This problem wasn’t caused by an ethnic minority, this problem was caused by a Republican majority!

As I’ve already mentioned Eric Cantor’s outrageous comments made to Wolf Blitzer on CNN yesterday, offered a disturbing insight to the extreme thinking of the modern Republican party, but they also highlighted a worrying misperception about the current banking debacle.

Cantor’s comments were aimed at blaming ethnic borrowing as the cause of the banking meltdown, which he did via Jimmy Carter’s equal opportunities bill. The reason he made the outrageous comments is because he knows the public believe that all the troubled mortgage loans were made to greedy, and/or foolish people who couldn‘t afford them. Cantor wants to ensure that ethnic borrowers take the brunt of the blame, because ethnic equals Barack Obama.

The reason that this scandalous plan is doomed is because it’s untrue, and the rest of America didn’t wake up wearing brown shirts this morning. But, it’s frightening that Republicans feel they can ‘sell’ a widely respected 30 year old equal opportunities bill, as the cause of our country’s banking meltdown. Cantor's distortions were not made by mistake they were made to appeal to the party base, which indicates just how extreme the 21st Century Republican party has become.

Also, I have to address this terrible misperception about borrowers, regardless of race, are to blame for all this shit. There’s no doubt that the Republican administrations of the last 30 years or so have encouraged speculation in the housing market, and backed up by Banks offering special mortgages for second, and third houses, they lured increasing numbers of middle-class Americans in. Although I’m sure that speculators will account for some of the failed loans, and greedy and foolish borrowers will account for a few more, but there's no doubt that the vast majority were just regular working people trying to get on.

Let’s be clear the cause of the mass defaults was not consumer greed, but banker greed, and political incompetence.

The banks, desperate to make interest, pushed ever more credit into the market, then due to no fault of the borrowers there was a worldwide economic downturn, the economy slowed, and people began losing their jobs. These people weren’t greedy or foolish, they're normal people that had been working for years, and only became homeowners because loans were cheap, and were finally able to afford it!.

Like everyone else, their homes were based in the communities where they worked, so when a company shut down, and lots of people lost their jobs, people would start moving out of the community looking for new work. It was a double edged sword, because as there was no work in their community, no one was moving in, and so house prices fall. Maybe close to the end, as a last resort they borrow against the little equity they had just to keep up the payments, but without work and unable to sell their house, and no income coming in they finally stop making the mortgage payments.

Suddenly, that regular, decent, honest, hard working family of four that used to live next door are out on their asses, homeless...horrific.

The system just created a few more statistics.

How dare people look to blame their neighbors just because their timing was off. The same could’ve happened, could happen, to any of us. Don’t believe the main stream media with their own corporate interests.

The downturn happened because the Republican administration, backed by those same Congressional Republicans who are crowing about ethnic minorities today, ran riot over regulations governing finance, and all for the sake of creating a market bubble that would inevitably burst.

Instead of looking at ways to reduce our oil consumption and look at new technologies, they kept their big oil masters happy by throwing billions and billions into a pointless war for control of oil. Instead of renegotiating foreign trade agreements that were costing millions of American jobs, those caring Congressional Republicans kept schtum so they could keep collecting backhanders from lobbyists representing our foreign trading partners.

Make no mistake, this is down to a lack of regulations governing greedy, and ever more desperate banks and bankers. It was fuelled by two insanely expensive wars, in treasure and lives, and was fanned by the atrocious management of our foreign trade agreements.

This problem wasn’t caused by an ethnic minority, this problem was caused by a Republican majority.

If any good at all has come out of this, it’s that over the last fifteen years as the Republican party has lurched ever further right, they have become more and more marginalized. They are in genuine danger of becoming extinct in the North East, an incredible but very real possibility.

The moderates that used to abound in their party are gone, there’s no room for them any more, Republican’s hold seats in rural areas, they are becoming a provincial party of provincial thinkers with provincial fears, and they try to sell that as small town thinking...small town! Is that good?

I’m not convinced the country is changing it’s political shape at all, it’s always been seen as center right, and sadly that’s pretty much where Barack Obama and the modern Democratic party finds itself. However, as the Republicans controlled government they’ve become ever more extreme, and attempted to drag the rest of the country along with them, center right policies are now called liberal, and liberal policies are now socialist.

The Republicans are not what they say they are on the bottle anymore, and fortunately, at last the people seem to be seeing past the name tag.