Convergences

by Patricia J. Williams

Released: 26 Feb 2010

Train stations are a great place from which to survey the world of this wintry economic landscape. Ever-increasing numbers of Americans gather in their shelter, the well-heeled to avoid airline delays, the homeless for their warmth. Train stations are some of the few places left in America where a full spectrum of citizens — rich, poor, high, low — sit side by side, cheek by jowl.

Last week I had to go from Washington to Boston. I settled in to wait at Gate J of Union Station with my knitting and a book of crossword puzzles. A woman who had seemingly donned everything she owns sat down two seats away from me. She was wearing a linty black knit cap drawn over short dreadlocks, an oversize stained sweatshirt and baggy maroon trousers. She carried several smudged and well-worn shopping bags, which she arranged in a semicircle at her feet, and she began talking to them, commiserating about the terrible state of the world. Her tone was gentle, conversational, light. At first I thought she was speaking on a cellphone — there were polite pauses in what she said, moments of agreement and playfulness — but in fact she was not. She mourned the loss of democratic process in the Senate, the rise of mercenary armies and agribusiness as well as the concentration of corporate power in the manufacture of butter and detergents. (“It looks like there are a thousand brands on the shelves, but in fact they’re all owned by one or two multinationals.”) She feared the social consequences of the financial crisis: “Things that should protect our economy… the Robinson-Patman Act… They’re so busy undoing that — that undoing will be our undoing…”

Genius? Insanity? Either way, her observations threw me for a loop — they were illuminating, mesmerizing, shocking, dislocating. I dug my iPhone from my bag and Googled the Robinson-Patman Act. In some other universe, I used to know what it said. As the tiny blue screen fluttered and winked to life in its search for meaning, I gazed about the waiting area of Gate J. Nearly everyone was similarly engaged with their cyberspacial phylacteries, davening into thin air, entranced, uttering streams of words that echoed in the high-domed space like a turbulent waterfall. Unlike the woman next to me, however, they all seemed to be deploying visible Bluetooth devices or earplugs affixed to their heads, their eyes flat, inwardly transfixed.

Fifteen years ago, I suppose, the place would have seemed like a ward at Bellevue. A well-dressed man across from me was enunciating loudly about having to reschedule a game of handball. A woman with a messily overstuffed briefcase had her head cocked like an eager spaniel’s in order to keep her phone tucked in the hollow between shoulder and neck; she murmured over and over, “Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh,” like a series of involuntary spasms. A college student in a porkpie hat congratulated a friend on his recent engagement and promised to throw him a bachelor party with lots of “juicy, big-lipped prostitutes, dude.” A guy in a hoodie and mud-spattered Timberland boots was waxing lively about “some people” who don’t want to “move their fat butts and work.” Not on a cellphone was the exception — a wiry child of about 10 with alarming, much too bright eyes, darting up and down the aisles seeking “a dollar for food.”

Fifteen years ago, it was still springtime in America. The thought of a recession as deep as ours crossed few minds outside the more perspicacious — some said paranoid — quadrants of academia and, of course, the perpetually redlined limits of inner cities. In contrast, the present-day waiting room at Union Station was ablaze with the semaphores of legitimacy, exhaustion, the absurd. My head spun with fatigue and the roaring heteroglossia. Next to me, the woman in the linty hat was telling the same story over and over: she moved so fluently among the disappointments of commerce, politics, law enforcement and grammatical apocalypse (“You need to end that sentence with a question mark, young lady!”). I struggled to track the coherence in her constantly disrupted narrative. An amiable security guard strolled by. He nudged at the woman’s circle of bags with his shoe and told her to move along. She gathered her belongings, the flow of her words never ceasing. There was a particularly intriguing riff about the police having killed her, followed by a soft, wise little laugh: “But you can’t let your kin kill you either.” Then, still addressing the epistemic gatekeeper within, she offered shyly, “You are very well liked.” “Thanks,” she responded brightly and shuffled off.

