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The Obama Nation
Barney Frank Doesn’t Like the Taste of His Medicine
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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
Democrats Created the Financial Crisis
Barack Obama and his Democratic colleagues are responsible for the financial crisis, according to Bloomberg.com.
Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.
But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.
Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.
Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.
There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.
Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that’s worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.
So, it’s pretty clear - Obama chose himself before the country and practically imploded our economy. One of the few voices of reason that foresaw and tried to prevent the problem was John McCain.
How about we see and hear these details on the evening news from the big three networks?
Barack Obama #2 Recipient of Campaign Cash from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
The collapse this week of Lehman Brothers’ is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago.
It turns out that the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs, and the #2 recipient of these funds was Barack Obama, according to Center for Responsive Politics.
It’s jaw-dropping that Obama has collected such a sum in his short four years in office, as this tally covers all of contributions to politicians over the past 20 years.
And if you forgot (it’s understandable - the mainstream media apparently forgot), one of the initial members of Obama’s team searching for a running mate for him was former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson.
Additionally, there is a post at the Wizbang Blog, “Obama One of Leading Recipients of Fannie/Freddie Political Contributions,” with a transcript from a segment on Fox News yesterday that provides further details into the role of Democrats in this financial mess.
Now remember, Obama’s ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil.
It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.
Senator Barack Obama, number two on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the senate. Next time you see that ad, you might notice he fails to mention that part of the Fannie and Freddie problem.
But still we see Obama on the stump as he tries to lay the blame of this mess on the Republicans. I’ve got to wonder - is Obama that duplicitous, or is he really that unaware of how it all happened?
Who is Responsible for the Foreclosure Mess?
We continually hear how the rise in foreclosures is the fault of President Bush and his administration, but that’s the version from the mainstream media.
The reality is that this real estate implosion dates back nearly a decade to the Clinton years, according to the New York Post.
Each of the political parties shares responsibility for the troubles at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored organizations that needed to be bailed out this weekend by - who else? - the taxpayers.
The latest housing bubble started back in the Clinton administration, when Washington suddenly got the brilliant notion that all Americans should be able to buy houses.
No, let me change that.
Our elected officials concluded that everyone deserved to own a house regardless of whether they could actually afford one.
Democrats would have you believe that every ill in the U.S. rests squarely on the Republicans, when they are hugely responsible for this mess, too.
The real trouble began in 1999 when Franklin Delano Raines, former budget director for Bill Clinton, took over as chairman of Fannie.
Only Raines knows why he pushed so hard to expand the number of mortgages and the size of those loans that Fannie could hold.
But at the end of the Clinton administration and into the Bush presidency, Fannie Mae and its sister organization, Freddie Mac, ended up owning trillions of dollars of mortgages.
So, we can either play the blame game, as Obama has favored, or admit it’s a bi-partisan screw-up and go about fixing it.
Another mess born in the Clinton days (like the Clinton Recession) that Democrats pretend magically appeared when Bush took office.
