Insane World

Monday, October 06, 2008
 
SNL bailout skit

Saturday Night Live lowered the boom on the Democrats during this skit on this past weekend's show. It's funny and hits home....




Monday, September 29, 2008
 
Community Organizer in Chief





In today's NY Post, Stanley Kurtz does a good job of explaining the role of "community organizers" over the years and the role they played in the sub-prime mortgage industry that ultimately led to the current financial crisis.

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.

As a so-called "community organizer", Barack Obama played a significant role in the diversity and affirmative action racket pushed on financial institutions by community organizer thugs.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?


Read the whole thing. A "Community Organizer in Chief" sitting in the White House is the last thing this country needs.



 
Village Voice on Andrew Cuomo: How the youngest Housing and Urban Development Secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis

You know things are pretty bad when a left wing newspaper like The Village Voice does some decent investigative journalism on the meltdown of the mortgage and credit markets and finds Democrats and their social policies with a large slice of the culpability.

If only other news organizations were actually interested in investigative journalism, the public would know a little more on how we got to this point.

It's a very interesting and enlightening article.

The link to the article is here...


There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.


Andrew Cuomo, now as NY State Attorney General, has been all over the news recently claiming he is going to launch investigations and get to the bottom of this whole mess and possibly prosecute some people. I've even seen him use the words "predatory lenders" and phrases like "Wall Street greed". He needs to start his investigation while looking into the mirror while shaving in the morning.

Over the last 10 or so years, we have all noticed the explosion of storefront and corner mortgage brokers and lending operations. They have popped up in almost every neighborhood, strip mall, and many areas had numerous shops on the same block. All displaying signs like "Low Down Payment", "No Down Payment", and my favorite "Credit Problem - No Problem".

It was the federal government itself during the Clinton Administration that encouraged this explosion of mortgage brokers, lending operations, and loans to people with bad credit. All while allowing these people to make huge profits and commissions on pushing mortgages on every warm body that walked through the door. "No job, no credit... No problem".

The government bought up the mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the political class could go on the news and gloat about how home ownership has increased under their watch.

The Yield-Spread Premium(YSP) which was allowed by the government is what made it so attractive for so many people to open mortgage lending operations all over the country.

Cuomo said the point was "to discourage practices that give financial incentives to mortgage brokers that offer higher-priced loans than what are generally available in the marketplace." The MBA, which includes brokers and other industry organizations, got Congressional leaders to oppose it, and Cuomo retreated. A year and a half later, Cuomo adopted a new rule that did the opposite of his first proposal. "The Lending Industry Welcomes Policy Clarification" was the subhead on the MBA's cover story. Cuomo's 1999 rule, issued under pressure from Congress to come up with a policy statement one way or the other because of all the lawsuits, found that YSPs were legal if "reasonably related to the value of the goods" actually furnished or the services "actually performed" by brokers. The Cuomo rule-making also stated that "HUD does not view the name of the payment as the appropriate issue," even though calling something a premium based on a "yield" and a "spread" pretty much destroys any notion that the payment is tied to a good or a service.

Experts point out that borrowers usually have no idea that such a thing exists. In fact, Harvard law professor Howell Jackson discovered that the HUD booklet on settlement costs, issued for distribution to borrowers on Cuomo's watch, never mentions YSPs or how they are financed. "You may wish to ask about the fees that the mortgage broker will receive for its services" is as close as the booklet gets. "Critically absent," concludes Jackson, "is disclosure of the fact that the borrower finances the cost of YSPs through higher monthly mortgage payments." In 1997, Cuomo's proposed rule said that "a consensus" on only one point emerged from the negotiations with the department's broadly based advisory group, namely that "a rule should require that mortgage brokers inform borrowers of the role that they are serving early enough in the transaction to allow the consumer to shop for alternatives." Cuomo's final rule, much like the GSE edict, concluded: "This statement does not mandate disclosures beyond those currently required."

Glaser acknowledged that YSPs are a big cause of the crisis, though he pointedly insisted that they were "not the biggest," and he blamed them on Bush. He pointed out that Mel Martinez issued a YSP rule in late 2001, and claimed that he did so because Cuomo's ruling permitted class-action lawsuits. In fact, courts around the country had denied class-action certifications based on Cuomo's ruling, but a circuit court in Alabama decided that Cuomo's regulations were "ambiguous," which is why Martinez then issued what he called a "clarification" of the Cuomo regulations. But as a San Francisco circuit court found shortly thereafter, the Martinez clarification essentially "reiterated" Cuomo's position and "carries forward the same principles." A dissenting member of the same California panel deplored Cuomo's ruling and said "the phrase 'yield spread premium' " was a "way of avoiding calling a kickback a kickback."

The sad fact is that Cuomo's surrender on YSPs can't be excused as an unfortunate consequence of well-motivated policy, as his defenders have argued regarding his FHA and GSE actions. He has no cover for this one; it exposes him as an agent of special interests. And looking at his GSE and FHA policies through the lens of his retreat on these payoffs (which even Glaser, in a marked change from his MBA days, now condemns) suggests a pattern of compromised judgments.


The Bush Administration didn't do much to change the way things were operating at HUD and the FHA either.

We might be at a point in this country when even if you want to stop policies you know are unsound and wrought with impending disaster, there is probably more of a fear of being labeled racist than actually dealing with the disaster.




Sunday, September 28, 2008
 
Burning Down the House

Democrats have been running scared and their spin machine has been in overdrive ever since the meltdown of the financial industry. I shouldn't exactly call it spin. I'm not shy. I'll call it outright lies.

For years they have been instituting their liberal social policies of diversity and affirmative action on the private mortgage and credit markets. Now they are on every news program denying they ever had anything to do with the current crisis. In fact, according to them, it is everyone else's fault but their own.

Thankfully, C-Span and newspapers have extensive archives. Someone made extensive use of those archives and put together a video briefly explaining the roots of this crisis. It hits the nail on the head.

Take a look....




Below is another Video of Congressional hearings from 2004 regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Listen carefully to the Democrats. According to them it was Republicans fabricating facts about a potential crisis involving these GSE's. According to them there was nothing wrong.... even though it was already known they were "cooking the books".