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POPSAre the Bushies trying to retain control after January 20th? More: "Noting that Bill Clinton also ordered up a transition council on Nov. 27, 2000, Light called his "similar but without all the bells and whistles." Among other things, the Bush executive order could keep agencies busy preparing briefing materials and a Transition Directory to include "federal publications and other materials that provide information on each executive department and agency." Cynics might wonder if the Bush team wants to keep its hands in before the order expires on Feb. 20, 2009, one month after the new president takes office. Whatever the motives, said Light, one of the presidential candidates will need the help more than the other. "McCain has done almost nothing about the transition," he said, except to criticize Obama for saying in mid-summer that he was appointing a team to begin contingency planning."
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POPSFannie Mae & Freddie Mac not the cause of the subprime mortgage meltdown Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble. During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.
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POPSPlanting Seeds of Disaster
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” ACORN’s Inside Strategy Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy. Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” ,Saul Alinsky.
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POPSfinancial crisis Democrats may finally learn the truth about their leaders in congress and Obama and his crew. Hope all their greed catches up to them. Somehow I don't think they can hoodwink the public again.
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POPSDemocrat Fingerprints Are All Over The Financial Crisis ........under stricter regulatory control. In 2006, it was revealed that Fannie Mae had overstated its earnings – to which its senior executives' bonuses were linked – by a stunning $9.3billion. Between 1998 and 2003, Fannie Mae's executive chairman, Franklin Raines, picked up over $90m in bonuses and stock options. Yet Barney Frank and his chums blocked all Bush's attempts to put a rein on Raines. During the House Financial Services Committee hearing following Bush's initiative, Frank declared: "The more people exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness , the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury which I do not see. "There were nearly a dozen hearings where we were trying to fix something that wasn't broke. Mr Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac and particularly at Fannie Mae under the outstanding leadership of Mr Franklin Raines."
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POPSFannie/Freddie Trouble Seen 9 Yrs Ago
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans. ''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.'' Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black
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POPSWHO DUNNIT???THIS MEGA CRISIS Summary of facts of who did what, where and why. Enough blame to go around and it begs the question? WHO COULD REALLY IMPLEMENT CHANGE?????
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POPSBush Can Act Unilaterally Without Congress In order to contain the bailout and protect taxpayer dollars, companies should be able to use book accounting for assets deemed by the Treasury as “distressed” 3. Direct the Treasury Secretary to determine that capital basis can be adjusted for inflation by taxpayers. There is a body of legal thought which holds that the Treasury Department can do this by executive action. In order to free up needed capital and unlock frozen assets more easily, the Treasury should make this common sense change to tax rules. If there is a legal brief which details Treasury’s objections to capital basis indexation, it should be released for public dissemination. It’s important to note that all these actions can be done unilaterally by the Executive Branch. There are other reforms which require legislative action (note especially the House Republican Study Committee package), but the above executive steps would do much to alleviate the panic, assure markets, and protect taxpayers.
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POPS Investigated For Election Fraud In At Least A Dozen States ACORN's practices have corrupted our political process as well. It has engaged in questionable election activities for years—stretching back even to the organization's founding years in Arkansas. In recent years, as its political power has increased, so have instances of fraud. In the past few years, it has been investigated for election fraud in at least a dozen states. Want examples? In Florida, ACORN employees filed a false voter registration form for 68-year-old former St. Petersburg Democratic mayor Charles Schuh – amazingly, they registered him as a 30-year-old Republican woman. In Ohio, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.
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POPSFactCheck: Who's really responsible for crisis? "Screwing up takes a great deal of cooperation." D's blame R's and R's blame D's - but those accusations (and I have made them, too, sorry to say) are far too simplistic to help us fix the problem. Here's a list of contributors to the perfect storm.
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POPS Bailout Vote Fails In the House Yes, Clinton's surpluses gave way to Bush deficits (due largely, it's worth noting, to the 2001 recession that was in place when Clinton left office). And yes, the Bush administration (and a complacent GOP Congressional majority) presided over a lamentable and inexcusable bloating of the federal government. But the idea that this was a significant contributing factor to the mortgage/credit crisis strains the limits of creative causality. Even so, Pelosi's partisan rant - ill-timed, illogical, and irrelevant as it was - doesn't seem like a particularly good reason for intended Yeas to tank the bill. Update: A full transcript of Pelosi's speech (which was significantly longer than the clip in the video) is available in the extended entry.
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POPSMcCain's Social Security Plan Would Cut Benefits To People Who Already Paid For Them Under Clinton, the force feeding of SSA collections into government began to be referred to as the Social Security Surplus. Clinton used it to pay down other national debt, rightly assessing that in order for the debt to the Trust Fund to be repaid, we would need a solvent government. Paying down the extra-Social Security debt and balancing the budget seemed to assure that the government's indebtedness to the Greenspan plan could be serviced.
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POPSObama - a popular Freddie Mac Senator Obama is in the top 4 of political contribution recipients from Freddie Mac. The other 3, also Democrats. Then add Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to the mix and it's very 'clear' how they blame the Bush administration for the debacle.
