* The CRA applies to depository banks - to regulated banks subject to the rules of the FDIC. The leaders of the sub-prime lending explosion were not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other agencies monitoring compliance with the CRA.
* Nothing in CRA compelled or encouraged leading U.S. banks to: offer loans for no money down; throw underwriting standards out the window; aggressively seek out new impoverished markets; bundle thousands of bad loans into complex securitized packages for sale on the global market.
* Nothing in CRA compelled credit rating agencies to stick A+ ratings on big packages of subprime debt.
* Nothing in the CRA forced Lehman Bros to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars of short-term debt in capital markets to buy up mass quantities of risky commercial real estate.
* Nothing in the CRA made Bear Stearns run with outlandish leverage ratios or drove AIG to go over the top with "credit default swaps."
* Plenty of the big real estate flameouts in recent months and over the last two years have had nothing to do with subprime loans and involved big condo developments in highly affluent white areas.
STATE CAPITALISM
I could continue with a list of factors the produced the current financial collapse - things that have nothing do with poor blacks or Latinos or radicals and everything to do with the bad decisions and greed of predominantly white financial and political elites, including the (bipartisan) agents of financial liberalization and deregulation over the last thirty-plus years. More fundamentally, the financial crisis is a symptom of deep contradictions in U.S. and global capitalism: chronic underlying over-production, under-consumption, excess capacity and excess capital leading to endemic speculative mania and the related hyper-financialization of capital [8].
Of course, American-style proto-fascism sees it as "treasonous" "anti-Americanism" to write or speak in reasonably honest, intelligent, and informed ways about these critical political-economic problems. Even as the nation's bipartisan state-capitalist masters move to protect elite fortunes with a new level of corporate-socialist state intervention, the proto-fascistic right and even many in the "liberal" center will shame you as a dangerous "anti-American" for daring to suggest that the current crisis is a result of the deeper disease that is deceptively called "free market capitalism."
Veteran radical ex-historian, author, speaker, jouranlist and activist Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality (2004), Segregated Schools (2005), and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007). His latest book (just released) is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, September 2008:
www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
1. See Joe Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000; Michael Brown et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California-Berkeley Press, 2003); Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
2. Jennifer Steinhauser, "Door to Door: Volunteers for Obama Face a Complex Issue," New York Times, October 15, 2008, A21.
3. Adam Nossiter, "The South: For Some, Uncertainty Starts at Racial Identity," New York Times, October 15, 2008, A21.
4. For an (I hope) useful review, see Paul Street, "The Madness of Jerome Corsi," ZNet (August 25, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18540
