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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Farmboy who wrote (74245)	6/23/2012 7:29:47 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Blood Of Housing Massacre On Obama's Hands Subprime Scandal: Analysts now say the housing market is so weak it may not rebound in our lifetimes. Yet the White House is pursuing the same policies that put it on its back. Worse, many of the officials it has put in charge of reviving the housing market are the same ones who crafted the fatal policies before the crisis. First, consider the latest data supporting a lost generation in housing: • The average homeowner today has 7% equity in his home vs. 45% in 1990. • Home prices in 20 major markets plunged 3.5% from a year earlier; adjusted for inflation, they're back to 1998 levels. • The U.S. homeownership rate fell to a 16-year low of 65.4% in the first quarter. • Homeownership for blacks, now at 43.1%, is the worst since 1995, when the government first launched its reckless housing policies in a national campaign to boost minority homeownership. It was then, roughly a decade before the mortgage meltdown, that the Clinton administration declared traditional underwriting standards racist. And it forced lenders to comply with new minority-friendly rules by threatening to charge them with lending discrimination. Or deny their expansion plans. At the same time, federal regulators pressured government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which control the secondary market for home loans, to lower down payment and other requirements to meet the government's increasing loan quotas for low-income minorities. By the eve of the crisis, these easier credit standards had been adopted industrywide. When HUD in 1996 required Fannie and Freddie — which set qualifying rules for the entire mortgage industry — to meet new lending quotas for credit-poor borrowers, they reduced down payments to 3%. By 2000 — when HUD lifted those quotas to 50% of their business — Fannie and Freddie bought loans from banks with no down payments at all. Shaun Donovan and Bill Apgar implemented these pre-crisis policies at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They now run HUD for Obama, still pressuring Fannie and Freddie to ease credit for low-income minorities. Housing chief Donovan, moreover, has referred a raft of bank discrimination cases to Attorney General Eric Holder for prosecution. As a top official in the Clinton Justice Department, Holder led what became a witch hunt against racist lenders. Today he's turned the job over to another Clinton retread, Tom Perez, who as the new head of the department's civil rights division has cracked down on no fewer than 60 banks for alleged lending bias. Perez has ordered bank defendants to set aside "special financing programs" for minorities with weak credit and donate millions to Acorn clones that shake down banks for such risky mortgages. Copying the policies of the Clinton administration, the Obama Justice Department also has ordered defendants to open new branches in unprofitable areas devastated by the recession. Scores of risky mortgages are already being inked, restarting another cycle of risky financing. Many of the 1990s' discrimination cases were referred to HUD and Holder by Acorn officials, who worked closely with the White House on crafting banking and housing policies. Holder at the time also solicited private civil-rights lawyers for "fair lending" cases. One lawyer who heeded the call was Obama, who at the time was agitating for looser credit standards as a Chicago civil-rights lawyer. In 1995, he sued Citibank and other lenders on behalf of Acorn deadbeats. Now he and the repeat offenders he's hired from the Clinton gang are rebooting the same risky home-loan programs for low-income minorities. These programs fed the subprime mortgage bubble and triggered record defaults and foreclosures that devastated urban neighborhoods. They've turned the American Dream into a nightmare for millions of minorities. They've hurt more than helped the people Obama claims to care about most. So why is he doubling down on them?