. The column was titled “Karl Rove—Architect Of The Minority Mortgage Meltdown”. VDARE is the on-line publication in which Mr. Sailer's column appeared. Mr. Sailer's complete column can be located at http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080928_rove.htm)
VDARE
September 28, 2008
(1) “Last week, the mainstream conservative punditry finally picked up an idea I had first put forward in August 2007”: Our reigning ideology of multiculturalism and diversity is responsible for the current financial meltdown. Many individuals and groups share the blame: “Democrats and Republicans, business people and politicians, Congress and the Executive Branch, borrowers and lenders, and whites, blacks and Hispanics.”
“There's one man, however, who has so far escaped any blame.” That man is Karl Rove, Bush's political strategist. “The mortgage mess was, in sizable measure, an outgrowth of the primary political goal of the Bush Administration” and Rove's primary goal : “to bring Hispanics into the Republican Party”.
(2) Rove is best known for promoting the idea of an amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants (mostly Hispanics) in the U.S. But he was also very influential in promoting the idea of providing loose home buyer credit to minorities. On October 15, 2002, at a White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, Bush, through Rove's influence, announced that he wanted 5.5 million new minority homeowners by 2010.
(3) The problem the minorities faced was that many were low-wage earners. Bush could have tried to curb legal and illegal immigration which would have lowered competition for the jobs of minorities and probably raised their wages, but he did nothing about those things. Bush was more interested in the fact that, according to him, about 75% of white Americans owned their own homes, but less than 50% of Blacks and Hispanics did. He referred to this difference as the “Home-Ownership Gap”. He resolved to correct it. By doing so, he hoped, in particular, that the Republican Party would curry significant electoral support from Hispanics.
(4) Co-incidentally, a total of 5.5 million new homeowners with an average mortgage of $127,000 amounts to $700 Billion.
(5) As early as mid June, 2002, Bush had promised to set up an American Dream fund for minorities to buy homes. Traditional obstacles such as down payments would be removed. “Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the federal Home Loan Banksthe government-sponsored corporations that handle home mortgageswill increase their commitment to minority markets by more than $440 billion, Bush said.”
(6) In December 2003, when signing the American Dream Downpayment Act, Bush bragged: “Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we're making progress toward that goal. In the past 18 months, more than 1 million minority families have become homeowners. (Applause.) And there's more that we can do to achieve the goal. The law I sign today will help us build on this progress in a very practical way.”
(7)”The unsubtle message Bush was sending to lenders and, most importantly, to his own employees, the federal regulators” was that “he opposed not merely discriminating against borrowers who might turn out to be bad credit riskshe wanted more money to go to documented bad credit risks. He brayed: 'Freddie Mac recently began 25 initiatives around the country to dismantle barriers and create greater opportunities for homeownership. One of the programs is designed to help deserving families who have bad credit histories to qualify for homeownership loans.' ”
(8) One major obstacle that Bush faced was that “since the government is on the hook for excessive lending, the government regulates lending.”
“The job of these federal regulators is to 'take away the punchbowl just as the party gets going,' as former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin said long ago.”
“In his many speeches on minority housing, however, President Bush was telling his underlings to keep their hands off the punchbowl. Heck, maybe the regulators should add another bottle of Everclear just to be hospitable. And if private lenders started worrying that giving mortgages to dubious credit risks could backfire on them, Bush's speeches could be read as hinting that his Administration would try to help them out, to the tune of, say, $700 billion.”
“Bush summed up: 'And part of the cornerstone of America is the ability for somebody, regardless of where they're from, regardless of where they were born, to say, this is my home; I own this home, it is my piece of property, it is my part of the American experience. ' ”
“(Italics are) My emphases. In other words, under the Bush Administration, the American Dream isn't just for Americans. For instance, at his White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, Bush orated:
'I appreciate so very much the home owners who are with us today, the Arias family, newly arrived from Peru. They live in Baltimore. Thanks to the Association of Real Estate Brokers, the help of some good folks in Baltimore, they figured out how to purchase their own home. Imagine to be coming to our country without a home, with a simple dream. And now they're on stage here at this conference being one of the new home owners in the greatest land on the face of the Earth. I appreciate the Arias family coming. (Applause.)' ”
(9) “This orchestrated push for more minority homeownership wasn't some random caprice of the President. It was part of the master plan of his political Svengali, Karl Rove.” His compassionate conservatism (policies to increase minority home ownership, a tax cut, education and leaving no child behind, etc.) increased Hispanic home ownership.
