BECK: Nobody is saying we’re blowing children up or anything like the Taliban. But this is the same kind of tactic being used now in America. You can’t get your agenda, so you unleash the hounds and point the fingers, and everybody is a racist.
There's also the issue of how, for the oppressed whites on the right, the worst kind of racism is calling someone a racist, not actual racists engaging in racist actions.
Still, the hypersensitive to fictional allegations of racism highlights once again the basic outlook of the contemporary conservative movement on race. Actual racism against racial minorities is, according to conservatives, a trivial or non-existence problem. By contrast, anti-racism gone too far (often known as “political correctness”) is seen as a huge social problem against which one must always be on guard.
The Colbert Report last night featured one of the most subversive and brutally honest half-hours of television in recent memory. It's a sad commentary that it takes a comedy program to provide more news and information on one of the most critical subjects in American politics that anywhere else in our broken media and political landscape, but I'll take this argument wherever I can get it. Colbert spent two full segments of his show focusing on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which could - and probably will - lead to deregulating the entire campaign finance process, allowing corporations to give unlimited money to any candidate of their choosing. This severe step backwards with enormous implications has been barely discussed in any traditional media setting, but Colbert went after it vigorously, discussing the consequences and even the flawed legal rationale, a true third rail of American politics, corporate personhood. Colbert explained that the 1886 case (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that conferred 14th Amendment equal protection rights onto corporations wasn't even in the original ruling. But when the Chief Justice made an off-hand comment that the Court wouldn't hear an argument on whether the 14th Amendment applied to these corporations (saying, "We are all of the opinion that it does"), the court reporter wrote it into the ruling opinion, and the precedent has held ever since. And that reporter of the Supreme Court didn't only have ties to the railroad barons, he used to run one.
These are subjects you just never hear about in the American media, precisely because the American media is owned by giant multinational corporations, who benefit from the corporate personhood rule and would stand to benefit more from deregulating elections so they could use their "speech" to buy candidates and fund their own with unlimited resources. And despite being on a Viacom-owned network, Colbert says, skewering the immorality and psychopathology of the corporation, "Corporations are legally people... they do everything people do, except breathe, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River."
There's some backstory to that remark. Colbert actually worked with Robert Smigel on the "TV Funhouse" bits from Saturday Night Live (he's one-half of the Ambiguously Gay Duo), including the infamous episode from March 1998, Conspiracy Theory Rock. Here are some of the actual lyrics (remember this aired, albeit one time, on NBC, whose parent company is General Electric):
It's a media-opoly A media-opoly. The whole media is controlled by a few corporations thanks to deregulation by the FCC.
You mean Disney, Fox, WestingHouse, and good ol GE? They own networks from CBS to CNBC. They can use them to say whatever they please, and put down the opinions of any one who disagrees. Or stuff about PCB's.
What are PCB's? They come from power plants built by WestingHouse and GE. They can give you lots of cancer that can hurt your body, but on network TV, you rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry [...]
But the bigshots don't care. They're all sitting pretty. Thanks to corporate welfare. What's that now?
They get billions in subsidies from the government. It's supposed to create jobs, but that's not how it's spent.
They pulled this cartoon from the rerun broadcasts and it never aired again.
Colbert didn't just provide this lesson in corporate control of government in his "The Word" segment, but then had Jeffrey Toobin on to explain how the expected Supreme Court ruling would impact elections:
COLBERT: If this goes through, if they decide in favor of the corporations here, what's going to happen to elections?
TOOBIN: Well, they will be essentially deregulated. Corporations will be allowed to give money, corporations will be allowed to broadcast programs that are in favor of one side or another, it'll basically be no more rules about what corporations can do in political campaigns.
COLBERT: Now when I ran for President in 2008, as the Hail to the Cheese Doritos Stephen Colbert campaign for President, I was told that I actually couldn't do that, that I was breaking federal election law by being sponsored by that corporation. But if this goes through, if this court case, if they win, does that mean that I retroactively won the election?
TOOBIN: I don't think it means that.
COLBERT: But could you do that? Could I actually just wear a NASCAR suit and just have logos all over me and run for President as the sort of Gatorade Thirst for Justice campaign for President?
TOOBIN: You definitely could. No question.
COLBERT: What does it mean to individual donation? A corporation, as a person, gets to give any amount of money, but I as a person can give only $2,500.
TOOBIN: That's what's potentially the next legal challenge. Because if giving money is a form of speech, as the Court has held at various times, you can't prohibit a company from giving money. And then presumably the next step would be that you couldn't have limits on how much individuals could give either. That's the potential implication of this decision.
COLBERT: So right now, corporations would actually have more power as people than people, until people catch up with corporations.
Here's the point. Stephen Colbert, a comedian, devoted his show to arcane campaign finance law to show the power of corporations to engage in a hostile takeover of government and extract virtually any law they choose, with no consequences for any wrongdoing. Consequently, the self-described populists on the right - aided by a hapless political class - are working their minions into a frenzy over some unidentified alien "other" coming to take your hard-earned tax dollars, without the pernicious influence of rapacious corporations ever entering into it. Anonymous Liberal had a great post on this yesterday.
But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday's Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it's an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.
That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We're still not out of the woods and we're deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.
But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN's relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).