The District of Columbia suffers the highest percentage of homelessness in the nation. African-Americans, veterans and the mentally ill are disproportionately represented among their ranks. As the foreclosure crisis spreads, incrementally leveling this unfortunate playing field, non-African-Americans, nonveterans and the certifiably sane struggle madly to distinguish themselves from the usual narratives of poverty: laziness, lack of qualifications, bad choices. A determined dis-identification with the already internally displaced has edged into our national parlance, with a host of predictable resentments. The possibility that we, the broad collective of people, are sinking into a communal financial ooze is underestimated, rationalized as the fault of the ones who sank first. From Fox News to the blogosphere, such analysis focuses on blaming those on the bottom for being too heavy, weighing too much and generally dragging the rest down.

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault wrote, “If, now, we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations with the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.” By the same token, the failure to see our common fate defines a dangerously bedazzling split between spirit and logic; between poetry and engineering; between the messiness of mercy and, ultimately, the orderliness of law.

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American Dreams

American Dreams

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Diary of a Mad Law Professor

By Patricia J. Williams

This article appeared in the December 29, 2008 edition of The Nation.

December 10, 2008

 

On December 8 the front page of the New York Times featured an arresting image of three snow-white SUVs on the altar of a Pentecostal church in Detroit. Like bullocks led to sacrifice, they were parked amid a swirl of parishioners in choir robes, arms raised in song and seeming supplication. The caption revealed that they were praying for the auto industry to be saved.

It might be tempting for some to dismiss such pageantry as idolatry, this beseeched-for sustenance embodied in a once-golden calf, now a dried-up cash cow. But as passion play, it is powerfully evocative of an American spirit. If I were the proverbial Martian anthropologist, I’d see similarities between those SUV anthems and a rain dance, or the miracle of the loaves and fishes. We pray for the cod to be plentiful, we pray for the corn crop, we pray for a harvest of cars. We look for divine signs that our traditional sources of abundance have not been driven to the point of drought or extinction.

 

The American Dream is a form of worship–if more than just metaphorically so–in certain branches of evangelical and charismatic Protestantism. From Daddy Grace to Pat Robertson, from tents to televangelism, a strong line of American sectarianism converts monetary remuneration into a form of God’s grace. Even for those of us to whom this configuration is not a matter of divine will but rather the outcome of applied economic ideologies and sociopolitical narratives, its immense symbolism is worthy of serious consideration. If this recession/depression is not the work of a deity hungry for sacrifice, it might be good to take a look at the stories we tell ourselves, the ones that bind, and blind, us to the stupidity, arrogance and corruption of those who rule from the heavenly pinnacle of top-down corporate, as well as Congressional, governance.

All our civic saints are ciphers for hard work and its just rewards: Horatio Alger, the self-made tycoon. Old MacDonald, the farmer in gumboots and plaid shirt. Joe Sixpack, the factory worker with his hard hat and lunch pail. My Ántonia, the busy housewife turned plain-spoken soccer mom. We recite parables in which their evil nemeses, the sloth and the sluggardly grasshopper, starve in the winter, and deservedly so; for there is fruit on the trees for all who reach for it and lay in a store of provisions. We invent the Evil Welfare Queen and try to do away with public assistance so that she will learn to help herself. We invent the Greedy Trial Lawyer as a reason to “reform” bankruptcy so that loan forgiveness is nearly impossible for consumers to get. We invent the Fat Cat Union Member, who schemes to break the back of his honest employer by burdening business with silly perks like pensions, minimum wage and healthcare.

An economic ice age is upon us, however. As with any belief system, the loss of an idyll results in fear, anger, anxiety. When Samuel Wurzelbacher, dba Joe the Plumber, availed himself of the opportunity to ask candidate Barack Obama about taxes, he premised his question on a scenario that had nothing to do with his actual life circumstances. He was supposedly a plumber–although he was not licensed in any state as such. He was supposedly going to buy a business worth $250,000–although he had liens against him for back taxes and medical bills and earned $40,000. Joe the Plumber, an aspirational but entirely fictive reverie, was so powerful an American persona that vast swaths of the public, as well as Wurzelbacher himself, were able to dis-identify with the actual living, breathing, struggling man. “Joe” is a hard-working man of means; Sam is a hard-working person who is barely making it. The inability to reconcile the vision and the reality creates a split, a chasm in which dissatisfaction festers, leaks, then seeks a target, longs for a scapegoat.

