Webloggin » Crisis as a Tool To Elect Barack Obama

I was watching Meet the Press yesterday and was astonished to see Tom Brokaw put the blame of the current financial crisis at the feet of Ronald Regan.

MR. BROKAW: Congressman, Chris Cox, who is the chairman of the SEC, said it’s not the dead hand of government.

REP. SCHAFFER: Right.

MR. BROKAW: In effect, he said it’s the blind eye of government and he now apologizes for regulations as they were deregulated not working, he said that we went voluntarily and Wall Street just didn’t respond to that. That put us in the jam that we’re in now and all of that grew out of a Republican culture beginning with Ronald Reagan.

These words, ladies and gentlemen, are the words of a colossal ignoramus. It is classic liberal speak by someone that is either too stupid or too much in the bag for Barack Obama to be on television informing anyone about what lead to the current financial crisis or how we should get out of it.

Nonetheless NBC willingly allows its talking heads to misinform its viewers.

A great article appeared in American Thinker that seeks to expose the narrative for the lie it is and ties that lie to the election of Barack Obama. (The image here from American Thinker is a guide)

…now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: “a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks.” (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter’s answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: “a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks.”

Well look at that, here we have Senator Phil Gramm that was actually a Democrat in 1977 putting the blame where it belongs. Of course Democrats have been out trying to put the blame of the subprime mortgage crisis on Gramm now that he is a Republican and tied to John McCain. They were using a convoluted collection of lies and spin, blaming everything on a 1999 bank deregulation law that Gramm sponsored. Fortunately for truth seekers that strategy backfired. The problem with that narrative was that the former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin said the Democrats are wrong. This matters because Rubin is a former member of the Clinton administration and is an adviser to Barack Obama.

In an interview on Friday, Rubin said the law, named after its now-retired congressional sponsors — Phil Gramm (Tex.), a top McCain economic adviser; Jim Leach(Iowa), who heads Republicans for Obama; and Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (Va.) — “had no impact, zero,” on the current crisis.

The Democrats have become nothing more than liars. They are covering up the fact that they blocked all attempts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There is plenty record to support this, and now they are out in front of cameras patting themselves on the back as they dip into your wallets one more time, first for the failed mortgage giants, then for AIG and now to buy up all the bad assets that their friends, investment partners and campaign contributors bought.

But how does this tie into Barack Obama? We turn back to American Thinker and see how the corrupt organization ACORN is involved in all of this. This is the same ACORN that Obama has been heavily involved with. The same ACORN that is under investigation once again for voter fraud, and has now expanded their crime wave into charges of embezzlement.

ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining”-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

As a New York Post article describes it:

A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with “100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don’t report it on your tax returns.” Credit counseling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor’s Business Daily added:

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit.”

And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN’s negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an “Affordable Housing Trust Fund,” granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.

Even now, unbelievably — on the brink of national disaster — Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!

This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN’s efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.

Unfortunately the ties are so deep, twisted and convoluted that this simple synopsis doesn’t begin to cover it. Please read the whole American Thinker article if you care in the least about this election and the financial security of your family now and in the future. It is important to understand the radical Saul Alinksy strategy of crisis before casting a single vote in November.

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