Bureaucrats

Bush Tried To Rein In Democrat Driven Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae

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In yet another article about the Democrat responsibility for events that led to the hell we’re in now (and frankly most of the hell this country’s ever been in). Read the full article here. Excerpts are included below…

Mr. Bush wanted to limit systemic risk by raising the GSEs’ capital requirements, compelling preapproval of new activities, and limiting the size of their portfolios. Why should government regulate banks, credit unions and savings and loans, but not GSEs? Mr. Bush wanted the GSEs to be treated just like their private-sector competitors.

But the GSEs fought back. They didn’t want to see the Bush reforms enacted, because that would level the playing field for their competitors. Congress finally did pass the Bush reforms, but in 2008, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed.

Isn’t that interesting. Surrender Poodle Pelosi and the Freddi Mac executive’s boy-toy Barney Frank should be run out of the country on a rail. I don’t understand why fools in those states keep fools in power, but I guess I guess that explains it.

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster. Later, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed, Mr. Dodd asked, “Why weren’t we doing more?” He then voted for the Bush reforms that he once called “ill-advised.”

But Mr. Dodd wasn’t the only Democrat to heap abuse on the Bush reforms. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defended Fannie and Freddie as “fundamentally sound” and labeled the president’s proposals as “inane.” He later voted for the reforms. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York dismissed Mr. Bush’s “safety and soundness concerns” as “a straw man.” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” was the helpful advice of both Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Maxine Waters of California. Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York berated a Bush official at a hearing, saying, “I am just pissed off” at the administration for raising the issue.

…

The housing meltdown is largely a story of greed and irresponsibility made possible by government privilege. If Democrats had granted the Bush administration the regulatory powers it sought, the housing crisis wouldn’t be nearly as severe and the economy as a whole would be better off.

That’s why some mythmakers are so intent on denying that Mr. Bush worked to rein in the GSEs. But facts are stubborn things, as Ronald Reagan used to say, and in this instance, the facts support Mr. Bush and offer a harsh judgment on key Democrats. Perhaps that explains why so many in the media haven’t told the real story.

Shift from Capitalism to Socialism, European Style

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From the WSJ…

The most basic explanation for why Barack Obama may win next Tuesday is that voters want economic deliverance. The standard fix for this in politics everywhere is to crowbar the old party out and patch in the other one. It is true as well that the historic nature of the nation’s first African-American candidacy would play a big role.

Push past the historic candidacy, however, and one sees something even larger at stake in this vote… The real “change” being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of “the past eight years” but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America’s idea of itself.

I don’t agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, “progressive” Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its “social market economy.” Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create “wealth” so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

…

This would be a historic shift, one post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan’s “Cowboy Capitalism.”

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the United States made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Central States, pushed across a tough Western frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple — the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth Cowboy Capitalism, are doing what we did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It’s time to spread the wealth around.”

READ IT HERE, [an itemized list of European yoke-style government policies Obama-Reid-Pelosi will install.]

U.S. Chamber of Commerce vs. Democrats

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I think the chamber of Commerce knows a thing or two about how economies are built and destroyed. They clearly see a danger in letting the Democrats run away with the government. From the WSJ…

The nation’s largest business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has raised ire among Democratic leaders for pouring millions of dollars into an advertising push to prevent the party from winning dominance in the Senate next year…

The Chamber says it has raised enough money this year from corporations to spend about $35 million on the election, double its budget for House and Senate races in the 2006 election. The group is supporting pro-business candidates, almost exclusively Republicans in contested Senate races.

Business executives fear that Democrats, bouyed by heavy spending from organized labor, could gain enough muscle in the Senate to spark policies favoring increased unionization, higher taxes, more restrictions on trade and more regulation on the financial-services and housing sectors…

The Chamber has spent $10 million on advertising on behalf of pro-business candidates in tight races since the end of August. No other single organization has spent more on Senate races, according to data collected by the Federal Election Commission. The Chamber says it will spend millions more in the final weeks of the campaign.

The Washington-based Chamber represents three million U.S. business and most of the thousands of local chambers of commerce from around the country. The lobbying federation says it doesn’t favor either party, but backs “pro-business candidates” from both. It has no legal obligation to be nonpartisan.

Overall, U.S. businesses tend to contribute similar amounts to Democrats and Republicans in their direct giving to candidates and political parties. Through Sept. 30, companies and their political action committees donated $129.6 million to Democrats and $132.6 million to Republicans.

