Ending The Crimes of Centuries–Ideas Whose Time Have Come–Constitutional Republics and Market Capitalism–Videos

Posted on April 20, 2011. Filed under: American History, Banking, Blogroll, Books, Business, Communications, Economics, Education, Employment, Federal Government, Fiscal Policy, government, government spending, history, Investments, Language, Law, liberty, Life, Links, Monetary Policy, Money, People, Philosophy, Politics, Private Sector, Public Sector, Rants, Raves, Regulations, Strategy, Taxes, Technology, Unions, Video, War, Wealth, Wisdom | Tags: Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Bailouts, Coerce, Collectivism, Commercial Banks, conspiracy theories, Corruption, Credit Rating Agencies, Crimes of the Century, Dylan Ratigan, Fannie Mae, Financial Crisis, Force, Freddie Mac, G. Edward Griffin, Glenn Beck, Individualism, inflation, Investment Banks, Leverage, Milton Friedman, national debt, Philosophy, Real Estate Bubble, rule of law, Rule of Man, Ruling Class, The Con, The Federal Reseve System, The Sting, To Big To Indict, Too Big To Fail |

“Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

~Victor Hugo

An Idea Whose Time Has Come – G. Edward Griffin – Freedom Force International

The Capitalist Conspiracy – G Edward Griffin

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 1]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 2]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 3]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 4]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 5]

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 5)

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 2 of 5)

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 3 of 5)

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 4 of 5)

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 5 of 5)

Greenspan Denies Blame for Crisis, Admits ‘flaw’

alan greenspan defends himself

Let Greenspan Tell You What Fed is!

THE GREAT CON JOB – DYLAN RATIGAN – 1 (APRIL 8 2010)

THE GREAT CON JOB – DYLAN RATIGAN – 2 (APRIL 8 2010)

Glenn Beck-04/19/11-A

Glenn Beck-04/19/11-B

Background Articles and Videos

G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #1

G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #2

Ed Griffin Collectivism

Milton Friedman – Collectivism

Milton Friedman – The Proper Role of Government

Ayn Rand – Reason vs Force

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Obama’s Christmas Eve Rape and Robbery of The American Taxpayer–Pouring Trillions of Taxpayer Money Down the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Toilet Bowl–Totally Corrupt and Criminal Politicians!

Posted on January 4, 2010. Filed under: Blogroll, Communications, Crime, Economics, Employment, Fiscal Policy, government spending, Homes, Investments, Law, liberty, Life, Links, media, Monetary Policy, People, Politics, Psychology, Quotations, Rants, Raves, Regulations, Taxes, Video, Wisdom | Tags: Barack Obama, Blank Check to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Crime, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Government Failure, Government Interventionism, High Crimes, Jim Rogers, Unlimted Bailout |

Obama Pledges Unlimited Funds to Fannie Mae, Freddie

Wallison Says Fannie, Freddie Seeing `Enormous’ Losses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGJlcEsfOc

Fannie And Freddie – Unlimited Federal Money

Blank check for Fannie Freddie: Absolute Outrage

Capital Limits Removed for Fannie, Freddie

12/28/2009 Peter Schiff On The Glenn Beck Show: Will Gov’t Get Out Of The Way In 2010?

Glen Beck: 800 Billion More for Fannie and Freddie

Who is Responsible? (Meltdown): Fannie Mae – Freddie Mac – Wall Street – Bill Clinton – George Bush?

Democrats Covering up the Fannie Mae Freddie Mac

Thomas E Woods. Fannie Mae CRA and The Federal Reserve

Housing and Fannie Mae: FDR’s American Dream

Obama and Democrats are Responsible: Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac

Democrats were WARNED of Financial crisis and did NOTHING

The real reason for the financial mess!!!

OBAMA hires FANNIE MAE CEO as advisor – Dem connections

LET THEM FAIL ! NO BAILOUT ON MY BEHALF JIM ROGERS

Jim Rogers on Regulators’ Failings and Inflation’s Return

LOL
Solution to Our Economic Problems…

The American people are tapped out when it comes to bailing out failing businesses and financial institutions.

No more bailouts and no more blank checks to bailout both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Shut down these total irresponsible and failing financial institutions.