There is no comfortable role in American iconography for the poor. The myth of inevitable mobility leaves little room for acknowledging the existence of the dispossessed. Poverty is shrugged off like foreignness when you step off the boat and sashay down the golden bricks of Main Street. We Americans believe in pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but in case you’ve never tried it, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps pitches you forward, flat onto your face. As our industrial base moves offshore and our fruited plains are taken over by agribusiness, the trope of the blissful drone inspired by promises of phantasmagorical wealth is revealed as unsustainable. The creed by which we profess ourselves a classless society no longer leads to redemption.

Americans are the hardest workers among industrialized nations. We grind ourselves down with the longest workweek and the fewest social protections. No pint in the pub, no rest for the weary. The very idea of being “weary” has been displaced by images of the relentlessly able-bodied bionic economic man who never stops until the body is genuinely and visibly broken. Disability checks come only when you have the marks to prove it–a bit like the way the Bush administration defines torture.

And so I think it’s time we consciously craft new prayer totems. If I were to bring an offering to the altar of the American Dream, I’d haul in an electric tram, two intercity railroad cars and a bouquet of bicycles. I’d garnish them with copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’d hand out praise songs for the concept of human dignity and for economic rights. We ought to recognize the basic need for sustenance as a right, not bury the larger question in the vexed vocabulary of “bailouts” and “handouts.” We the people have a right to a home, to healthcare, to untainted food, clean water, a living wage and time to rest, time to develop the personal ties and social engagements that sustain the best and most pleasurable parts of a civilization.

If we could retrofit auto factories to make tanks during World War II, how hard can it be to recognize that oil dependency is killing us–literally, in wars but also with climate erosion? How hard can it be to fire the petroleum-drunk heads of the Big Three and to get those desperately hopeful parishioners back to an honest, and honorable, day’s work?

Uncooperative Housing

by Patricia J. Williams

Released: 14 Nov 2008

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This year is the fortieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. As we celebrate Barack Obama’s election and the extraordinary social transformations that the civil rights movement brought us, we should also review with fresh eyes some of the divisions that remain. One of the thorniest of these is housing segregation. There is no doubt that many suburbs are less monolithically white than they used to be, and that many neighborhoods in the Deep South have integrated at faster rates than in the urban North. Overall, however, national disparities in public schools, medical care and policing all flow from the fact that residential segregation by race remains a pervasive feature of American life — and that it exists in the United States at a higher rate than in just about any other industrialized country. This, in turn, allows for — and even rationalizes — separate and very unequal public policies exacerbating the social barriers between white citizens and those in communities of color.

Geographic isolation enables a vicious circle of human devaluation: Public transportation is less reliable and sometimes nonexistent in many neighborhoods marked as black; this makes it harder to be punctual in the workplace. More schools are built next to or on top of industrial waste sites in communities of color, contributing to more public health crises like asthma and lead poisoning. And banking practices are often wildly different: It is much harder to obtain a prime (rather than a subprime) mortgage in a black neighborhood than in a white one with similar income levels.

Take New York City — at once the most cosmopolitan and mixed up of metropolises. When I voted on November 4, I saw an exhilarating civic festival, with lines of good people wrapped around the block. But I spotted only one other black person in the entire crowd. Despite its generally left-leaning politics, Manhattan is one of the most residentially segregated places in the country — not just neighborhood by neighborhood but block by block and building by building. Take co-ops: Unlike condominiums, rentals or straight sales (which have only a right of first refusal), co-ops can turn applicants down without ever disclosing a reason and are by their structure immune to fair-housing testers. For years, organizations like the Anti-Discrimination Center in New York have been trying to get the City Council to hold hearings on a bill that would require such disclosure. Although almost two-thirds of cooperative apartment owners support it, the bill languished until just months ago, when the City Council advanced a new version requiring zero disclosure and shifting rule-making authority from the City Council alone to a process of “consultation with…the cooperative apartment industry.”