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POPSUS Financial System -- What comes next? *sigh* Naturally, I'm one of those guys described in that last paragraph.... _However_, I do not go along with the statements that this is as bad as 1929. I think we're looking at the mid-late 70s again -- and a bunch of lovely new government regulations intended to clean up the mess left from the last round of government regulations....
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POPS"Happy Days" Home Buyers Get Mortgages --- Politicians Get Reelected Democrats — and their community organizer “constituencies” — argued that it was “discriminatory” for banks to deny mortgages and business loans to people with poor collateral, poor credit, and dubious ability to repay their loans. Legislators replaced common sense with gouts of political oration about “redlining inner city communities,” “racist banking practices,” and other electioneering formulations that protected incumbency, but shoved bank solvency to the end of a bending limb. The CRA allowed legislators to bully banks into loaning money to people who simply weren’t credit-worthy. The only “collateral” they possessed was electoral: They could repay Democratic lawmakers on Election Day. Now, let’s fast-forward to 1993, when the Clinton administration further liberalized (a.k.a. “reformed”) the already anemic lending restraints of the CRA and created the President’s Community Development Bank, which “…
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POPSThe Real Culprits - Part Two The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today's nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
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POPSThe Real Culprits - Part One And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory." Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck. And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.
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POPSNew York Times - Collapse Smoking Gun ''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
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POPSEthically Bankrupt Virtually all the mistakes have been caused by errors in regulation — not by "corporate greed," as liberal Democrats would have it. Corporations follow the signals and guidelines set by Washington. When those are faulty, bad things happen and taxpayers pay. Remember this, too, when Congress cranks up hearings and vilifies one CEO after another for "looting" their companies. It was Congress that created the subprime crisis. Any promises that it makes to solve it should be viewed with serious skepticism. Dirksen would have been impressed. By our count, that's about $2 trillion, or 14%, of a $14 trillion economy. How did it happen? One case after another has been made for intervention in the private economy, based on the principle that some private-sector financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG, are "too big to fail." If they did fail, it would lead to a financial market catastrophe — or what the Fed on Wednesday referred to as "disorderly failure."
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POPSThe Real Culprits In The Meltdown The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck. As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud. Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick "The Wall", padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million. Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.
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POPSThe Mysterious Missing “Dear Leader” of North Korea, Kim Jong Il Verify North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Programs?– Hey, They Can’t Even Find Kim Jong Il That hasn’t stopped the Bush administration, with the Condi Rice State Department blazing the way, from sending Kim — or whoever it might be in Pyongyang — $25 million in hard cash, re-starting the Clinton era shipments of free fuel, shoveling in aid (which North Korea can all too easily divert from hungry people to its massive military machine) and ladling out a series of diplomatic concessions in hope of pleasing Kim enough so that he will at least provide a full accounting of his nuclear programs — which North Korea has yet to deliver. Give us a break. Step one ought to be a “verification protocol” for who’s actually in charge, and where he/they are. Step two should be the end of that regime. Not payoffs and dignification of the mystery tyrant.
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POPSThe Bush Crime Family Thrives on.
Amazingly, Bush Sr. completely insulated himself from any personal consequences regarding Iran-Contra. Like a good mafia don, he had layers and layers of loyal "button men" willing to shut up and take the fall for him. His good friend Bill Clinton, who by many accounts protected the gun export and cocaine importation leg of this trade as it was conducted out of Mena, Arkansas, ran against Bush for president in 1992, won, and promptly discontinued all further investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. If you want to take this a little deeper, the folks who were incinerated at Waco by Clinton and Janet Reno very early in Clinton's presidency, had a thriving business converting semi-automatic rifles to automatic ones. It's never been made clear who the customers for these weapons were, but if you look at a map, Waco, Texas is not that far from Mena, Arkansas. Bill Clinton's representatives in the ATF office in Little Rock started feverishly developing their case against the Wac
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POPSClassic USA Movies About Political Elections
'The Best Man' 1964 scandal driven political maneuverings behind the nomination of a presidential candidate, characters based on Harry Truman -- Adlai Stevenson - Richard Nixon) ‘The Candidate’ 1972 how the political machine corrupts, and thecharade image making of politics. Sentimental - ‘The Last Hurrah’ 1958 ‘All the King’s Men’ - 1946 about the most amazing, most radical politician most Americans never heard about. ‘Wag the Dog,’ A spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer join efforts to fabricate a war ‘The War Room’ 1994 Documentary of the Clinto campaign ‘Primary Colors’ - 1998 - silver tongue talker Clinton-like character ‘Bulworth’ > black humor & impending death leads to blunt talk Last but not least, 1939 - ‘Mr. Smith goes to Washington,’ called one of the hundred best USA movies of all time, about as real as Santa Claus, but everybody loves the dramatic filibuster at the end. We can’t have an election until we see it. Clip> about amazing propaga
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POPSThe Mafia, the CIA and Bush Sr. When you consider that Reagan was probably out of it from Day One of his term and that Bill Clinton is a close associate of George Bush Sr., the Bush crime syndicate has been influencing when not outright running the executive branch continuously since 1980, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, marks the earliest days of the credit bubble the economy is now having serious trouble digesting.
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