• SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Not surprising. Obama presided over the largest drop in home ownership among Black Americans in our country’s history, so why would we expect him to give a shit about the Black community now?

    edit: You can downvote uncomfortable facts all you want, but you can’t change history. Obama’s policies were a disaster for Black wealth.

    • phar@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Obama took over after the housing market fell out from under the entire country and the economy was in complete recession…

      • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        And his response to that recession was to give money to banks and ask them politely not to foreclose on people. We see how well that worked.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 month ago

          Well, in the long run it did “work”. But it was a shitty liberal solution by a liberal president, not sure why anyone is surprised.

          That said, he became president as the entire world economy was imploding. I would wager that anyone in the position would have presided over the drop in home ownership you referred to. It’s not really fair to put any kind of blame on him.

          Except maybe Bernie, or another actual socialist that would have just paid off people’s shitty mortgages rather than bail out banks. But shit, we can’t even get student loans forgiven, people in this country would have revolted if they saw black people being “given free homes,” while they still have to pay their mortgage. Literally revolted.

        • phar@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          Actually Bush signed that before Obama was president. It was 2008.

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Bush signed the law, but it was carried out by the Obama admin, most specifically Obama-appointed Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner. Despite around four million people being originally estimated as eligible for the program, under Geithner’s administration the program helped less than a million of them, and a third of those it helped ended up re-defaulting on their mortgages anyway because they weren’t helped enough. Geithner was quoted as saying that he viewed the goal of the program not as keeping people in their homes, but as slowing down the foreclosures so that they didn’t overwhelm the banks.

        • keegomatic@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Look at all the graphs for the other races linked on that page. They all follow the same curve. Homeownership across the board followed that curve, not just for black Americans. You have an obvious agenda.

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Obama’s policies were bad for all Americans, not just Black Americans

            not a great counterargument, I gotta say,

            • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              It is to your claim that he specifically failed black americans.

              And it’s also your move to prove that Obamas policies were actually the issue, because similar things happened all over the world, and a government can only do so much.

              • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                he specifically failed black americans.

                I said that he failed Black Americans, I did not say “specifically”. You imagined that I said that because it was a way to move the goalposts to invalidate my point without having to engage critically with what I was saying.

                Barack Obama does not give a shit about the black community. He does not give a shit about working class Americans. He didn’t even give a shit about his own campaign staff in the end, kicking them to the curb as soon as they had fulfilled their purpose to hang out with celebrities. These aren’t unique traits to Barack Obama, but they are nevertheless an accurate assessment of him.

                And it’s also your move to prove that Obamas policies were actually the issue, because similar things happened all over the world, and a government can only do so much.

                I would agree that McCain would have failed the American people in the exact same way, but your insistence that “a government can only do so much” is false, because even in just the history of 20th century America we have an example of the government doing far more than it managed to do in 2009, as was pointed out by my earlier source.

                • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 month ago

                  No, you didn’t say “specifically”, you just completely imply it if you word it like that. Stop playing wordgames please…

                  • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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                    1 month ago

                    The thread was about black men, so I started the thread by talking about Obama’s effect on black men. I didn’t imply anything except in your mind.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              2008 was bad for all Americans.

              This is a classic “blame the Democrats for the mess created by Republicans” right wing tactic. Republicans shit their diapers, then get voted out, then immediately start complaining that it smells awful and why would the Democrats do this

        • blarth@thelemmy.club
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          1 month ago

          What policies of Barack Obama do you think contributed to this?

          Do you believe the president actually has a role in determining whether black people can achieve home ownership?

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Obama didn’t get to determine the state of the economy when he took over, but he had the largest mandate of any modern president and his economic recovery plan failed to deliver for anyone except bank owners.

            New Report Looks at How Obama’s Housing Policies Destroyed Black Wealth

            “What it shows is we bailed out Wall Street — that wasn’t entirely Obama’s doing at all, that was Bush and the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and so forth — but housing was almost entirely under his control. Homeowners were not bailed out,” Ryan Cooper, one of the report’s authors, told The Intercept about the findings of the report.

            The authors singled out the Home Affordable Modification Program for censure for seeking to incentivize mortgage services to modify loans.

            The failures of HAMP are well-documented — it ended up helping big banks and doing very little for homeowners.

            The authors suggest that the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation is a model that may have yielded different outcomes. HOLC purchased mortgages directly and refinanced them, but such a model of direct government intervention and control of an economic problem has been anathema to modern government officials.

            What’s wild is that an HOLC-type solution as the auuthors suggest also would have bailed out the banks. It just would have done so in a way that saved homeowners too. Obama specifically pursued a policy that bailed out the banks without saving the homeowners.

        • very_well_lost@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Observe the slow, uninterrupted decline that starts in 2004

          Ah, yes! 2004! A truly defining year for the Obama presidency when…

          checks notes

          …he was still the junior Senator from Illinois. Huh…

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            You didn’t even read the second clause of my sentence, which was “doesn’t reverse during Obama’s term,” despite his policies allegedly being intended to do exactly that.

      • Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        He took on after 8 years of deregulation and bad policies set the economy up for an unsustainably driven bubble followed by the inevitable pop. Just like the fed printing more money than has ever been printed before during Trump’s rule, followed by…surprise! Inflation!