It’s a tad contradictory: on the one hand, New York City has one of the more comprehensive antidiscrimination laws around, in addition to federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, marital status or disability. There is also a city law covering source of income, occupation, sexual orientation, marital status, alienage, citizenship status or “persons with whom children are, may be or would be residing.” On the other hand, the institutionalized obstacles presented by the real estate industry keep us as far apart as ever. One of the reasons “occupation” is included in the above list is to prevent not just the obvious but also the kind of scenario whereby a landlord uses an applicant’s job as a cover, as in: It’s not that she’s black or a woman. It’s that she’s a lawyer.

From 2006 to 2007, the number of mortgages to black borrowers in New York fell by 44 percent and to Hispanics by 34 percent. The numbers remained more or less the same for white and Asian borrowers. One should not assume that this decline was because black and Hispanic borrowers didn’t deserve loans. Here’s the deeper story: Black and Hispanic populations tend to be concentrated in neighborhoods where they are more likely to be served only by subprime lenders — many of which have gone out of business in the past few years. In addition, when housing prices fall, they tend to fall first in minority neighborhoods; hence, more people in those neighborhoods have been hurt by the value of their homes dropping below the amount they owe.

Then there is the matter of straightforward discriminatory lending practices, like redlining, by prime and subprime lenders alike. And as I mentioned in my previous column, one of the least reported aspects of the Bush administration’s horror show was a federal lawsuit that blocked New York State from investigating discriminatory mortgage lending. Even in its final days, the administration seems determined to crush the possibility of regulation in any arena whatsoever. The original emergency bailout provisions, for example, gave the treasury secretary broad powers to suspend public laws — including the Fair Housing Act.

In view of the entrenched global crises facing the new president, reversing the fallout from some of this must, like the election, begin with us. We often fight the good fight as though it exists on a battlefield far, far away rather than in our own backyards. On the dawn of our spanking-new era of optimism, a good starting point might be to ask ourselves, How financially integrated are our neighborhoods? Do we have any black or Latino neighbors? Does our building have wheelchair access? Have we thought about the “steering” tendencies of realtors that might allow one’s building to be labeled “singles-friendly” — does that mean no children or no elderly? Does it include veterans? Does “family-friendly” include openly gay families? Is our notion of religious diversity limited to Judeo-Christian? Does one’s “international” neighborhood include Muslims or Hindi speakers or Mexican immigrants?

As an old civil rights maxim puts it: “In the South you can come as close as you like, but know your place. In the North, you can rise as high as you like, but just don’t come near.” It’s time we Americans challenged the limits of our assigned “place” in society as well as the biases that keep us from drawing near enough to know how much of a collective vision we truly share.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor.” Her books includeThe Rooster’s Egg (1995) and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997).

Copyright © 2008 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global

Dialogue with Matt Bai

DAILY INTEL

Matt Bai and Patricia J. Williams Argue Over Religion in Government and Homeowners’ Role in the Financial Crisis

published on New York Magazine’s website

10/30/08 at 2:00 PM

 

4Comments

Photo: Getty Images

Every day (or close to it) until November 4, a series of writers and thinkers will discuss the election over instant messenger for nymag.com. Today, The New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai and The Nation columnist Patricia J. Williams argue over what an Obama presidency might mean for the judiciary and abortion, the current role of religion in government, and whether homeowners aren’t partly to blame for the financial crisis.

M.B.: I read that very good piece in our paper about the judiciary under Bush. Something you’ve watched closely, no?

P.J.W.: Yes, the composition of the judiciary is one of the things that will be most important and transformational. And the article started with one of the most interesting ways in which the judiciary’s thoughts will be important: It’s not just about abortion, but about how personhood is created. If a full, righted human being exists at the moment of conception, this has all kinds of implications that pit a woman’s body against that of her “unborn child” even if that designation refers to blastocytes…

M.B.: So do you expect a President Obama, should he be elected, to apply a pro-choice litmus test? What kind of judges are we going to see?

