The friends of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in government turn out to be the usual cast of culprits. We have Obama, Gorelick, Johnson, Raines, Dodd, Frank, and the Congressional Black Caucus who all fought reforms even though this speech in 2005 clearly indicated they were needed. McCain was campaigning for reforms (see enough is enough) but they were beat down.
The real impact of all of this will be felt by the taxpayers, the thrifty, those who have thought of their future and saved. This will impact your pension, your 401K, your life savings. Meantime Jamie Gorelick, Democrat operative, is waltzing away with 26 Million. Special shame should also be attached to the Republicans who assisted the lobbyists and Democrats who fought these needed reforms, and we will be hunting those names down in the future as well.
Meantime this is definitely not leadership, this is definitely not change, it’s despair:
Lawmakers say they are unlikely to take action before, or to delay, their planned adjournments — Sept. 26 for the House of Representatives, a week later for the Senate. While they haven’t ruled out returning after the Nov. 4 elections, they would rather wait until next year unless Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who are leading efforts to contain the crisis, call for help.
One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that “no one knows what to do” at the moment.
At a campaign rally in Elko Obama had this to say:
“I will crack down on predatory lenders — who all too often target the African-American community, target the Hispanic community — with tough new penalties that treat mortgage fraud like the crime that it is,” he said.
Obama and his compadres in the Democrat caucus have been “cracking down on predatory lending” since 2000 1990’s, and that’s exactly what has led to this mess. They systematically took away the profit from high risk loans, making it a losing, giveaway business backed by your tax dollars. They cut options to have high risk loans credit insured and rolled into loan cost, which led directly to increased foreclosures.
More on this from IBD Editorials:
A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. “No,” she snapped at reporters who dared ask.
Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.
“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.
Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.
They were the ones who screamed — “REDLINING!” — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.
If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.
Here’s an example of one of these shakedown programs that started way back, under guise of fighting predatory lending Chuck Schumer and Jesse Jackson fight to have Freddy and Fannie lower standards:
Also from IBD :
The [CRA] revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.
Previously:
Enough is Enough
Obama 2nd Biggest Recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Money in Last Ten Years
More at Big Lizards