Absolutely. Set aside the fact that the Glenn Becks of the world are smearing community organizations that help low-income folks, often at variance with the facts. It's the intensity of focus from the privileged on the poor, the disenfranchised, and yes, minorities, when measured against the influence and giant multinational corporations who are on the verge of buying American elections, that strikes such a discordant note. But not for the hucksters pushing the smears and the paranoids and racists who lap it up. They want to believe that black people have the power in America and they're coming for you and your children, so they can ignore the fact that they've been duped - that the ruling class has controlled the political machinery to keep them underfoot, and handed them welfare queens and illegal immigrants and all sorts of other members of the "lower orders" on which they can focus their attention. This boils down to a largely homogenous class of people not wanting their money, or anything, really, to go to people who don't look like them. "Illegals" or the undeserving poor need not apply. It's been a time-tested tactic going back to Richard Nixon's Southern strategy. And it allows a majority ruling class of whites, terrified that their stranglehold on the country is slipping away, to pretend that a race war is coming when it's the class war grinding them into the dust.
Matt Taibbi called it the peasant mentality. The powers that be get the lower classes to fight amongst themselves and split along ideological or tribal or other identifying lines, leaving room for them to prosper. For Republicans, that means painting their opponents, who are less homogenous and are made up of so-called "outsiders" of society - the poor, the disenfranchised, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, etc. - as undeserving of really anything; and painting the leaders of that party - whether it be a Governor from Arkansas or a war hero from Massachusetts or South Dakota or a multicultural community organizer from Illinois - as the head of a movement to destroy American culture. That's really basically it.
And all the while, both sides in DC studiously ignore the near-complete capture of the country by companies seeking only profit, and the corporate-owned media just follows the manufactured drama and goes mute on the critical stuff, such that it takes a comedian to shine a spotlight on this unexamined corner.
Yesterday, Brian Kilmeade walked down a rhetorical blind alley and found himself arguing in favor of "ethnically pure" societies. It's painful to watch. And yes, the likes of Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs call America home. But in fairness, we don't have all the racists. My favorite part of this is the backtrack ("Hey, I didn't say kill them!"):
Boats carrying illegal migrants to Europe should be sunk, Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, said yesterday.
In a provocative intervention, Griffin, elected to the European parliament last month, called on the EU to introduce "very tough" measures to prevent illegal migrants entering Europe from Africa.
"If there's measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we'd support that," Griffin told BBC Parliament's The Record Europe.
"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats. Anyone coming up with measures like that, we'll support, but anything which is there as a 'oh, we need to do something about it' but in the end doing something about it means bringing them into Europe we will oppose."
Shirin Wheeler, the programme's presenter, interrupted him to say the EU did not murder people. "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea – I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya," Griffin said. "But Europe has, sooner or later, to close its borders or it's simply going to be swamped by the third world."
Maybe Britons should pay more attention to those European Parliament elections, ay? Do us all a favor.
It's very interesting to me that Newt Gingrich dialed down his description of Sonia Sotomayor as a racist, even if, in context, he didn't. Surely we know how this works - we saw it last week with the President. Obama took one step back on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, conceding the point but also set it in context, but it set off a flurry from the commentariat, claiming that Obama "caved," etc. Now Gingrich does essentially the same thing, conceding the point but adding a whole bunch of context actually keeping his claim alive that Sotomayor is a racist. And while this gives Republicans space to welcome the return of civility to the debate, it keeps them on the defensive and in a reactive position as well. Clearly calling Sotomayor a racist wasn't exactly working out for them, so they had to defuse that. But the backpedaling is historically the kind of thing Republicans NEVER do. Could they be understanding the damaging nature of their rhetoric?
Of course, Gingrich isn't alone, and there are plenty of other ways for Democrats to continue to exploit this and put the pressure on. In fact, Gingrich's admission, despite its fatuousness, gives them more ammunition - "even Newt Gingrich disavowed this," etc. For example, will Republicans be made to answer for Pat Buchanan's comparison of Sotomayor to white supremacists? In the distant past, Buchanan was a symbol for a particular strain of xenophobic ugliness. Now he's a respected member of the media community and that "liberal" network MSNBC. Will he be held to account?
Given Pat Buchanan's history of clear bigotry - most recently demonstrated in his reminder last night that he supported and continues to defend a white supremacist - there really isn't any good reason for MSNBC to continue putting him on the air. The man is a bigot, plain and simple. In light of the hot water MSNBC has gotten into in the past for bigoted comments by its employees, you would think they would want to distance themselves from the likes Buchanan.
But what's really extraordinary is that MSNBC brings Buchanan on air to talk about race issues. It gives Pat Buchanan a platform from which to call other people racists. Granted, if there's someone who knows racists better than Pat Buchanan does, I can't think of who it would be. But his is not the kind of expertise MSNBC should be inflicting upon its viewers.
...by the way, this is completely divorced from the larger debate over Sotomayor's confirmation, which is assured. The "fight" is a bit of a shadow play for the base. But conceding the point doesn't help that cause.
...the Chairman of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, won't retract the racism charge. Wedge away, Democrats.
...This also brings up a larger question about that liberal network MSNBC. Giving space to an out-and-out bigot like Pat Buchanan, who's on that channel more often than the peacock, reflects really poorly on them. Not to mention the three hours of unadulterated horseshit in the morning.