P.J.W.: No, I don’t expect Obama to do a litmus test. He’s much too complicated a legal thinker for that. But I do think that he’ll reject flatly theological designations in this debate. He’ll appoint people who have a more traditional regard and respect for the range, the plurality of ways Americans think about the limits of bodily integrity.

M.B.: I suspect most Americans would appreciate that. Even quite religious Americans I talk to seem to have grown weary of a theological brand of government. Liberals assume that the more religious you are, the less you want to see a separation of church and state, but my sense is that’s too broad a generalization.

P.J.W.: People have long referred to this as a woman’s “choice,” but I think in recent years there’s been some recognition that it’s deeper and more complicated than that. And aside from abortion, the specter of parents choosing “designer babies,” now that that technology is proceeding apace — this has brought a new level to the complexity.

M.B.: Right — technology is changing all of these debates, or should. It’s one of the ways in which boomer leaders seem to be somewhat retro. To hear them talk, nothing around these issues has changed for 30 years, but of course everything about them has, and in a very short time.

P.J.W.: Bioethicists and disability-rights activists have also entered this debate: The potential ability to predict risk for certain conditions from DNA — long before pregnancy — this has given new dimension to the prospect of a Gattaca-like future. And this removes the obsessive focus from abortion — it’s a revisiting of a very old problem — a kind of eugenic impulse on the one hand, in tension with a free-market ideology that would make self-improvement a matter of the market. Who can afford designer genetic intervention, etc. Traditional religion gives way to a reconsideration of foundational moral and ethical precepts.

M.B.: I guess that’s the battlefield for the next 100 years. Personally, I don’t feel like I could have improved on my kids. But they’re very small. I may feel differently when my son starts playing baseball.

This issue of judicial appointments is interesting to me, because Obama has staked his vision on this more bipartisan — or post-partisan — approach. The main question is how he lives up to this at, say, the cabinet level and in his congressional relations, but the judiciary is another area where the cultural divide has really grown extreme and contentious.

P.J.W.: One of the things that troubles me most about Bush’s appointments is not just that they’ve been arch-libertarians, but that they have been inconsistent ideologues. They are libertarian free-marketeers for some things, but simultaneously allow monopolistic and oligarchic accumulations of power that subvert optimal market operation. So they seem more partisan than judicious. Activists for particular wealth interests rather than the anti-activists they tell us they are. This is particularly true when it comes to consumer rights, women’s rights, and labor rights; but also with regard to disability rights, protection of health through regulation of pharmaceutical companies. And lord knows, in permitting the ungodly consolidation of our media outlets.

M.B.: Well, but that can be said of the entire hyper-conservative ideology, right? There’s very little consistency in any extreme ideology, right or left. The more extreme you get, the harder it becomes not to undermine your own principles.

P.J.W.: I guess you could say that inconsistency is there. But I have evangelical and fundamentalist friends who adhere to a consistent set of principles even when it leads them to conclusions that are personally uncomfortable. They’re rigidly consistent, and thoughtfully so — I may not agree, and they may not even like what their moral frame guides them to do, but they don’t do what’s convenient or self-interested. And that’s the difference.

M.B.: Yeah, I get that, but evangelism isn’t necessarily a political extreme. It can be just a religious framework (though we sometimes forget that now). I mean, the inconsistency of the arch-libertarians is, to me, no more surprising than the liberals I know who live by a code of complete tolerance but who easily employ the word “redneck” and would happily tell rural Americans how they should live. Ideologies in the extreme all end up in the same basic place. This is why fascism and communism are essentially indistinguishable at the margins.

P.J.W.: But most evangelism and fundamentalist Protestant movements in the U.S. purportedly adhere to a concept of the Inerrancy of the Word. That’s all I’m referring to. And many of the judges appointed in the last eight years say they adhere to a parallel kind of strict construction of the constitution.

