This past Friday, theatlantic.com’s Andrew Sullivan and award-winning journalist Naomi Klein debated the ultimate cause of our current economic meltdown on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Klein argued that America has become the newest victim of a hard-lined and ideologically bankrupt kind of exploitative capitalism that seeks out (even purposefully creates) economic disasters as a pretext for saddling those still-wobbly countries with extreme forms of privatization and free marketism that wouldn’t “sell” during better times. She blamed this “disaster capitalism” (the subject of her latest book) for our current economic crisis. It is a function, she said, of unchecked and unregulated corporate greed let loose by a philosophy of financial fundamentalism. Ordinary Americans, Klein claimed, have become the latest victims of disaster capitalism’s devastating mandates.

Andrew Sullivan dismissed that claim out of hand. He maintained that ordinary Americans are the culprits, not the victims. They are the ones who took out loans they couldn’t afford. They are the ones who no longer know how to defer gratification and live within their means. He also criticized American tax policy for rewarding homeownership over renting, but he wanted to emphasize the notion that, in some very important ways, everyday Americans brought a bit of this upon themselves.

This top-down vs. bottom-up debate about the cause of America’s current financial problems wasn’t linked to race/ethnicity in the Klein-Sullivan discussion, but that theme is clearly hovering just below the surface. And Neil Cavuto (at Fox News) has brought that subterranean theme out into the bright light of day, explicitly racializing Sullivan’s claims by specifically flagging “minorities” as the borrowers at fault. They were the one’s who disproportionately took these loans, he argues. And they weren’t responsible enough to handle them. Is this another version of the “culture of poverty” argument retooled for a different kind of macroeconomic analysis?

When opponents respond to Cavuto’s claim, they argue that the corporate lenders were exploiting the poor (and with what sometimes might have even approached a housing market version of payday lending-esque interest rates). One pundit, answering questions during today’s “morning show” on an independent black radio station in Philadelphia, put the counter-argument bluntly: These were victims of economic exploitation, he said, people targeted by the banks for profit, but they are now asked to do double-duty as scapegoats for the consequences of their very own exploitation. He specifically invoked Cavuto and accused him of disingenuously playing “the race card,” trying to spin the crisis so that it might implicate bleeding-heart liberals, Democrats who promoted these loans to minority communities, while letting a deregulated corporate America off the hook. So who has this thing right? Sullivan? Klein? Cavuto? His critics? And how do we make sense of the blame-game that has both candidates trying to gain the upper-hand?