No more Federal Government supported enterprises that keep losing taxpayer money and causing the Obama Depression.

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be closed down and sold to any private company that would like to buy them.

The Federal Government should get completely out of the mortgage investment market.

Throw the bums out in Congress, the Senate and the White House who support the repeated serial rape and robbery of the American people.

These people should be in prison not in government.

How dare they?

The arrogance of the progressive radical socialists led by Barack Obama knows no bounds.

This is a high crime against the property and prosperity of the American people and future generations.

These people are criminals and should be prosecuted for stealing from the American people.

No blank checks and no unlimited bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is too big to fail, it should fail.

Shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and fire everyone that works there.

Background Articles and Videos

U.S. Move to Cover Fannie, Freddie Losses Stirs Controversy

By JAMES R. HAGERTY and JESSICA HOLZER

“…The Obama administration’s decision to cover an unlimited amount of losses at the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the next three years stirred controversy over the holiday.

The Treasury announced Thursday it was removing the caps that limited the amount of available capital to the companies to $200 billion each.

Unlimited access to bailout funds through 2012 was “necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market,” the Treasury said. Fannie and Freddie purchase or guarantee most U.S. home mortgages and have run up huge losses stemming from the worst wave of defaults since the 1930s.

“The timing of this executive order giving Fannie and Freddie a blank check is no coincidence,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. He said the Christmas Eve announcement was designed “to prevent the general public from taking note.”

Treasury officials couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

So far, Treasury has provided $60 billion of capital to Fannie and $51 billion to Freddie. Mahesh Swaminathan, a senior mortgage analyst at Credit Suisse in New York, said he didn’t believe Fannie and Freddie would need more than $200 billion apiece from the Treasury. But he and other analysts have said the market would find a larger commitment from the Treasury reassuring.

In exchange for the funding, the Treasury has received preferred stock in the companies paying 10% dividends. The Treasury also has warrants to acquire nearly 80% of the common shares in each firm.

The Treasury removed the cap on the size of available bailout funds by amending agreements it reached with the companies in September 2008, when the government seized control of the agencies under a legal process called conservatorship. The agreement allowed the Treasury to make amendments through the end of the year, without the consent of Congress. Changes made after Dec. 31 would likely involve a struggle with lawmakers over the terms.

Some Republicans are angry the administration is expanding the potential size of the bailout without having a plan for eventually ending the federal government’s role in the companies. …”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126168307200704747.html

December 24, 2009
2009-12-24-15-34-59-24543

TREASURY ISSUES UPDATE ON STATUS OF SUPPORT FOR HOUSING PROGRAMS

U.S. Treasury Department
Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 24, 2009
CONTACT: Treasury Public Affairs (202) 622-2960
Treasury Issues Update on Status
of Support for Housing Programs

The Freddie Mac 509 Amendment is available here.

The Fannie Mae 509 Amendment is available here.

WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury provided an update on initiatives established under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) of 2008, which supports housing market stabilization and provides relief to struggling homeowners. As part of a commitment to wind down programs that were established during the crisis and are no longer critical to financial stability, Treasury will terminate several HERA programs at the end of the year. Treasury will also amend the terms of its agreements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support their ongoing stability. The steps outlined today are necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market.

Program Wind Downs

The program that Treasury established under HERA to support the mortgage market by purchasing Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) -guaranteed mortgage-backed securities (MBS) will end on December 31, 2009. By the conclusion of its MBS purchase program, Treasury anticipates that it will have purchased approximately $220 billion of securities across a range of maturities.

The short-term credit facility that Treasury established under HERA for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks will terminate on December 31, 2009. This credit facility was designed to provide a backstop source of liquidity and has not been used.

Amendments to Terms of Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements

At the time the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship in September 2008, Treasury established Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements (PSPAs) to ensure that each firm maintained a positive net worth. Treasury is now amending the PSPAs to allow the cap on Treasury’s funding commitment under these agreements to increase as necessary to accommodate any cumulative reduction in net worth over the next three years. At the conclusion of the three year period, the remaining commitment will then be fully available to be drawn per the terms of the agreements.

