Sunday, September 28, 2008

Misplaced blame in the financial crisis

A rant of sorts: I can't believe that the Republicans are getting the short stick over the financial crisis. Actually I can believe it, but have that heavy burdensome feeling of a conventional perception that just ain't so. Sure, the Bush administration is at the helm, so they can blame for what happens on their watch, and by implication that is all Republicans, but ...

The Democrats run Congress now and have always had enough influence to protect their own special interests. The Dems protected fannie in 2005 when Republicans wanted better oversight. Obama is in deep with Raines and Johnson and got more Fannie Mae money than anyone except Chris Dodd, who was #1 recipient. Fannie Mae incited the subprime lending boom and bust. Meanwhile the Dems are the majority in Congress and have managed to destroy trust and confidence in Govts handling of the economy through repeated attacks on CEOs, on business ('big oil' etc), tax hikes, regulation attempts/sprees, and wild meddling. In this bailout bill alone, they wants a budget-busting diversion of money to ACORN, a 'destroy-mortgage-cont... clause on bankruptcy, unions on corporate boards, and Govt ownership of banks. Socialist is no longer a hyperbolic term for these guys. (the good news is that the bailout bill has removed most of the poison-pill provisions).

What a sad and sorry spectacle: The Dems cause a problem, the Repubs get the blame, the Dems gain more power and cause more problems - rinse and repeat. We had FDR, we had LBJ and now we will get BHO, the third Liberal Reich.

Let me restate the roots of the problem in the current financial crisis: This was partly due to overexpansionistic Fed policy, but mostly, the core problem was and is subprime lending combined with the housing bubble (which subprime lending helped foster). The seed of this core problem was planted by ACORN and their push for sub-prime lending with the CRA. CRA led to massive increases in subprime lending, and massive increases in subprime lending is at the root of this.

ACORN was represented by Barack Obama when he was a leftwing community activist. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in their effort in the 1990s to loosen lending standards. The efforts by ACORN worked. An enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report in 2003 singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003. That company was Countrywide Financial, which also gave sweetheart deals to Democrats in Congress like Sen Chris Dodd for political cover.

Bad underwriting was getting hidden by corrupt CEOs like Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson at Fanne Mae and hackles were raised. But Democrats turned back the efforts to reofrm Fannie Mae. In 2005, Obama protected Fannie Mae when McCain and Republicans wanted better oversight of them. Fannie Mae underwrote close to a trillion in subprime loans in the past 4 years, inciting the current mortgage crisis.

Putting leftwing activist Obama and his fellow Democrats Dodd etal in charge is rewarding incompetence, corruption and bad intentions. It’s like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department. The pro-Obama media will not tell the truth about Obama’s links to ACORN and CRA, and will not point out the serious links that tie him to left-wing extremists or to the corrupt insiders to incited this crisis. They will continue to lamely and falsely blame "deregulation" when in fact GOVT INTERVENTION AND LEFT-WING ACTIVISM is the real problem.

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