84, 83, 24, or Why the Fannie Mae Charge is a lie.

84 is the percent of subprime mortgages privately originated in 2006. 83 is the percent of subprime loans originated for middle and low income homeowner by private lenders. 24 is the number out of 25 of the top subprime lenders that year that were not fully subject to the Community Reinvestment Act, the scapegoat thrown out there by Republicans who stil haven’t learned their lesson, and who misrepresent the true source of the Mortgage Meltdown: An overheated private mortgage market.

The Republicans won’t tell you a number of things. These are among them:

Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

Funny, isn’t? The company that is supposedly to blame found its share of the secondary market cut in half. And why? Well, one reason was tougher standards! In other words, because they wouldn’t take the kind of loans that were dominating that sector.

Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were down to a third of the total, and were being cut of even more by the Regulatory Agency over the GSEs, under Bush.

As for the Community Reinvestment Act?

In a book on the sub-prime lending collapse published in June 2007, the late Federal Reserve Governor Ed Gramlich wrote that only one-third of all CRA loans had interest rates high enough to be considered sub-prime and that to the pleasant surprise of commercial banks there were low default rates. Banks that participated in CRA lending had found, he wrote, “that this new lending is good business.”

Got that? Only one third Subprime, and low default rates to boot.

So what the hell is going on? Well, on the surface and with your average person, the reason these canards are being spread is simply because it is easy and reflexive at this point for Republicans to blame liberals and overregulation for any problem that comes along. Liberals are their favorite scapegoats, and what’s more, they have been taught to be very protective of their political dogmas, which means when deregulation becomes part of of the problem, that part gets ignored.

But on a deeper level, this is about Republican leaders stirring up resentments towards the poor and towards minorities, rehashing the old, sad, sordid, history of resentments and refreshing, in the minds of many people who trust their word, the prejudices that non-whites are either immoral, or incapable of responsiblity. At its core, that is the genesis of this approach to spinning financial crisis: blame the poor, blame those who are not like your targeted voters.

Better yet, blame government, stir up more resentment against them, against helping the average person. That this is the line of rhetoric from the Republicans, from the Right, demonstrates to us that for all the things that have changed during this campaign, one thing has not: the willingness of the GOP and its fellow travellers to tear down government protections, government regulations, and government help to the average person. The bitter irony of this, is that they are taking advantage of the fear and anxiety about this crisis, to further the agenda which could be substantively argued to have caused the crisis in the first place.

Do we need any more evidence here that Republicans are not to be trusted at this time in our nation’s history to lead our government? They not only haven’t learn, they don’t want to learn, they just want to continue doing now what they have done for the last thirty years.

This can’t go on any longer. This is governance by mental illness. This is members of government deliberately trying to destroy programs that work, that increase responsibility, that protect people from the abuse of unscrupulous lenders, so that they can turn around and then sell even more destruction of government, and more failure to live up to responsibilities.

There is no excuse for this. It is a fundamentally elitist approach to government, one where, without consent or consultation, the politicians and the officials demolish the very system they’ve been elected to be stewards of. Either these people think it is not important to factcheck what they say, or they know they are wrong and they are telling us these things to gain consent for an exercise of their power which is not in our interests.

The Republican Party is either too ill-informed or too ruthless and antagonistic to the interests of the average American to remain the political force it has been these past years. Their Morning in America must end, and a true dawn must follow for our country.