Neither firm is near the $200 billion per institution limit established under the PSPAs. Total funding provided under these agreements through the third quarter has been $51 billion to Freddie Mac and $60 billion to Fannie Mae. The amendments to these agreements announced today should leave no uncertainty about the Treasury’s commitment to support these firms as they continue to play a vital role in the housing market during this current crisis.

The PSPAs also cap the size of the retained mortgage portfolios and require that the portfolios are reduced over time. Treasury is also amending the PSPAs to provide Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with some additional flexibility to meet the requirement to reduce their portfolios. The portfolio reduction requirement for 2010 and after will be applied to the maximum allowable size of the portfolios – or $900 billion per institution – rather than the actual size of the portfolio at the end of 2009.

Treasury remains committed to the principle of reducing the retained portfolios. To meet this goal, Treasury does not expect Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be active buyers to increase the size of their retained mortgage portfolios, but neither is it expected that active selling will be necessary to meet the required targets. FHFA will continue to monitor and oversee the retained portfolio activities in a manner consistent with the FHFA’s responsibility as conservator and the requirements of the PSPAs.

Treasury is making two additional changes to the PSPAs. Treasury will delay setting the Periodic Commitment Fee by one year to December 31, 2010. Treasury will also make technical changes to the definitions of mortgage assets and indebtedness to make compliance with the covenants of the PSPAs less burdensome and more transparent in light of impending accounting changes.

The Path to Longer Term Reform

The Administration is in the process of reviewing issues around longer term reform of the federal government’s role in the housing market. We expect to provide a preliminary report around the time President Obama releases his fiscal 2011 budget in February 2010. Recent announcements on the tightening of underwriting standards by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration, demonstrate a commitment to prudent housing finance policy that enables a transition to an environment where the private market is able to provide a larger source of mortgage finance.

###

http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/2009122415345924543.htm

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Get “Unlimited” Bail out!

By Robert Oak

“…What a time to bury a press release,Christmas Eve, the headlines awash on health care bill Senate passage. Well, some of use are wired to God and despite cooking pomegranate glazed ducks and wrapping presents, we’re not asleep at the wheel!

To find the juice, one must even look between the lines of the U.S. Treasury Press release:

Treasury is now amending the PSPAs to allow the cap on Treasury’s funding commitment under these agreements to increase as necessary to accommodate any cumulative reduction in net worth over the next three years. At the conclusion of the three year period, the remaining commitment will then be fully available to be drawn per the terms of the agreements.

The cap was $400 billion dollars. Previously, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac requested $800 billion dollars in available bail out money. Now, it’s unlimited.

Treasury is also amending the PSPAs to provide Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with some additional flexibility to meet the requirement to reduce their portfolios. The portfolio reduction requirement for 2010 and after will be applied to the maximum allowable size of the portfolios – or $900 billion per institution – rather than the actual size of the portfolio at the end of 2009.

Note that the Treasury and Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage backed securities. Current Fannie/Freddie holdings are each about $760 billion. Now is this yet another free money to Goldman Sachs and other large institutions to get them to buy toxic MBSes from Fannie and Freddie? They can now hold onto this toxic waste for 3 years instead of 2010.

Treasury will delay setting the Periodic Commitment Fee by one year to December 31, 2010. Treasury will also make technical changes to the definitions of mortgage assets and indebtedness to make compliance with the covenants of the PSPAs less burdensome and more transparent in light of impending accounting changes.

Get that? Fannie and Freddie now have unlimited funds resources and don’t have to reduce their mortgage holdings. …”

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/fannie-mae-freddie-mac-get-unlimited-bail-out

Call For An Audit – The Blank Check For Freddie And Fannie Must Be Tracked

“…Freddie and Fannie are de facto wards of the state, but their operations are housed off Uncle Sam’s balance sheet. As such, who will keep them accountable? Who will properly monitor their operations? Who will question their business practices?

I have no doubt that the blank check provided to Freddie and Fannie on Christmas Eve is nothing short of the continuation of Uncle Sam’s quantitative easing program currently managed by the Federal Reserve. Recall that the Fed’s quantitative easing program to purchase mortgage-backed securities is scheduled to end on March 31, 2010. At that point, if not prior, I fully expect the internal investment portfolios housed within Freddie and Fannie to reenter the marketplace and become the biggest buyer of mortgages.