The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.
This says more about their qualifications to discuss public policy and labor relations than it says about unions. To pick just one obvious example, UPS is unionized -- and the company made more than $3 billion last year. That's "billion" with a "b," and those are profits, not revenues.
Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.
Oh, and GE owns NBC-Universal, which owns MSNBC, which pays Joe Scarborough a handsome salary (and the unionized workers who help get his show on the air considerably less.)
Scarborough, you recall, is the former GOP Congressman who represented Michael Griffin pro bono, the man who killed abortion provider Dr. David Gunn, in his murder case.
In addition to everything else, Arlen Specter was the Republican ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His departure necessitated the GOP to choose a replacement, and given seniority issues and the inability for a member to repeat as chair or ranking member, it was not a clear-cut solution. After a weekend of discussion, Jeff Sessions won the job for the time being.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) will take over the ranking member position on the Senate Judiciary Committee after striking a deal with his more senior colleagues over the weekend, sources confirm to The Hill.
Sessions and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reached the deal that will allow the Alabama Republican to take over for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), whose departure from the GOP last week left the committee without a ranking member.
Under terms of the deal, Sessions will serve as ranking member until the 112th Congress, when he will take over the ranking member post on the Senate Budget Committee. Current Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) is retiring at the end of the 111th Congress.
Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, will then become ranking member on the Judiciary Committee.
In the near term, Sessions will hold the ranking member position during the confirmation hearings for Obama's next Supreme Court nominee. Which means that the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at this important time was denied a federal judgeship by the same committee because of his racist past.
Sessions entered national politics in the mid-'80s not as a politician but as a judicial nominee. Recommended by a fellow Republican from Alabama, then-Senator Jeremiah Denton, Sessions was Ronald Reagan's choice for the U.S. District Court in Alabama in the early spring of 1986. Reagan had gotten cocky by then, as more than 200 of his uberconservative judicial appointees had been rolled out across the country without serious opposition (this was pre-Robert Bork). That is, until the 39-year-old Sessions came up for review.
Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause c?l?bre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.
On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.
It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.
During his nomination hearings, Sessions was opposed by the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, People for the American Way, and other civil rights groups. Senator Denton clung peevishly to his favored nominee until the bitter end, calling Sessions a "victim of a political conspiracy." The Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee finally voted ten to eight against sending Sessions to the Senate floor. The decisive vote was cast by the other senator from Alabama, Democrat Howell Heflin, a former Alabama Supreme Court justice, who said, "[M]y duty to the justice system is greater than any duty to any one individual."
Senate Judiciary has jurisdiction over election reform and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, as well as their prosecution of voter fraud cases, by the way.
This is like someone who flunked the driver's test running the DMV.
[Obama's] sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are. Asked whether their opinion of the president is favorable or unfavorable, 49 percent of whites in the Times poll say they have a favorable opinion of Obama. Among blacks the number is 80 percent. Twenty-one percent of whites say their view of the president is unfavorable, while the number of blacks with unfavorable opinions of Obama is too small to measure.
As Adam Serwer notes, this is "If Only Those People Weren't Here" conservatism. Conservatives like to write black people out of electoral politics like this were 1866 and they don't deserve a vote, and then claim "If you set aside 10% of the population, X is popular/unpopular and X can win/lose!"
It reminds me somewhat of the absence of black people in most non-dystopian science fiction, except the subtextual desire in York's column is far more deliberate: If black people weren't able to vote, Republicans would win more elections. And Ann Coulter, at the very least, has had the chutzpah to say directly what she's really thinking: "If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president.
York responded to this complaint by showing offense at being called a racist. Which is of course a classic conservative maneuver to change the subject. I think Ta-Nehisi Coates says what needs to be said here.
We spend a lot of time attacking people for playing the race-card--I've done my share. But what largely animates this idea that crying racism is an overused tactic (as opposed to say crying antisemitism) is this notion that among polite, thinking people, there are no employers of racism. Racism is the trade of the American savage--the man who flies the Confederate flag, has an undiscovered dead dog under the porch, and lives in West Virginia. This man doesn't walk among the civilized.
But here is your political correctness run amok:
James Watson argues, not simply that there may be a biological explanation for IQ differences, but says of notions of intellectual equality, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not to be true," and be held up as a truth-teller.
A series of newsletters entitled the Ron Paul Freedom Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report, The Ron Paul Politcal Report are revealed to be incredibly racist. ("Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks" Martin Luther King "seduced underaged girls and boys.") But Paul knows nothing about them, and is the farthest thing from a racist. ("Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero.") [...]
We live in a country that may well be offended by racism, but it's equally offended that anyone might actually charge as much.
Conservatives always want to rush to an "end of racism" so they can be freed to make, frankly, racist statements, and then scold their critics for calling them racist in this post-racial era. It's a tiresome argument that usually never works, as most people judge these things on the merits. So whine away, Byron, whine away.
Another outrage today concerned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments at the UN Conference on Racism, which prompted several diplomats to walk out of the meeting. This is the typical anti-Zionism and Holocaust denial of which Ahmadinejad is famous, and it's all terribly familiar. I would argue that the uproar is not at all significant compared to this development.
