That’s Right Nate

This is indeed a sad day in America as HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson was forced to resign under a partisan witch hunt.  Bush’s ties with Jackson go back to the 1980s when the two lived in the same neighborhood in Texas–that right there says a lot about our President. 

Last year, after the subprime mortgage crisis erupted, many policymakers underlined the disproportionate impact of the high-risk, high-cost mortgages on minorities and the elderly, who often are targets of predatory lending practices that lure people into loans they are incapable of repaying.

Asked about the problems with subprime mortgages last June, Jackson cut through the bull and insisted that many such borrowers were not unsophisticated, low-income people but what he called “Yuppies, Buppies and Guppies” – well-educated, young, black and gay upwardly mobile achievers – with expensive cars who bought $400,000 homes with little or no money down.  This isn’t surprising as we all know larger homes mean more space to decorate.

The two main allegations against Jackson are that he steered New Orleans work to a developer friend and that he retaliated against the Philadelphia Housing Authority when it wouldn’t give a $2,000,000 piece of land to a friend .  The reconstruction of New Orleans was an impossibly large job.  It would never have been completed without people like Jackson.   Secondly, having been to Philadelphia I find it very hard to believe any land there is worth that much.  A lot of that case stems from remarks Jackson made to friends about punishing the PHA, but Jackson confessed he made up the story just to sound big.  In the same place would any of us have acted differently?