-
The Obama Nation
Barney Frank Doesn’t Like the Taste of His Medicine
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Barney Frank, Democrat representing Massachusetts’s 4th congressional district since 1981, has been grandstanding over the economic crisis for the past week or so. To watch him, you would find it hard to believe that the situation started under the Democrats, and when Bush tried to fix it, Barney Frank stood in the way.
The mess dates back to the Carter administration where the Community Reinvestment Act came into being.
Later, when President Clinton came to office in 1993, he allowed the Community Reinvestment Act to increase the number of mortgage loans by 39 percent, while other loans increased by 17 percent.
And then we had President Bush, who was concerned about Fannie and Freddie, and proposed changes that would not bail them out if they ran into difficulty.
What did Barney Frank say to this?
“Fannie and Freddie are not facing any crisis.”
At the same time, left-wing groups like ACORN worked to increase the scope of the Community Reinvestment Act.
So, it was a bit entertaining to watch Bill O’Reilly grill Barney Frank on the issue.
Read the transcript from the discussion between Barney Frank and Bill o”Reilly
Barack Obama, ACORN, and the Killing of the Economy
Barack Obama has been talking a big game over the past week about his concerns for Main Street, but he actually played a key roles in an organization that contributed significantly to the financial crisis.
No, I’m not talking about the Democratic Party, though the Democrats were certainly prominent in this mess with the Community Reinvestment Act.
I am talking about a group called ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), an activist group that pressured banks into lending money to high-risk applicants, in addition to voter fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Acorn, one of America’s most militant left-wing “community activist groups,” is spending $16 million this year to register Democrats to vote in November. In the past several years, Acorn’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Washington, while several of their employees have been convicted of voter fraud.
That same ACORN group with close ties to Barack Obama since his storied community organizer days, and the group he represented ACORN as a lawyer.
Anyhow, Stanley Kurtz wrote an insightful article on ACORN and Obama in the New York Post, “O’s Dangerous Pals, Barack’s ‘Organizer’ Buds Pushed for Bad Mortgages.”
What exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.
In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
The seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
More on Obama and ACORN from CBS News.
I am not sure what is more troubling… how deep Obama is in with this fringe group that helped implode our economy, or the lack of coverage by the mainstream media about what Obama was actually doing as a community organizer.
Role of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the Financial Crisis
The root cause of the financial mess in the U.S. is the housing foreclosure crisis. But how did it happen?
The Community Reinvestment Act, as explained in the video, “Burning Down The House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?“, was the genesis of the current state of the economy.
According to Wikipedia, this 1977 law requires banks and thrifts to offer credit throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services, a practice known as “redlining.”
This was during the Carter administration with a Democratic Congress.
Then in 1995, during the Clinton administration, the Democrats added new provisions that forced banks to issue $1 trillion in “sub-prime” loans.
And have you heard of former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines? His fingerprints are all over this mess from the start.
- Carter Administration: he was associate director for economics and government in the Office of Management and Budget and assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff from 1977 to 1979.
- Fannie Mae: Vice Chairman from 1991 to 1996.
- Clinton Administration: he was the Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he served until 1998.
- Fannie Mae: returned in 1999 as CEO.
- Golden parachute: on December 21, 2004 Raines accepted what he called “early retirement” from his position as CEO while U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators continued to investigate alleged accounting irregularities.
He also happens to be a guy the Obama administration has gone to for advice, according to the Washington Post:
He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case’s D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.
We gave Jimmy and Slick Willy a chance… we cannot afford Obama.