Saberi's conviction and sentence are an irritant in the attempt to President Barack Obama to improve relations with Iran, and Ahmadinejad, who is no fool, knows it [...] Ahmadinejad does not want Saberi's case to derail the current thaw between Washington and Tehran.
It is also likely that Ahmadinejad is worried that the Saberi case will reflect badly on him with Iranian youth and women, who in past years swung toward reformist candidates pledging greater personal liberties. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's rival, has now taken up that mantle, and he could benefit from a backlash in the Iranian public over the Saberi case.
That is just a huge reversal, evident of a split, even among hardliners, inside Iran. While some in the government want to use the Saberi case as a bargaining chip, Ahmadinejad would rather use the case, and his advocacy for Saberi, in his election campaign. This shows that, at least at some level, Iran actually must respond to the will of its people, which is a powerful thing to remember as the diplomacy over their nuclear program continues.
And now I'll wade into the continuing Sarah Palin adventures. No, not her war of words with an 18 year-old, but her serious failure to govern in Alaska.
As the legislative session draws to an end this weekend, Ms. Palin is pushing no major bills, and neither are state lawmakers. Many pivotal alliances between the governor and minority Democrats are obsolete, undone by mutual bitterness from the election. The rush of oil revenues that helped Ms. Palin press for big-ticket projects in the past has been replaced by a budget deficit that will require taking at least $1 billion out of state savings [...]
Twice the governor has rejected Democrats’ choice to fill a vacant State Senate seat in heavily Democratic Juneau; they have responded by rejecting the three Democrats she has nominated. This week, the state Democratic Party held a news conference to criticize Ms. Palin’s trip to Indiana, prompting a sharp retort from the governor’s office insisting that she has spent far more time in Juneau than previous governors had.
The biggest policy fight has been over how much federal stimulus money the state should accept (the governor initially held a news conference to say she would accept only 55 percent of the $930 million available; she soon signaled her willingness to accept more, though not enough for lawmakers). The State Senate, often her foil, took matters to a new level this year by stripping some of the governor’s priority projects from its proposed budget, including some in support of the natural gas pipeline. The Senate has yet to go along with a bill backed by Ms. Palin that would require parental notification and consent before young women under 17 can have abortions.
The governor recently nominated Wayne Anthony Ross, a board member of the National Rifle Association, to be Alaska’s attorney general. Mr. Ross, who is expected to be confirmed, has told lawmakers that he opposes many federal efforts in Alaska like increasing protections for polar bears and beluga whales and limiting resource development. Years ago, he described gay men and lesbians as “degenerates.”
The State Senate seat is really amusing. She keeps sending nominees who recently changed their party affiliation to Democratic to apply for the position, and most recently she sent the names of all three rejected nominees to fill the one seat. The latest nominee's claim to fame appears to be that his wife sold her shoes. Earlier, she tried to change the rules so that a Republican would be eligible for the seat previously held by a Democrat, which, um, didn't work.
Sarah Palin's choice for attorney general once wrote a column defending the statue of a KKK figure as an expression of free speech and mocked the psychology of a college student who protested the display.
Wayne Anthony Ross has come under intense scrutiny since the Alaska Governor and former vice presidential candidate announced his nomination. His resume includes derogatory remarks about homosexuals, accusations of sexism, and bizarre comments downplaying the fallout of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But his most controversial incident may have come in December 1991, when he penned an op-ed for the Anchorage Times, a copy of which was obtained by the Huffington Post, entitled "KKK 'art' project gets 'A' for courage." ... [T]he column was filled with racial and political insensitivities that, even in the relatively homogenous Alaska, were bound (perhaps designed) to stir the pot.
Considering that this is all happening in Palin's official role as the chief executive of Alaska, it's no wonder that Washington Republicans are souring on Palin's prospects to lead the Party in 2012.
...And the Alaska Senate just did some nailin' Palin, rejecting her Attorney General candidate, Wayne Anthony Ross. FAIL.
The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the sitting President of Sudan, who is accused of directing and authorizing the genocide in Darfur. Under the concept of "universal jurisdiction," the ICC asserts the right to arrest and imprison those who played a role in crimes against humanity. Al-Bashir responded by tossing out all aid groups:
NAIROBI, March 4 -- Reacting swiftly to the International Criminal Court's decision to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the government of Sudan on Wednesday expelled at least 10 foreign aid groups that provide food, water, medical care and other assistance to more than a million displaced people in the western Darfur region, according to U.N. officials and aid workers.
The groups include Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, CARE International and others that collectively handle 60 percent of humanitarian assistance in Darfur, where the largest relief effort in the world has reversed a dangerous rise in the level of malnutrition and disease among people stranded in refugee camps. Some groups were given 24 hours to leave; others were told that the safety of their staffs could no longer be guaranteed.
"It's alarming," said a U.N. official in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, who was not authorized to speak publicly because of security concerns. "The humanitarian impact of this is massive."
This will only increase the pressure on the international community to put additional sanctions on the Sudan. Hopefully soon al-Bashir will find justice.
However, there is a data point coming out of this arrest warrant that is quite interesting.
Sudanese President Omar al Bashir is the 12th and highest profile suspect sought by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes — all of them Africans.
The seven-year-old court previously opened cases against a Sudanese official and a militia leader for crimes in the Darfur region, and against rebel leaders accused in long-running conflicts in Congo, Uganda and the Central African Republic.
