But what I really liked about her piece — in addition to taking on a subject few have paid attention to during the crisis — is her description of a new subprime documentary, set in Baltimore.

In a new documentary film about the subprime crisis, “American Casino,” solid black citizens — a high school social studies teacher, a psychotherapist, a minister — relate how they lost their homes when their monthly mortgage payments exploded. Watching the parts of the film set in Baltimore is a little like watching the TV series “The Wire,” except that the bad guys don’t live in the projects; they hover over computer screens on Wall Street.

As TWI noted last week, lawsuits over racial discrimination in subprime lending are winding their way through the court system. Some of the allegations are nothing short of shocking; in one suit recently classified as a class action case, Wells Fargo is accused of using loan software with discounts on rates and fees in white communities, but forbidding loan officers in minority communities from access to it.

Wells Fargo has strongly denied these and other charges. But Ehrenreich’s report is further evidence that the conversation over the racial implications of subprime lending is shifting. It’s no longer just about blaming poor and minority borrowers for the crisis. Instead, the focus is turning to questions about the the morality of lenders, who discovered a gold mine in selling high-rate mortgages to minority communities, and took full advantage of it.

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisans.

The rhetoric of those pushing nonsense on the public in an attempt to confuse rather than illuminate  — the phrase is “agnotology” –  only serves to aid the lobbyists working on behalf of the Banks and Investment houses to maintain the status quo.

All is well, nothing to see here, move along.

Well, its time to put up or shut up: I hereby challenge any of those who believe the CRA is at prime fault in the housing boom and collapse, and economic morass we are in to a debate. The question for debate: “Is the CRA significantly to blame for the credit crisis?”

A mutually agreed upon time and place, outcome determined by a fair jury, for any dollar amount between $10,000 up to $100,000 dollars (i.e., for more than just bragging rights).

I can’t help but applaud this. No matter how many times it has been shot down, the blame-the-CRA myth keeps coming back to life. As TWI has explained, the CRA, a 1977 anti-redlining law, didn’t even cover the unregulated lenders who made most of the subprime loans during the housing boom. There’s simply no evidence for this assertion.

The movement to blame the CRA started during the fall campaign season, seized by conservatives as a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis. It  came back to life recently, when bloggers like The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle picked up on Clusterstock postings by John Carney, once again citing the CRA as regulation gone wrong.

As McArdle put it, the CRA’s role in the crisis is “understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.”

Felix Salmon at Reuters has knocked down most of this. But I’d like to add something that’s regularly missed in the CRA debate. What the anti-regulation types miss is that the CRA never was much of a regulation to begin with. As Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, which covers the subprime industry, told TWI, lenders never took the CRA all that seriously to begin with. The lending industry viewed the CRA as an extremely loose regulation. Lenders joked about how you’d have to mug an elderly, disabled, minority woman in a wheelchair to lose your positive CRA rating.

How that got turned on its head so that the CRA has become a symbol of regulation gone wrong is an example of what happens when idealogues who don’t know how an industry really works take over the debate. If Ritholtz’s bold offer gets some of this out on the table — and then off the table for good — it’s all for the better.

Salmon reports that Carney may be willing to take up Ritholtz on the challenge. So let the games begin. And let them put an end to the blame-the-CRA movement for good.