Scapegoating is as American as monster trucks and “Real Housewives” shows. It brought us to revolution; it won our last election. Pain requires a scapegoat, especially in an era where nobody ever admits fault – I’m looking at you, anyone associated with Fox News. When the financial crisis hit at the end of the Bush presidency, America needed a scapegoat. When the answer finally came out that the crash took place as a result of greedy Wall Street gazillionaires manipulating newly unregulated markets, America needed a different scapegoat; check it out, a local Chinese-American run bank . That’ll do.
You probably haven’t heard of Abacus Federal Savings Bank. It lives in New York City, and almost nowhere else. Like most banks, it’s open to anyone with money, but it was founded by family patriarch Thomas Sung in 1984 primarily to provide banking services for local immigrants and jobs for his three daughters: Heather, Chanterelle, and Jill. Although the housing market tanked throughout the world in 2007, the Fed gave a “too big to fail” label to the true villains – institutions like Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, etc. and the people who run them – leaving the architects of the crisis alone and instead went after Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
The problem with isolating Abacus for punishment is that the D.A.’s case is bullish, not Bear Stearns-ish. Abacus came into focus because they sought to clean their own house, ridding corrupt loan officers and informing the authorities in the process. It was only after Abacus itself invited the feds over that suddenly compliance became jailable. That said, the Abacus case is not as air-tight as the producers would have you believe; while the officers of the bank were almost certainly not diabolical, shouldn’t they have known what was going on beneath them?
I once read about a criminal case involving an artistic child pornographer. His vice was the creation of child pornography from scratch – no model, no contact with actual children. While our societal fur stands on end and 
bristles at the thought of child pornography, the question is the case of this slimy individual is: where is the crime? For a crime, there has to be a victim, doesn’t there? Who is the victim in this crime? Similarly, there is a real absence of victim in the Abacus trial. While the paperwork was underwritten counting dubious assets and unlikely wages, the loans themselves performed much better than national average, even superlatively with respect to their foreclosed peers. Corruption at the lower level of Abacus ranks did not extend to the land of foreclosure where the national and world markets fell.
Was there racism involved in picking on Abacus? Oh, you bet. Provable racism? Well … you know what? I used to be more careful about words like “racism;” that’s a big charge, racism. You have to give folks the benefit of the doubt before throwing around the word, doncha? And then 2016 happened, and the folks who cried the loudest about being unfairly called racist voted for racism. Now? Yeah, there was racism here. There’s little doubt the D.A. and the Feds were pissed off by their impotence with respect to Wall Street, so they looked around and kicked sand in the face of the nerdy, friendless Asian kid. Sure, why not? How are they gonna defend themselves? Dudes, don’t underestimate first generation Americans, ever. They bleed deeds, not slogans.
The real life George Bailey is Chinese
He built a modest bank and made cheese
But when pain found American pride
The finger pointed at George’s hide
While runneth over doth the foreclosure cup
The Abacus case — it just didn’t add up
Not Rated, 88 Minutes
D: Steve James
W: well, when I say “Writer” here, I mean “Underwriter”
Genre: Scapegoatin’
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Chinese Americans
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: NYC District Attorneys