Readers may wonder why I am so concerned about this activity. Look for economists, market analysts, and political pundits to promote this activity as both necessary and beneficial for the American housing market. This misinformed crowd believes Freddie and Fannie can issue debt at favorable rates, use the proceeds to purchase mortgages at prevailing rates, and make big, fat, juicy returns. Look for this overly simplistic analysis to be fed to the American public a lot over the next quarter and throughout 2010. …”

http://www.dailymarkets.com/stocks/2009/12/30/call-for-an-audit-the-blank-check-for-freddie-and-fannie-must-be-tracked/

Fannie and Freddie’s Blank Check Will Further Fuel America’s Rage

By Larry Doyle

“…I remain incensed at the sheer arrogance and brazen demeanor of the Obama administration providing a blank check on Christmas Eve to cover future losses of the failed institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Given the fact that this check has been issued, America deserves to know what exactly it is covering. Over and above a full and total exposition of these government sponsored entities, America is in a position to demand certain retributions. Let’s bang the drum and demand some answers, including:

1. The current valuations of all of Freddie’s and Fannie’s holdings so America can fully evaluate those holdings relative to market prices.

2. The current fees being paid for all services rendered.

3. An independent audit.

4. Why aren’t these stocks delisted immediately? To allow stock in these entities to continue to trade is a total mockery of a legitimate market.

5. Clawback all bonus payments rendered to Franklin Raines, James Johnson, and Leland Brendsel, the executives at Fannie and Freddie who truly plundered these institutions.

6. Immediately extinguish Freddie’s and Fannie’s contingency liabilities to Wall Street firms.

7. How are we to know and appreciate that this blank check is not merely a conduit to deliver slush funds and hush money to every favored friend of the administration?

8. Any market analyst who favorably opines on the housing market in light of this blank check is hereby rendered a total jackass. …”

http://www.senseoncents.com/2009/12/fannie-and-freddies-blank-check-will-further-fuel-americas-rage/comment-page-1/

Shocking Video Unearthed Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis

Explosive Video, Fannie Mae CEO calling Obama and the Dems the “Family” and “Conscience” of Fannie Mae

EVIDENCE FOUND!!! Clinton administration’s “BANK AFFIRMATIVE ACTION” They forced banks to make BAD LOANS and ACORN and Obama’s tie to all of it!!!

Background Articles and Videoes

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to seek more money from taxpayers

Trever Bierschbach

“…When the bailout was proposed taxpayers were promised that they would not lose a dime on Freddie and Fannie. Since then Fannie Mae has lost $120.5 billion, while Freddie Mac has lost just about $68 billion in the past nine quarters. All of these losses are in spite of the government’s backing of the companies, new regulations to help prevent future losses, and the $400B lifeline, and now they want more.

While these two mortgage giants bleed off money, and feed off taxpayers, the government continues to push them to offer more loans, and restructure existing loans that are in jeopardy. Opponents wonder at the lack of common sense involved in all of this, but supporters continue to uphold the idea that Freddie and Fannie are crucial to the President’s housing relief plan. …”

http://www.examiner.com/x-32743-Tazewell-County-Conservative-Examiner~y2009m12d18-Fannie-Mae-and-Freddie-Mac-to-seek-more-money-from-taxpayers

The Fannie and Freddie show continues… and continues

Posted by Barbara Kiviat

“…Bloomberg is reporting that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s regulator is renegotiating the terms of the housing agencies’ financial rescue with the Treasury Department. According to unnamed people “familiar with the talks,” this renegotiation could include increasing the size of the agencies’ $400 billion lifeline—so far, Fannie Mae has tapped $60.9 billion and Freddie Mac $50.7 billion—and possibly cutting the dividends the agencies pay to Treasury on the borrowed money.

Things at Fannie and Freddie are still a mess, it seems. That makes me wonder why in some 1,300 pages of thoughts on how to reform the financial sector last week, the U.S. House of Representatives didn’t mention Fannie or Freddie once.

The lynchpin part of the nation’s financial system that is effectively owned by the government, the government has yet to ring in on. We’ve got proposed changes for credit rating agencies, over-the-counter derivatives, hedge funds, the insurance industry, executive compensation, institutions that are “too big to fail,” even individual home loans—but not for the two government-sponsored entities that own or guarantee half of the nation’s $11 trillion mortgage market.