M.B.: Agreed. I guess I’m just saying, as one who didn’t live through the sixties, that from my vantage point and I think to many in my generation, there’s “the Word” on one side and the antiwar, anti-establishment dogma on the other. I think this is what Obama has been gingerly trying to get at for the last two years — that rigid ideologies left over from the last century aren’t up to the complexities of this one. Which is more or less where you started out.

P.J.W.: I hope you’re right about the generational divide. Though Sarah Palin is younger than Obama, isn’t she? A lot of the power of evangelical megachurches is recent; its expansion is based on a throwback but not directly tied to the Vietnam era either.

M.B.: I think the megachurches are largely about community and are largely constructive, but that’s a debate for another time, I guess … as is Sarah Palin, because I can’t even get started on my annoyance with her anti-elitism shtick…

If Obama wins, what will be the role for legal scholars on the left like you?

P.J.W.: If Obama wins … hmmm. I don’t know that our role will change. I’m basically doing the same interrogations that I did when Clinton or Carter was president. And what will not change with an Obama presidency — despite the huge global sigh of relief — is the on-the-ground mess that’s been growing for decades. Just in the area of race: It’s very significant at the symbolic level to have an African-American president, but that doesn’t erase the nightmare of our incarceration rate — and about 90 percent, is it? (or more?) are AA or Latino.

M.B.: Yes, this is the fear of a lot of African-American leaders I’ve talked to — that Obama makes it harder, in some ways, to raise these issues. Al Sharpton is very thoughtful about this. He told me the success of politicians like Obama makes the role of civil-rights leaders even more important, not less so.

P.J.W.: Or that despite the dizzying ponzi schemes that are at the root of our economic collapse, it’s being figured in some sectors as a problem of lending to too many African-Americans — were that there were enough to make that kind of difference!

M.B.: Yeah, I don’t think African-Americans are a very fair scapegoat there. Though I do think there is something to the larger idea that the housing collapse was only partly about greed and partly, too, about people willing to take unreasonable risks to attain something close to the American dream that was handed down to them.

P.J.W.: I did a column recently detailing this, but just before Eliot Spitzer went down in flames, he did a very eye-opening piece about how the Bush administration blocked the state of New York’s attempt to prosecute discriminatory lenders and credit practices. In fact, the Bush administration prohibited states from enforcing their consumer-protection laws against any bank that was not strictly within state. So I don’t think this is mostly about excesses of the American dream. This was a complete blocking of ordinary and long-standing consumer-protection laws. The administration’s stance was so extreme that it was protested by all 50 states’ attorneys general and all 50 states’ banking directors.

And that was a very bipartisan group, as you can imagine.

M.B.: Yes, I saw that piece, and it was important. But I do think there is some distinction to be made between consumers who were swindled in fine print and those who simply took the best deal a bank would give them in order to buy a house they couldn’t afford. It’s a fairness issue, because an awful lot of Americans made wise choices that sacrificed their own ambitions to the reality of their circumstances, and they ought not to be screwed for it. I know that’s not a popular sentiment, but it’s important to understand.

P.J.W.: There are certainly greedy purchasers and people who overextend stupidly, but statistically that’s not what this collapse is about — take a look at some of these contracts. They’re filled with very old scams, scams that used to be illegal. Hidden clauses that allow enormous balloon payments; subsequent modifications that change from fixed to variable rate; rate increases that exceed all definition of usury; forms of insurance that protect one’s creditors but don’t give you a dime — but that don’t reveal that with anything like clarity.

In the wake of Katrina, a lot of people discovered that that’s the kind of insurance they bought — the insurance companies pay the banks the mortgage but don’t give the homeowner a dime. It’s one reason why so many homes remain unrepaired. And it’s a form of insurance that used to be illegal or much more heavily regulated.

Predatory Lending and Scapegoating

Predatory Scapegoating

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the November 3, 2008 edition of The Nation.