“And these increases in minority homeownership due to government initiatives going back decades were true temporarily. But now minority homeownership rates appear to be falling as foreclosures hit Hispanics and blacks harder than whites and Asians. ”
“Foreclosures appear to be one of the few things in America not tracked directly by race. But the circumstantial evidence that blacks and Hispanics account for a disproportionate share is agreed upon by all who have looked into the question closely.”
(10) “…(a) map from RealtyTrac shows that the foreclosure disaster is largely regional. There are high rates of foreclosure in states such as Georgia and New Jersey, but the two main default dumps are the Midwestern Rustbelt and the heavily Hispanic Sunbelt.” “Yet the Rust Belt default catastrophe is dwarfed by what's happened in California, along with its neighbors Arizona and Nevada, and in Florida.”
(11) “As of August 2008, California alone, with 12 percent of the national population, accounted for 29 percent of all foreclosures. Add in the two California wannabes, Nevada and Arizona, and states with just 15 percent of the population are responsible for 36 percent of the foreclosures. Add in Florida, and four states with 21 percent of the population are home to half the foreclosures.”
“This is not to say that Hispanics account for most of the defaults in those four states. Plenty of white speculators bought homes figuring they could rent them out to all the Latino laborers who had flocked across the border to build exurban homes. And other whites wanted to move to the exurbs to get their children out of public school systems overwhelmed by the children of illegal immigrants.”
(12) “Most white pundits can't believe that minorities had an impact on the mortgage meltdown because they don't really grasp the number of minorities now in the country. After all, there aren't a lot of Hispanics at dinner parties in Georgetown and the Upper West Side.”
“The National Association of Realtor's webpage entitled “Diversity Is Good Business” quantifies where we're headed. Minorities are expected to comprise 64 percent of the net new households over the next decade and 54 percent of first-time homeowners by 2010.”
“USA Today reported in 2007: 'Across the nation, black and Hispanic borrowers helped fuel a multiyear housing boom, accounting for 49% of the increase in homeowners from 1995 to 2005, says Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. But Hispanics and African-Americans were far more likely to leverage the American dream with subprime loans higher-cost products for buyers with impaired credit that are now going bad at an alarming rate. About 46% of Hispanics and 55% of blacks who took out purchase mortgages in 2005 got higher-cost loans, compared with about 17% of whites and Asians, according to Federal Reserve data.' ”
(13) “… the Bush jihad against traditional credit standards meant that not only more Hispanics and blacks could get loans they couldn't pay backbut more whites could, too. Why didn't the financial institutions realize what was going on. Were they greedy?”
(14) “One reason is obvious: political correctness, enforced by anti-discrimination lawsuits. Expressing “prejudices” about the likelihood of protected minorities paying off loans violates anti-discrimination laws. ”
“It's now legally dangerous to express fear in writing. Imagine that an executive in a financial firm had sent an email to a fellow executive saying:”
'I see that the median home price in California is heading toward a half million bucks. Isn't California full of Mexicans? How can a bunch of Mexicans afford to pay off half million dollar mortgages once the price of homes stops going up and they can't refinance anymore. Aren't we headed for disaster in California if we don't go back to traditional credit standards?' ”
“An email like that would wind up in the hands of plaintiffs' attorneys during discovery in discrimination lawsuits. The author would be fired. The CEO would have to go apologize to the National Council of La Raza and promise to give a whole bunch more zero down payment loans to people whose names end in Z. ”
“You can only mutter heresies like that over drinks to close confidants.”
(15) “Unfortunately, one little thing had changed over the decades that the Wall Street quant jocks didn't include in their numbers: the Californians themselves.”
“The current average resident of California just doesn't have the same human capital as in the old days. In the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test, California's 8th graders came in 49th out of the 50 states in reading. A United Way study recently found that 53 percent of the adult residents of Los Angeles are functionally illiterate in English. If you stopped and thought about it, you might wonder how they would earn enough to pay back those massive mortgages. But stopping and thinking about the shortcomings of minorities is the road to legal ruin in modern corporate America.”
