Targeted?

During a meeting with nearly 50 of her top Boston-area donors Sunday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department pick Antonio Weiss and said Hispanic and African-American families were “targeted” during the mortgage crisis, according to people who attended the event. * * * * * * * * She ascribed some of the problem to a worsening climate of economic opportunity for African-Americans than existed even a decade ago, according to attendees. And she said that the mortgage crisis affected black and Hispanic families more heavily, describing those groups as being “targeted.”

Umm, minorities were targeted all right — by the Federal government — who demanded that banks lend money to those with those with insufficient credit to likely repay the loans, ushering in the subprime mortgage bubble that, when it burst, created the economic crisis that ushered in Barack Obama in the fall of 2008:

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As a commenter at Hot Air notes:

This is an argument we can’t win with the left. If the sub prime loans are not made, then we are denying mortgages to low income families (Never mind that the interest rate is higher because of the increased risk to the lending institution). Since they were made, the left argues that they were predatory. And if you suggest that the interest rates should be higher to higher risk borrowers, now you are being discriminatory.

Just ask Barack Obama, who sued banks in 1998 as a young lawyer and would-be community organizer on behalf of 186 Chicago-area clients. As Neil Munro noted in 2012 at the Daily Caller, “With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago’s African-Americans:”

Two guesses as to how that all worked out:

At least 46 of Obama’s 186 clients have declared bankruptcy since 1996, often multiple times. That’s a far higher bankruptcy rate than the rate for all Americans, for Chicagoans and even for African-Americans in Chicago. In a 2011 report, the left-of-center Woodstock Institute reported that just 4.25 percent of African-Americans living in Chicago’s mostly black neighborhoods went bankrupt between 2006 and 2010. By contrast, 11 of Obama’s 186 clients — or 6.6 percent — went bankrupt during the same five-year period. That bankruptcy is 50 percent higher than the rate among Cook County’s African-American population, and almost three times the bankruptcy rate of all Cook county residents, according to data in the Woodstock report, titled “Bridging the Gap II.”

And there you have it: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and even young radical Barack Obama pushing banks to lend money to those least likely to pay back their loans, and now Elizabeth Warren declaring those same subprime loan applicants were “targeted.”

Perhaps this earlier government spokesman summed up this Mobius Loop best:

Exit quote: “The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

But good luck trying tell America’s best-known phony Indian that.