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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kathtoo who wrote (60242)	2/27/2009 5:20:55 PM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224717

After the repubs were out of office for 40 years and after Newt left(he kept them in check) they were like kids in a candy store, now the dems after being out for only 12 years are making the repub spending look like childs play, even Obama has an ear mark in this budget and Biden has many. Without term limits we are dead and we won't get term limits, can you see Pelosi voting herself out of office.lol

To: kathtoo who wrote (60242)	2/27/2009 7:10:38 PM
From: lorne	4 Recommendations Respond to of 224717

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable By TERRY JONES INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY September 24, 2008 ibdeditorials.com One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market? The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be. While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules. In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse. Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended. Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it. Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class. Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995. The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another. Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else. "Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. But those rules weren't enough. Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous. Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way. Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks. Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed. With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income. By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure. Worse still was the cronyism. Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans. Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie. Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups. Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes. From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners. The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast. Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

To: kathtoo who wrote (60242)	2/27/2009 9:38:40 PM
From: lorne	4 Recommendations Respond to of 224717

Obama - ACORN Root Causes of Mortgage Crisis? by OzarkGuru \| September 30, 2008 at 4:24 AM thenextright.com ARRA News Service - by Alan Gottlieb, AmeriPac: FBI Investigates U.S. Financial Crisis - Where Did $1 Trillion Go? - The high-risk subprime mortgage social engineering community service experiment by left-wing ACORN and Obama has created the largest financial crisis since The Great Depression. The full reach of the corruption and scandal may never be known but those who created it must not be rewarded. The architects, primarily left-wing Democrats, created laws, took donations, looked the other way and instead were too busy overse eing donations to their own presidential campaigns and robbing main street blind. Now these same left-wing Democrats blame everyone else and get up on their high horses and say, “we are here to save you” from the crises they created. Yes, Mr. Obama knows a great deal about the mess. He is a central figure in the left-wing ACORN exploitation of financial institutions and pressuring them to make high risk loans. The very same left-wing ACORN was guilty of voter fraud in the last presidential election. Now these same Democrats want to do another high risk “community service,” social engineering experiment. They want to elect a high-risk, low experience, socialist one of the same community organizers that created the mess to be our next president. We cannot experiment with the office of president and learn as we go. Barack Obama is not qualified and has no history of success as a leader in government or business. The FBI investigation - An FBI investigation is under way at Lehman Brothers and three other contributors to America’s financial crisis to determine whether they put pressure on ratings agencies to award top ratings to securities they issued. Concerns that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG or Lehman may have sought to encourage agencies to inflate their ratings — by offering higher fees or the promise of more work — form part of a broad inquiry by the bureau. The agencies are widely regarded as having failed debt holders by attributing the top ratings to many securities that turned out to be extremely risky and have lost investors hundreds of billions of dollars. The FBI, which is also investigating whether any of the four institutions deliberately misled investors about the true health of their assets, is expected to demand that they “hold all papers and e-mails under lock and key” as it sifts through the evidence, a source said. How did we get here? - FOLLOW THE MONEY AND CORRUPTION! A Lending Policy created by democrats for democrats run by democrats monitored by democrats enforced by community organizer democrats and profited from by democrats. Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster. ONE key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's mortgage policies. Obama Trains ACORN Staff in Shakedown Tactics - It would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama. When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff. He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks. Obama Funds ACORN - More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift. That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted. More, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations. Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship." Obama Aware of Intimidation Tactics - The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts. And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott's way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN's overall efforts. In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama's first campaign for state Senate, saying, "We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer." In short, to understand the roots of the subprime mortgage crisis, look to ACORN's Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.