The world's only standing war crimes court, based at The Hague, has been criticized for pursuing only African suspects to this point. Rwandan President Paul Kagame — whose central African nation isn't a party to the court — has described it as a new form of Western imperialism.
Not to hold harmless the actions of any of the Africans that the ICC is seeking to arrest - the continent often succumbs to dictatorships who commit all manner of crimes against their own people. But in the domestic arena, this is called "structural racism." Suspects are sought in the same communities, and the arresting officers have the same biases. The result is not overtly racist, but self-fulfilling. It's not like there aren't horrific crimes in Europe, or Asia, or around the world. The ICC arrest warrant is good news for those who seek justice in Darfur, but they ought to take a critical look at themselves.
...I don't want to minimize the crimes of al-Bashir, by the way. Here's a chilling description from a Sudanese soldier about how he was taught to kill and rape. It's sickening.
The Central Elections Committee on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month's parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country's Supreme Court.
The ruling, made by the body that oversees the elections, reflected the heightened tensions between Israel's Jewish majority and Arab minority caused by Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Arabs have held a series of demonstrations against the offensive.
Knesset spokesman Giora Pordes said the election committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motion, accusing the country's Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to countries listed among Israel's staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria.
This is a prelude to apartheid throughout Israel as opposed to just in the occupied territories. It's reflective of a mindset that views Arabs as trash to be taken out. That it's happening in a Jewish homeland, from a people that has seen all kinds of discrimination for centuries.
The Israeli Supreme Court can overturn this and I hope they do, because the consequences would be grave. It's bad enough for human rights to be violated in Gaza - making all Arabs in Israel second-class citizens would be irrepressible.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.
"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.
Following up on a previous item about white vigilante killings of black residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Police Superintendent of New Orleans says he is "looking into" the allegations. Given the seriousness of that statement, I'm certain it'll be entirely thorough.
In a press release sent to the media and local government officials, Riley said, “he is currently looking into the allegations, and asked if anyone has substantial information relative to any incidents of this type call to the New Orleans Police Department Bureau of Investigations.” [...]
Riley said the NOPD was unaware of this violence prior to the story’s publication. The department, according to Riley’s statement, “did not receive any complaints or information to substantiate any of the allegations of racial conflicts or vigilante type crimes in the City of New Orleans including the Algiers Point on the west bank of the City.”
That's just simply not true. Not only did the authors of the recent report contact the NOPD during the 18-month investigation, but this is not a new story. It was featured in the Spike Lee documentary "When The Levees Broke," for example.
Needless to say, I'm unimpressed that Riley will be "looking into" the incidents, but public pressure will likely leave him no choice. If you haven't yet, sign the Color of Change petition.
...here's the companion video to the Nation/Pro Publica story.
GIZZI: What was the biggest mistake made in the ’08 campaign?
PALIN: The biggest mistake made was that I could have called more shots on this: the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media. I was not allowed to do very many interviews, and the interviews that I did were not necessarily those I would have chosen. But I was so thankful to have the opportunity to run with John McCain that I was not going to argue with the strategy decisions that some of his people were making regarding the media contacts?
But if I would have been in charge, I would have wanted to speak to more reporters because that’s how you get your message out to the electorate.
Umm, there's a highlight reel around here somewhere that might contradict the gentlelady from Alaska on this one...
I mean, maybe as a journalism major and former TV anchor she wanted to resurrect the careers of more reporters than just Katie Couric, maybe that was her point...
I love this answer too, showing that she was DYING to appoint someone (herself?) into the US Senate:
GIZZI: You made it clear in our interviews earlier this year that you were not close to fellow Republicans Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young from your state, both of whom you said had a different vision of Alaska’s dealings with the federal government than you did. Were you pleased with the election of Democrat Mark Begich who defeated Stevens and with the re-election of Rep. Young?
PALIN: I met yesterday with Sen.-elect Begich to see that we are on the same page as we move forward as he starts his new job representing Alaska.
I thought that Sen. Stevens was going to be re-elected, and it was so close, and that if he were to step aside because he was convicted [on corruption charges], then I would get to appoint a Republican. So I was kind of surprised at the outcome there.
...I was kind of surprised that I wasn't able to play queenmaker there...
Meanwhile, the group still supporting Palin seems to be a lovely bunch.
The most entertaining parlor game in the media is figuring out where Republicans go from here, because a new Administration facing major challenges at home and abroad just isn't sexy enough, I guess. And so you have some jockeying for power among the leading lights of conservatism. I was a little worried that some of them were catching on after reading this:
Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, poised to ascend to House Republicans' No. 2 leader this week, said the Republican Party in Washington is no longer "relevant" to voters and must stop simply espousing principles. Instead, it must craft real solutions to health care and the economy.
"Where we have really fallen down is, we have lacked the ability to be relevant to people's lives. Let's set aside the last eight years, and our falling down in living up to expectations of what we said we were going to do," Mr. Cantor told The Washington Times in his district office outside of Richmond. "It's the relevancy question."
That's pretty much right, and one could see a new Republican Party with legitimate, free-market solutions on things like health care and the environment. This is how the Tories under David Cameron, waving a green banner, are rising to prominence in England.