Bernanke New Federal Powers Force Banks Conservatorship or Receivership

Receivership

“…In law, receivership is the situation in which an institution or enterprise is being held by a receiver, a person “placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights.”[1] Various types of receiver appointments exist:[1]

a receiver appointed by a (government) regulator pursuant to a statute;
a privately-appointed receiver; and
a court-appointed receiver.[1]
The receiver’s powers “flow from the document(s) underlying his appointment – a statute, financing agreement, or court order.

Several regulatory entities have been granted power by the Congress to place banking and financial institutions into receivership like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for failing nationally-chartered commercial banks; the Office of Thrift Supervision for failing savings and loan associations (thrift institutions); and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks. Most individual states also have granted receivership authority to their own bank regulatory agencies and insurance regulators.

Court-appointed receivers are “the most powerful and independent of the judicially-appointed managers.”^[2] Unlike special masters and monitors, “the receiver completely displaces the defendants: the receiver makes large and small decisions, spends the organization’s funds, and controls hiring and firing determinations.”^[2] …”

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receivership#cite_note-Bradley2007-1}

Money Made Simple – Receiveship

Thomas E. Woods–The Economic Crisis and The Federal Reserve–Videos

Background Articles and Videos

A tribute to our Navy SEAL snipers

By Michelle Malkin

“…Captain Richard Phillips paid tribute to the Navy and the SEAL snipers who shot and killed three pirates during rescue operations today.

Here’s a video clip from a recent documentary on Navy SEAL snipers. God bless ‘em: …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/12/a-tribute-to-our-navy-seal-snipers/

Will Glenn Beck overtake O’Reilly?

“…So Glenn Beck leaves Headline News – and is now sending shockwaves throughout Cable News. Now drawing over 2,000,000 viewers and has only been on Fox since January.

So let’s see who the winners and losers are – of this turn of events:

Winner: FOX News
Loser: Headline News
Loser: The other cable news channels
Loser: Bill O’Reilly? …”

http://talkradioinsiders.com/page/will-glenn-beck-overtake-oreilly/

Glenn Beck says he’s no Rush Limbaugh, but the ratings say he may be Bill O’Reilly

glenn_beck

“…Glenn Beck kicked butt in the ratings last week. After being on television for years, he’s an overnight success.

His Fox News program soared in the ratings, passing perennial second place Sean Hannity and nearly catching long-time leader Bill O’Reilly. All three Fox hosts left the other cable news shows far, far behind. …”

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/glenn-beck-rush-limbaugh-bill-o-reilly-ratings

Background Articles and Videos

Credit default swap (CDS)

Harvard Student Takes on Barney Frank Over His Role In The Economic Melt-Down With Video

Posted by Peg On April – 7 – 2009

“…Here are some more facts about President warnings and attempts to avoid the housing collapse caused, in large part, by Freddie and Fannie.
President Bush’s efforts over the years, not once, but several from The White House:

2001 April: The Administration’s FY02 budget declares that the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is “a potential problem,” because “financial trouble of a large GSE could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.”

2002 May: The President calls for the disclosure and corporate governance principles contained in his 10-point plan for corporate responsibility to apply to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (OMB Prompt Letter to OFHEO, 5/29/02)

2003 September: Treasury Secretary John Snow testifies before the House Financial Services Committee to recommend that Congress enact “legislation to create a new Federal agency to regulate and supervise the financial activities of our housing-related government sponsored enterprises” and set prudent and appropriate minimum capital adequacy requirements. 2004 February: The President’s FY05 Budget again highlights the risk posed by the explosive growth of the GSEs and their low levels of required capital, and called for creation of a new, world-class regulator: “The Administration has determined that the safety and soundness regulators of the housing GSEs lack sufficient power and stature to meet their responsibilities, and therefore…should be replaced with a new strengthened regulator.” (2005 Budget Analytic Perspectives, pg. 83)

2005 April: Treasury Secretary John Snow repeats his call for GSE reform, saying “Events that have transpired since I testified before this Committee in 2003 reinforce concerns over the systemic risks posed by the GSEs and further highlight the need for real GSE reform to ensure that our housing finance system remains a strong and vibrant source of funding for expanding homeownership opportunities in America… Half-measures will only exacerbate the risks to our financial system.” (Secretary John W. Snow, “Testimony Before The U.S. House Financial Services Committee,” 4/13/05)