October 16, 2008

 

Some three weeks before New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign his office in disgrace (sex! scandal! floozies!), he published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers,” the piece expressed Spitzer’s concern that for several years there had been a marked increase in predatory lending practices, including distortion of terms, surprise balloon payments, hidden fees and deceptive “teaser” rates. These practices, he wrote, were having a “devastating effect on home buyers.” In addition, the sheer number of such transactions, “if left unchecked, threaten…our financial markets.” To those in the know (OK, those few egghead “elites” not enthralled by the birth of the Brangelina twins), the situation loomed so egregious that the attorneys general of all fifty states, both Democrats and Republicans, lodged suits against the worst predatory subprime lenders. A number of states, including New York, passed laws to rein in such practices.

 

The response was shocking, and not nearly wellpublicized enough: the Bush administration employed a little-used 1863 law to annul all state antipredatory-lending laws and, if that wasn’t enough, to block states from enforcing their own consumer protection laws in suits against national banks. Thus, when Spitzer tried to open an investigation into discriminatory mortgage lending in New York, the administration actually filed a federal lawsuit to block it. These interventions were so extreme and so unprecedented that the attorneys general and the banking superintendents of all fifty states came together to oppose the rulings unanimously. But to no avail. 

It is worth quoting the last paragraph of Spitzer’s op-ed in its entirety: “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.”

Spitzer wrote his article eight months ago, in February. To some, it might be tempting to characterize his observations as prescient. It’s probably more accurate to say that Spitzer just had his eyes open (if not for Mata Hari)–and he was not alone. Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been sounding the knell for a very long time. But, frankly, I worry that even now there is too little attention–in media or in political debate–to the incremental ingredients of this crisis. For it is not merely a failure to regulate Wall Street; it’s a failure to govern at all. The FDA is packed with industry insiders who seem content with the gross understaffing of inspections bureaus. Animal feed laced with melamine was imported from China, consumed here and has now entered the human food chain. Nontherapeutic experimentation with pesticides on humans has been given the nod. Pharmaceutical companies have gotten approval for drugs like Vioxx and Fen-Phen that should never have been put on the market. Efforts by farmers to do voluntary testing for mad cow disease have been blocked by the Agriculture Department. The Justice Department’s civil rights division has been gutted. The FCC has hacked away at public access to the airways and OK’d obscene concentrations of media power. The Transportation Department is underfunded beyond all conscience, and the toll has been tragic: collapsed bridges, breached levees up and down the Mississippi and nearly unnavigable railroad tracks. And FEMA… well, we all remember FEMA.

Maybe now is not the time to be ungraciously partisan; perhaps in the middle of the tornado we “don’t want to argue about causes,” as Sarah Palin said of global warming. But let’s make one thing crystal clear: neither this global economic catastrophe nor the impending plunge in our standard of living is the fault of poor blacks or other disenfranchised minorities. It should be obvious, I suppose: African-Americans are only about 13 percent of the population, and about 48 percent of them are homeowners. Yet I emphasize this because to listen to some widely exported theories by John McCain’s surrogates and right-leaning radio shock jocks, you could get the impression that this all came about because penniless black slackers took out home loans they were just as unqualified for as the jobs they stole from more qualified white contenders.

Perhaps the most insidious and ubiquitous propagation of this imagery is the McCain ad that features a scary photo of Franklin Raines, former head of Fannie Mae, the single black head of any organization implicated in this mess. Yet of all the hundreds of CEOs, crooks and swindlers who could be named–from Ken Lay to AIG’s Christopher Swift to Jack Abramoff–it is Raines who is used as the Willie Horton-ized whipping boy of civilization’s downfall. This is pure manipulation: Raines is not connected in any way to Barack Obama. Yet McCain’s campaign director was a top manager at Fannie Mae. If we must look for figureheads, allow me to nominate George Herbert Walker IV, who just happens to be George W. Bush’s second cousin. He also happens to be Lehman Brothers’ investment management director, who, just before the firm’s collapse, dismissed a suggestion from the asset management firm Neuberger Berman that top executives forgo their multimillion-dollar bonuses so as to “send a strong message…that management is not shirking accountability for recent performance.” Walker actually apologized that the very notion had been circulated: “Sorry team. I am not sure what’s in the water at Neuberger Berman. I’m embarrassed and I apologize.”