Lee Edwards, a historian of the conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation, said that in meetings with conservative leaders since the election there was an emerging consensus that the Republicans had been hurt by drifting away from conservative principles and that religious conservatives, economic conservatives and strong-military conservatives had seemed to realize the need to unite to regain power.
“It isn’t a question of stressing economic issues or stressing social issues,” Mr. Edwards said. “What we have to do is to go back to what Ronald Reagan did and put together a coalition.” [...]
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, scoffed at calls for the Republicans to move left, which he said had followed Republican defeats in 1964, 1976 and 1992. And he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.
“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.
Older party hands pointed to John McCain’s lackluster campaign and the difficult terrain on which Republicans found themselves battling this year, and they eschewed any sky-is-falling rhetoric. The up-and-comers, meanwhile, sounded the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes.
“I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party, and this ain’t it,” assured Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who was RNC chairman in the 1990s. “I’ve seen it a lot worse."
Thank you Haley Barbour!
There's a certain justice to this. Republicans have spent the last decade tossing out apostates and using loyalty oaths and purity tests to make their party monochromatic and completely ideological. Now when they hit hard times, OF COURSE they can't figure out the way back, because they all have the same failed ideas and principles.
I think I'm going to tune out of this "debate" for the next several months and just go back to Matt Stoller's dead-on precis.
The GOP is going to do is futz around for awhile with the fake moderate versus conservative argument and then eventually find a way to tap into the newly emergent overt racism. It may happen in 2010, and it's impossible to predict whether the issues will be framed around 'law and order' as the millions of unemployed young people inevitably do what young people do when they are bored and disempowered in a recession, or some sort of stabbed in the back narrative around Iraq or Afghanistan, or some new set of issues focused on the fallout from this very scary financial crisis. Whatever happens the party will reorganize on the internet and that's going to seem really cool and innovative and counter-intuitive except that it will be perfectly normal for a political party to reorganize using a culture's mainstream medium for organizing, which is the internet. The right already did it once, with Drudge and the Free Republic in the 1990s.
The animus for the new Republicans, though, will not be fake conservative principles like low taxes, a strong military, and family values, because Republicans like taxes on non-rich people, they like hollowing out the military, and the GOP leadership is full of sexually tortured souls. It's going to be racism, as it always has been. There, soul-searching over. And this blog post only took you five minutes to read, which is probably a bit shorter than it will take for the Republicans to find and manufacture millions of new right-wing dog whistles.
This attempt to trump up an association between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi, as if it's a problem for a politician to know a world-renown scholar, is really sickening. So much so, in fact, that even the Washington Post editorial board disapproves.
For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear [...]
Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was "deeply flawed" but conceded there were also "flaws in the alternatives." Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging -- as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he "offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."
It's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable -- especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.
Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.
In other words, Khalidi actually listens to and comprehends multiple sides of a debate, which in conservative politics is strictly verboten. This is nothing more than slander toward a man who is being singled out for little more than, yes, the color of his skin. It's shameful and reminiscent of some of the worst eras of American politics. And it's sadly typical in this campaign for John McCain, who as Ezra Klein notes is "a leader who decided to stop leading."
Imagine, then, what would have happened if Barack Obama had ended up running against the senator who brought the first cap-and-trade bill before the Congress, passed one of the most important campaign finance reform bills in history, voted against Bush's tax cuts, championed the Patient's Bill of Rights, fought for comprehensive immigration reform, and was the Senate's most effective opponent of torture. Catastrophe, right?
Luckily, Obama didn't run against that guy. John McCain, who did all that, spent this election refusing to mention any of his accomplishments. He argued the virtues of experience without pointing to its fruits. He bragged of being a maverick without explaining how his independence had resulted in tangible achievements. The reality of his record is that he was an ineffective Senator until the aftermath of the 2000 election, when his anger with the Republican Party led him to construct odd-bedfellows coalitions with Democrats and his national celebrity -- yes, celebrity -- helped him pass the legislation, or at least get press for breaking with his party. The resulting achievements proved deeply unpopular with the conservative base. So when he ran as the Republican nominee, he clammed up about global warming and flip-flopped on immigration. He stopped talking about campaign finance reform and started supporting tax cuts. His resulting criticisms of Obama fell flat: Unable to detail his own record, he couldn't connect with his critique of Obama's history. Unable to explain why it was good to be a maverick, he came off like a pro-wrestler trying to promote his new nickname.
And so he resorted to baseless smears and insults, without giving one voter a compelling reason to choose him rather than reject his opponent. And at a time of such tremendous challenges, small-ball like that falls flat.
I also agree with Ezra that you should maybe buy Khalidi's book and decide for yourself what you think of his scholarship.
Advertising routinely washes out or darkens or basically makes to look bad the less preferred candidate or product, and gussies up the more preferred one. But this ad against Indian-American Iraq War vet Ashwin Madia (MN-03) goes way too far.
A Republican attack ad invites viewers to "meet the real Ashwin Madia," but the still photos featured in the spot present a noticeably darker version of the 3rd District DFL congressional candidate.
"At least three of the photos of Madia were obviously darkened, using one method or another," public affairs and media consultant Dean Alger told KARE 11.
Desaturation and darkening, as I said, is a standard tactic to make someone look spooky. Here it makes Madia look black. That's the desired effect.
