By Stacey Patton

“… the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate greatly exceeding the rest of the population.”

When U.S. financial markets spiraled downward and the housing bubble burst in the fall of 2008, political conservatives and media pundits fingered unworthy minority and low-income borrowers for widespread defaults and for bringing the entire global financial system to its knees.

The pages of the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Washington Post, the Fox Business Channel and conservative blogs gave similar spin on why the credit crisis was unfolding. They blamed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for stimulating minority gains by giving bad mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. Some commentators targeted Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and later bipartisan or “politically correct” affirmative action agreements of the Clinton administration that used government power to expand homeownership to groups that had been shut out because of economic and racial discrimination. Congress forced banks to loosen their standards to create subprime loans which crumbled the markets.

Now, as the country braces for the possibility of a double-dip recession, additional spells of unemployment, and yet another wave of home foreclosures, a recent report by the New York Times found that the bulk of those dumping their mortgages are rich people.

They call it “strategic defaults.”

According to data compiled by the real estate analytics CoreLogic, more than 1 in 7 homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, versus 1 in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark. This data reveals that the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate greatly exceeding the rest of the population.

Though difficult to prove, said the Times report, it appears that well-to-do borrowers are “purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.”

But nobody’s calling the rich unworthy or irresponsible nor are they unleashing the kinds of vitriol that got launched at blacks and low-income people.

For example, in September 2008 Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives blasted Democrats for addressing housing discrimination against blacks. In a piece titled How Democrats Thieves Looted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Limbaugh wrote: “So, to extend the American dream to everybody, [Democrats] said, ‘Get rid of redlining and loan money to people that can’t pay it back. That’s the way we’re going to fix it.’ It’s sort of like affirmative action. We’re going to not only address grievances of the past, we’re going to go so far beyond addressing the grievances, we ’re going to create new ones on the other side of the stick.”

That same month, conservative columnist Ann Coulter penned an essay entitled They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority. Coulter blamed the federal government for putting massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. She wrote that a mortgage applicant’s credit history, ability to make a down payment, and other traditional criteria no longer matter. Instead, “banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named ‘Caylee.’” When the housing bubble burst a decade later, Coulter asserted that “food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off.” Coulter ends her wicked rant by saying, “political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.”

Unlike blacks and others, the behavior of the rich has been quoted by The Times and other media outlets, bloggers and economic analysts as “strategic defaults” or calculated business decisions. In addition, the well-off have other resources to lean on in times of trouble and are less susceptible to shame and fear-mongering tactics that deter the middle-class and low-income borrowers of all colors from acting in our financial best interest.

The malicious commentary on blacks and the poor, in addition to the conspicuous silence about the antics of the rich, reveals how knee-deep we are into old naked hypocritical propaganda. Like the mortgage crisis, we also see an emerging class-based game where coded language is used to demonize millions of unemployed Americans. Those who are in trouble are characterized as unworthy and lazy as a means to justify the Senate’s refusal to extend unemployment benefits. And I guarantee you that conservatives will propose that one way to fix the housing crisis will be to exclude minority and low-income borrowers from the market.

The rich are different from you and I. When they walk away from their responsibilities, they’re covered by the fact that they have money. It is said that they’re simply smartly walking away to protect their investments. There’s no deadbeat status for them.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor of The Defenders Online and a writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.