Certainly the financial crisis is linked to Wall Street and the lack of regulation. Nevertheless, some now want to blame it on minorities and the undocumented.

For instance, FOX News commentator Neil Cavuto said: "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster." The comment was meant to throw darts at the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted to eliminate discrimination in mortgage lending.

Republicans opposed the law at the time and its elimination has been a long-held conservative dream. Thus, commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham, politicians like Mike Huckabee and even a Fellow from the Center for Immigration Studies want to blame the Wall Street collapse on Democrats and undocumented immigrants.

Is outrageous that the facts are being manipulated to blame others, rather than accepting the failure of their own deregulation theories.

For example, it is a fact that CRA successfully granted nearly $1 trillion in loans to medium and low-income clients.

It is a fact that the majority of the 1.5 million homes in trouble do not belong to racial minorities and that families of color who insured their bank loans through the CRA program met the requirements and continued paying their mortgages.

It is a fact that during the 2004 presidential campaign the pitch to Latinos for reelecting George W. Bush was the large number of new homeowners in his administration.

In short, if blame is to be laid, it falls on those who lent the money caring more about the immediate reward than the credit-worthiness of the applicant, and to those who exploited such lending for political gain.

The new conservative mantra of laying Wall Street’s problems on minorities is blaming scapegoats rather than accepting their responsibility in setting deregulatory policies that caused the crisis.