The Chamber of Commerce is attempting to counteract another major font of funding and influence — the $300 million that organized labor will spend on campaigns during this election cycle, most of it aimed at persuading unionized workers to vote Democratic. Much of that money has gone directly to campaigns: Through Sept. 30, labor unions and their political action committees have given $52.3 million to Democrats and $4.8 million to Republicans, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Yet another in a very long line of singularly decisionable proofs that Obama and the Democrats are wrong for America. Combine them and I’m shocked that Obama has any but the far-Left sideshow vote.

American fence-sitters are letting temporary emotion and hot-air speech-writing rule the election cycle, rather than substance, experience, and sound policy to our very painful downfall if Obama and and Democrat candidates win.

WSJ: Obama Would Europeanize America

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Another must read from the WSJ today…

The only organization with a worse rating than the Republican president is the Democratic Congress—14% approval, 75% disapproval. But there, too, the Democrats will gain strength. They are expected to increase their majority in the House, and current polling shows that in Senate races Democrats will increase their members from the current 51 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) to at least 57. They may even achieve the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain:

  • The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe.
  • Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited.
  • Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president’s goals of “spreading the wealth around.”
  • Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%).
  • Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use.
  • The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation.
  • Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment.

These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America. There will be many more public policy changes with similar goals—nationalized health care, Kyoto-like global-warming policies, and increased education regulation and spending.

Additional tax advantages for lower and middle income people will be enacted: a 10% mortgage tax credit that would average about $500 per household per year, a $4,000 tax credit for college tuition, a tax credit covering half of child-care expenses up to $6,000 per year, and even a $7,000 credit for purchase of a clean car.

More important, all but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” meaning people will get a check for them if they owe no taxes, which is simply a transfer of income from the government to individuals. In reality this is the beginning of a new series of entitlements for middle-class families, the longer-term effect of which will be to make those families more dependant on (and so more supportive of) larger government. The Tax Policy Center estimates that these refundable tax credits would cost the government $648 billion over 10 years.

These are Mr. Obama’s plans. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats would increase spending for their own interests and favorite programs. More important, the Congress will consider itself more important than a freshman president who has never held an executive position, so they will do what they want and he will have to go along with most of it.

READ IT HERE

Video: Escaped The Plantation, Voting McCain

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Perhaps the best speech given during this entire campaign cycle.

The O-Team
More genius by ZO. See more great clips here

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

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In a piece entitled “Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?” columnist and novelist Orson Scott Card chastises members of the liberal media for failing to report on the sources of the financial crisis we’re suffering through right now…

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor – which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house – along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

READ IT HERE

Obama Votes Present on Fannie/Freddie

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Again, the WSJ is on the ball today…

If Sen. Obama were truly looking for a kind of deregulation that might be responsible for the current financial crisis, he need only look back to 1998, when the Clinton administration ruled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could satisfy their affordable housing obligations by purchasing subprime mortgages. This ultimately made it possible for Fannie and Freddie to add a trillion dollars in junk loans to their balance sheets. This led to their own collapse, and to the development of a market in these mortgages that is the source of the financial crisis we are wrestling with today.

Finally, on the matter of deregulation and the financial crisis, Sen. Obama should consider his own complicity in the failure of Congress to adopt legislation that might have prevented the subprime meltdown.

In the summer of 2005, a bill emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.

Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending — but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama’s past: voting present.

READ IT HERE

Why Do Our Taxes Go To ACORN?

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You might ask, as I did when I found out the Democrat shell company ACORN is federally funded, why this is the case. A Wall Street Journal piece today lays out some detail we didn’t know, and now we feel like being militant ourselves.

“But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.”

READ THE ARTICLE

Obama: ACORN Will Help Set Presidential Agenda

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I can’t believe Obama said this out loud. This guy is a nightmare on scrawny legs.

“…before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we’re going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We’re going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations, so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.”

Because there are those who don’t know, and we shouldn’t assume, ACORN is a extreme leftist minority focused community organization that has been raided repeatedly by police over voter fraud. Even if ACORN weren’t involved in the voter fraud that seems pretty proven at this point, they’d still be disingenuous to the American people to only root out Democrats for registration and enticing (I say bribing) them with food, cigarettes, and rides to the polling location on the day.

The meat is about 1:40 into the clip.