Diversity Recession Denounced
10/15/2008
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You can tell that the "Diversity Recession" meme is catching on because it's being denounced by Hispanic journalists and Media Matters:
No basis for libel on minority mortgages

By MARY SANCHEZ [Email her]

The Kansas City Star

October 14, 2008 In the great search for somebody to blame for the nation’s economic meltdown, an easy scapegoat is emerging.

Or rather, make that a few million easy scapegoats. By golly, it’s those low-income minorities! Those people who never should have qualified for home loans in the first place. The uncreditworthy defaulters of all those nasty subprime loans that caused our lending system to crumble and is catapulting world markets into the tank.

It’s a conspiracy that involves all the usual boogeymen. The snooty liberal do-gooders who championed the Community Reinvestment Act; the 1977 law that mitigated lending standards for minorities under certain conditions; Wall Street sharks greedy to turn a profit, and everyone’s favorite miscreants, the members of Congress who failed to adequately regulate when the spigots of credit were opened.

”In fact, much of the crisis we’re in today is because the government set out to fiddle with the market,” George Will fumed on ABC’s ”This Week.” He was referring to the CRA, which in his view ”would criminalize as racism ... if you didn’t lend to unproductive borrowers.”

It makes a nice conspiracy theory, but unfortunately it’s a lie. A big lie.[More]

No it's not. Partly because it's not properly a conspiracy theory at all—nothing about the government's campaign against "redlining" was secret. Media Matters is chiming in with the same idea:
Fri, Oct 10, 2008 9:24pm ET Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis

Summary: Conservative and other media figures — echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans — have attempted to lay blame for the financial crisis on proponents of the expansion of affordable housing. Those attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods.

As usual, they have their myths and their facts backwards. But if it makes the complainers feel better,  "Diversity Recession" doesn't mean we're blaming minorities as such—we're blaming multiculturalists.
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