Could you point to specific things the Democrats did in the past two years to back this up?
Well I am going to only tackle one subject with one committee, the reform of Fannie Mae. It needed serious reform, stop gaps put in and accountability returned.
This actually goes back to 2000 but here is a sort of detailed description that I threw together quickly.
Remember that we needed to reform these entities since the ‘90s and congress, especially the senate, was not really ‘run’ as a full majority from 95 to 2006, there were a lot of fights and compromises made and it was false that the repubs could push anything through, everything was a fight except one or two bills.
So lets start......
The United States House Committee on Financial Services (or better known as House Banking Committee) is the committee that oversees the Federal Reserve, the United States Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and a bunch of other financial services regulators within the government and oversees Fannie and Freddie.
Back in 2000, the chairman of the house financial services, capital markets subcommittee, Richard Baker was really concern with Fannie and Freddie taking on really large risky unsecured debt. This concern came out of the ’92 changes to the regulatory laws that loosened up on mortgage rules for the Clinton administration to fulfill a stupid promise - homes for anyone. Rep. Baker proposed a reform bill to the sub committee and then it made it to the committee. Now here is the real issue, Barney Frank worked hard to kill this bill in the committee. His comments were longwinded but he summed them up with these two bits saying concerns about the two were "overblown" and that there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."
So in 2002, another reform bill was introduced and again it was killed in committee by the dems led by Barney Frank. I think killing it was part of the compromise made to stop the threats of filibuster any republican bill in the senate but unsure. Well again he and others said something to the effect "I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems," while there were repubs starting to get upset with this high amount of high risk debt.
Oh let me throw this in, the people who ran Fannie had something to do with the Clinton administration.
So in the 2000 to 2003 time period there were serious problems going on within Fannie, one thing they were cooking the books to cover up bad debt; again another bill was introduced to reform these two things and again the Dems led by Barney Frank killed it. Some time in June 03 the Fannie accounting mess hit the papers and nothing was done about it, Frank responded by saying "I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis,"
Now here is the catch, during the time that Jamie Gorelick was running Fannie with Frank Raines (remember she is the assistant US attorney General under Reno and the creator of the wall between law enforcement agencies allowing 9/11 and he was well another Clinton flunky), it just so happened that she came out and said in 2002 "We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions." Giving Barney Frank more ammunition to hold off any other attempts to have reform bills get past the committee but then sometime in 2004, one of the audits done by the feds uncovered something like $9 billion in loses during part of their tenure and that was just the start and Frank said then that there is no risk involved with these loses and that “I think Wall Street will get over it”. The SEC was investigating other allegations but the thing is that Raines got to retire out of Fannie and Gorelick resigned in 2003 before it all came out.
By the way, you got to ask yourself if there is no real problems with the dems running this in to the ground, why did a Clinton appointee who was a government servant end up with millions in Fannie Mae stock and sme $100 million in benefits?
So in 2007, with the newly elected Democratic congress, Barney Frank now is the head of the house banking committee. He has said that “What blocked it [reform] last year," Mr. Frank said then, "was the insistence of some economic conservative fundamentalists in the Bush Administration who, to be honest, don't think there should be a Fannie Mae or a Freddie Mac.". Yep I don't think there should be one either but the Bush Administration has zero to do with the reform, Bush could not do anything, it was the congress who was empowered to make those decisions and by the way the bill that was presented out of sub-committee was the same exact bill that was presented out of sub-committee in the previous congress and it was a "bi-partisan" effort but was benched.
Since that time, there has been zero work on serious reform of Fannie and Freddie to stop these loses. I also heard that the house banking committee has helped bury in amendments to other senate/house bills exemptions to the Sarbanes – Oxley and other regulatory laws to protect a lot of people. These all came out of the Enron mess but haven’t found specifics yet to that if it is fact or not.
But also since that time, there has been a few other things going on. The house banking committee and the senate committee on housing, banking and urban affairs has push hard for more loans to people who can’t afford them since taking over in 2007 even though there was tightening in the credit market (the original Clinton position was to give loans to let people own houses). I think they loosened up a lot of the regulations still even more revently but I haven't looked at that yet (this is a quick response) and with the lower interest rates, brought us to this point in history.
The stakes are high, it is all about money. Because the senate committee is chaired by Chris Dodd and he with help from a few other democrats, have been receiving some interesting perks for congress's help on looking the other way.
Let’s look at one really quick….
Country Wide Mortgage, who has been bought out amazingly quick (no real hearings on it, no nothing, just got cleared by the fed reserve and that's it), made low interest loans to a number of ‘politicians’ like Mr. Dodd. Actually these are way, way below market rate unsecured loans. The person who made this all possible, Angelo Mozilo CEO of Country Wide. He helped oh a few people like Dodd, Senate finance committee chairman Kent Conrad and dum dee dum …. Fannie Mae former-CEO Jim Johnson.
OK so far?
Here is where it get’s kind of confusing.
There are many ‘FoA’s out there (that is Friends of Angelo) and again one of them is Obama. Now I would bet that he has something to do to help Angelo but I won’t go anymore into this other than he has some amazing Friends helping out Obama.
OH yea let me go down this Angelo path a bit because it seems that he was doing something that others are in jail for, insider trading. But amazingly because there are two connections here with the SEC, Barney Frank and some residual from the Frank Raines SEC days, nothing seems to have happened here. See Country Wide seems to be the trigger of this ‘crisis’ and it set off the problem with Fannie.
So we have Jim Johnson, who ran Fannie back in the 90’s when Raines took over, ’98. He amazingly also was part of Lehman Brothers too. But see he is still the advisor to Obama, I seen his name mentioned today.
With all that, we still have no real investigations, no one going to go to jail and we end up with an estimated ready for this one…. Some $53 trillion in debt by this mess.
Now the other thing that I am forgetting is the housing market itself, there is a lot of money that changed hands since 2000 on the dems side from these large home building companies (Pulte comes to mind) and amazingly since the liberal court ruled on Kelo v. New London, the Dems have blocked a few bills in committee that puts back the restrictions on eminent domain.
I know I didn’t explain it well. It is really all about three things;
Making the Bush administration look like they are 100% at fault
About getting Obama into office
Getting more power
I won’t get into the blockage of amendments for expanding Sarbanes or the removal of the protections that the dems have created.
But I will say this, since Obama has been touting some crazy thing about ethics, he should be the first to step up and start naming names in his party. I know the blame sits on both sides of the aisle but the problem is that when this guy, who really has had his hand in the cookie jar claims he led efforts to clean up Washington, speaks of change and all that BS, he should be doing, not talking. The truth is that he with Biden’s help will cover it all up, will stop the investigations and like he did in Chicago will stop the people from speaking about these problems.
I listened to McCain, he said it, his party is at fault too, and I think that he will do something about it but not much. See it is clear, who really is to blame for this is US, the people. With the leadership in both parties faltering and lying to the people, the Dems have the lead right now in idiots and crazies running the party but again the repubs are not to far behind. But the people fell for the BS when they should have known better.
Remember McCain will not be perfect but it is far better than a real Marxist.
Go comrade ….Vote for Obama, Lenin will be proud.