I suppose this means that it is completely within bounds to do the same to potential 2012 GOP Presidential candidate Bobby Jindal?
My mother is from Johnstown. My grandmother and my aunt still live there. I spent many weeks and months there as a kid. The people in this video are people with whom I have probably eaten in the same restaurants, shopped in the same stores, walked down the same streets. They are working people who haven't had much economic opportunity in their Western Pennsylvania steel town in their lives. To see the racism somewhere that you have spent time is much more impactful. I always knew it was in the background, and I must admit that I've seen it at times in my own family. But a video like this with its countless examples is depressing.
I'm not concerned about Pennsylvania - the leaps forward in voter registration will make a difference. And both of my Pennsylvania resident grandmothers are voting for Obama. Neither were on board but I managed to convince them. But as we've been saying here for a while, the election is merely a part of the fight - then there's governing. And the poison that has been injected into the discourse is going to be a strong deterrent.
But of course, it's no different than the demonization of liberals and Democrats that has been a hallmark of the Republican noise machine for decades. One of the best ways to combat this is to reveal it - to create moments of recognition, moments of shame, moments of revulsion. Johnstown needs to know about Johnstown.
...Nancy Pfotenhauer today - in case you didn't think that the McCain campaign is stoking this:
I certainly agree that Northern Virginia has gone more Democratic. … But the rest of the state — real Virginia if you will — I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message... Real Virginia, I take to be, this part of the state that’s more Southern in nature, if you will.
They don't think Democrats are Americans. And that manifests itself in racism.
Barack Obama is shown with an edge against John McCain in a North Dakota presidential race that has narrowed to a statistical tie, according to a new Forum poll.
The survey shows Obama squeaking past McCain, 45 percent to 43 percent, a lead that falls within the poll’s margin of error and therefore indicates a dead heat, according to political analysts.
Still up for grabs: undecided voters, comprising 12 percent.
“It’s a statistical tossup,” said Jim Danielson, co-director of the Public Affairs Institute at Minnesota State University Moorhead, which conducted the statewide telephone survey for The Forum. Pollsters contacted 606 likely North Dakota voters by telephone Oct. 6-8.
North Dakota has no form of voter registration, so GOTV efforts can literally be targeted to anyone right up to and including Election Day.
Meanwhile, North Dakota has been getting some attention in the online world for this racist comment on the local SayAnythingBlog showing a picture of Barack Obama next to a noose. Apparently the website owner has a history of this stuff:
And I -- for one -- do not think Port deserves to be let off the hook for this simply because he pulled the offending blog post from his site. Port has a history of pulling internet stunts to try to draw attention to his website. If you click here to look at this website, you'll see someone's comment (on April 29, 2004, at 3:48 p.m.) suggesting Robbie Port used the alias "Hot Abercrombie Chick" for a span of time in an effort to generate interest in his website. (Spend a little time Googling "hot abercrombie chick" and "rob port" or "robbie port"; you'll see what I'm talking about). Port knows web traffic translates directly into web advertising money. A guy has to wonder if Port -- or his "sock puppet" -- published the offensive Obama/noose graphic in an attempt to draw national attention to his website. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Port has also been banished from one North Dakota Native American Indian reservation for previous racist rants on his website. This isn't a first for Rob Port.
With North Dakota getting this much attention 22 days before the election, you know something bizarre is happening.
The right-wing narrative has been set - the federal government forced the lenders to give houses to black people and Hispanics, they couldn't pay back, "Fannie and Freddie went wild," and they brought the whole system down.
It should be noted that we've had housing downturns before in this country, and none of them caused the financial markets to collapse (the Depression was more about monetary policy, stock speculation, and trade). The extreme leveraging (and the exemptions given to investment firms to double their leveraging limit) and bundling of exotic securities, as well as authorizing awful loans, is the new element here, and both the CRA and the GSEs have nothing to do with that.
Let's clarify the causes of current circumstances. Ask yourself the following questions about the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act and/or the role of Fannie & Freddie:
• Did the 1977 legislation, or any other legislation since, require banks to not verify income or payment history of mortgage applicants?
• 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision; another 30% were made by banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. How was this caused by either CRA or GSEs ?
• What about "No Money Down" Mortgages (0% down payments) ? Were they required by the CRA? Fannie? Freddie?
• Explain the shift in Loan to value from 80% to 120%: What was it in the Act that changed this traditional lending requirement?
• Did any Federal legislation require real estate agents and mortgage writers to use the same corrupt appraisers again and again? How did they manage to always come in at exactly the purchase price, no matter what?
• Did the CRA require banks to develop automated underwriting (AU) systems that emphasized speed rather than accuracy in order to process the greatest number of mortgage apps as quickly as possible?
• How exactly did legislation force Moody's, S&Ps and Fitch to rate junk paper as Triple AAA?
• What about piggy back loans? Were banks required by Congress to lend the first mortgage and do a HELOC for the down payment -- at the same time?
• Internal bank memos showed employees how to cheat the system to get poor mortgages prospects approved that shouldn't have been: Titled How to Get an "Iffy" loan approved at JPM Chase. (Was circulating that memo also a FNM/FRE/CRA requirement?)
• The four biggest problem areas for housing (by price decreases) are: Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami, Florida, and San Diego, California. Explain exactly how these affluent, non-minority regions were impacted by the Community Reinvesment Act ?
• Did the GSEs require banks to not check credit scores? Assets? Income?
• What was it about the CRA or GSEs that mandated fund managers load up on an investment product that was hard to value, thinly traded, and poorly understood
• What was it in the Act that forced banks to make "interest only" loans? Were "Neg Am loans" also part of the legislative requirements also?
• Consider this February 2003 speech by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozlilo at the American Bankers National Real Estate Conference. He advocated zero down payment mortgages -- was that a CRA requirement too, or just a grab for more market share, and bad banking?
The answer to all of the above questions is no, none, and nothing at all.
Honestly, most of these charlatans on the right probably don't know what Fannie (FNMA) and Freddie (FHLMC) stand for. They just want something to yell about. And the GSEs sound as good as anything else.
I'm glad that activists are fighting back against this not-too-subtle racism. It won't be successful, but at least they're putting another narrative out there.
The head of the National Urban League is calling on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to refute statements by conservative politicians and pundits that subprime mortgages provided to minorities led to the financial crisis and a $700 billion federal rescue of Wall Street.
In a strongly worded letter to Paulson this week, Marc H. Morial said Paulson has "an obligation to correct the misinformation that is spread concerning the root cause of the current financial crisis."
Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, said in an interview yesterday that the effort "to pin the subprime crisis on African Americans and Latinos" is a "big lie."
"It's an effort to shift the climate away from deregulation and the lack of oversight," he said. "The numbers are becoming clearer each day that a large number of people who ended up with a subprime loan could have qualified for a prime loan. That's the abuse that's inherent here."
I think that ultimately, reasonable people would agree on that as the cause of the crisis. Those who want to believe something else are being fed an alternate take. It's disgusting.
I thought the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 isn't responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 would be self-evident, simply because you would have to believe that the system worked fine for 25-30 years until now, which is just ridiculous. But I underestimated the ability of Republicans to willingly delude themselves. They are desperate to find a scapegoat that doesn't have an (R) next to their name, and people with dark skin are an inviting target. I mean, you have one House Republican getting out the Photoshop and painting his opponent as a bearded darkie (the guy is in fact as white as could be and clean-cut).
So here we go with the blaming of the CRA and minority homeowners, claiming that the government forced the banks to give bad loans out. It doesn't matter than the biggest foreclosure regions are in rural areas and exurbs. It doesn't matter that the CRA only applies to banks and thrifts, and not across the lending market, and certainly not where almost all subprime mortgages were created. Bonddad has the best refutation:
While we're on the topic -- the CRA had nothing to do with the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac either:
Note, too, that Fannie and Freddie have nonpareil lobbying operations and formidable political strength, owing to their hefty donations and penchant for hiring former political operatives. Besides, the agencies claim they've landed in their current predicament through no fault of their own. As Freddie Mac Chairman and CEO Richard Syron recently put it, the GSEs have been hit by a 100-year storm in the housing market, accentuated by some higher-risk mortgages that they were forced to buy to meet government affordable-housing targets.
The latter contention is more than disingenuous. A substantial portion of Fannie's and Freddie's credit losses comes from $337 billion and $237 billion, respectively, of Alt-A mortgages that the agencies imprudently bought or guaranteed in recent years to boost their market share. These are mortgages for which little or no attempt was made to verify the borrowers' income or net worth. The principal balances were much higher than those of mortgages typically made to low-income borrowers. In short, Alt-A mortgages were a hallmark of real-estate speculation in the ex-urbs of Las Vegas or Los Angeles, not predatory lending to low-income folks in the inner cities.
A simple Google search with help from Wikipedia would have revealed how clueless the CRA caused this mess claim is. But that's not the point. The entire financial system is under tremendous stress on the Republican's watch. It's their policies that are under the microscope right now. And they just don't look that good. So now the political game is to shift the blame to Democrats. And who better then to blame then ... Jimmy Carter.
It's just utter know-nothingism, but that hasn't stopped the Republicans before. Good for the CBC to challenge these racists directly, pivoting off of comments supporting this nonsense from Rep. Michelle Bachmann:
In a new letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) obtained by ThinkProgress, 31 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) call Bachmann’s claims “ridiculous” and ask Boehner whether her comments represent the views of the Republican Caucus:
It is clear from Rep. Bachmann’s comments that she believes that the bipartisan laws enacted over the past decade ensuring that minority communities have equal access to banking and other financial services are the cause of this financial situation. […]
There is no evidence to support Rep. Bachmann’s assertion that “minorities” caused the current financial crisis. Laws designed to open opportunities for equal access to credit do not require banks or thrifts to make loans that are unsafe or unprofitable. In fact, laws like the CRA mandate exactly the opposite. […] Additionally, research clearly shows that the majority of the predatory loans that have led us to this financial mess were originated by non-bank financial institutions and other entities that did NOT have a CRA obligation and lacked strong federal regulatory oversight. Shifting the blame for the current economic crisis to laws that allow equal access and opportunities to communities of color is ridiculous.
As members of the CBC, we simply ask if Rep. Bachmann’s position that it was lending to minority communities that caused the current financial crisis, represent the position of Republican Caucus?
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