2007 August: President Bush emphatically calls on Congress to pass a reform package for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying “first things first when it comes to those two institutions. Congress needs to get them reformed, get them streamlined, get them focused, and then I will consider other options.” (President George W. Bush, Press Conference, The White House, 8/9/07)

2008 February: Assistant Secretary David Nason reiterates the urgency of reforms, says “A new regulatory structure for the housing GSEs is essential if these entities are to continue to perform their public mission successfully.” (David Nason, Testimony On Reforming GSE Regulation, Senate Committee On Banking, Housing And Urban Affairs, 2/7/08)

March: President Bush calls on Congress to take action and “move forward with reforms on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They need to continue to modernize the FHA, as well as allow State housing agencies to issue tax-free bonds to homeowners to refinance their mortgages.” (President George W. Bush, Remarks To The Economic Club Of New York, New York, NY, 3/14/08) …”

http://www.chandlerswatch.com/2009/04/07/harvard-student-takes-on-barney-frank-over-his-role-in-the-economic-melt-down-with-video/

The Real Culprits In This Meltdown

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 15, 2008

Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it’s dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it.

“…The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Reinvestment Act*, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. 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.

As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, 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, 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.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk. …”

http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=306370789279709

what caused the melt down Investors business daily 5 part series.

What caused this loan crisis, Investors business daily 5 part series.
‘Crony’ Capitalism Is Root Cause Of Fannie And Freddie Troubles

By TERRY JONES
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 22, 2008 4:30 PM PT

“…Barack Obama has repeatedly blasted “Bush-McCain” economic policies as the cause, as if the two were joined at the hip.

Funny, because over the past 8 years, those who tried to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the trigger for today’s widespread global financial meltdown — were stymied repeatedly by congressional Democrats.

This wasn’t an accident. Though some key Republicans deserve blame as well, it was a concerted Democratic effort that made reform of Fannie and Freddie impossible.

The reason for this is simple: Fannie and Freddie became massive providers both of reliable votes among grateful low-income homeowners, and of massive giving to the Democratic Party by grateful investment bankers, both at the two government-sponsored enterprises and on Wall Street.

The result: A huge taxpayer rescue that at last estimate is approaching $700 billion but may go even higher.

It all started, innocently enough, in 1994 with President Clinton’s rewrite of the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act.

Ostensibly intended to help deserving minority families afford homes — a noble idea — it instead led to a reckless surge in mortgage lending that has pushed our financial system to the brink of chaos. …”

http://forums.audiworld.com/showthread.php?p=11460754

The Last Two Years

By Randall Hoven

“…What Congress would not investigate was anything about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, they fought against such investigations and cast aspersions against anyone who would even doubt the soundness of those institutions. Here is what Barney Frank said:

These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

You can also see on YouTube how Democrats treated the regulators trying to reign in Fannie and Freddie.

But now we know what happened. Fannie and Freddie were run corruptly and ineptly and went bankrupt. Their $1.5 trillion portfolios had to be rescued by the government this year. Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed CEO of Fannie Mae who was vigorously defended by Congressional Democrats, was sued by government regulators for cooking the books to the tune of $10 billion to increase his own bonuses to the tune of tens of millions. He settled his suit for an estimated $25 million.

On the other hand, here is what the New York Times had to say in 2003 .

The Bush administration is rightly pushing for the Treasury Department to regulate the two giants, along with the network of federal home loan banks. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae provide financing to lenders by creating a secondary market for mortgages. All told, these two institutions’ debt portfolio exceeds more than $1.5 trillion. Their current regulator is ill equipped to keep tabs on Freddie’s and Fannie’s sophisticated hedging strategies and the other financial moves they use to manage their huge investments.

And here is what John McCain said on the Senate floor:

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. …”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/the_last_two_years.html

Why Barney Frank resisted additional regulation of Fannie Mae

Ethel C. Fenig

“…While Bill O’Reilly absolutely exploded at Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) on his Fox news show The O’Reilly Factor, screaming at him, “Shouldn’t everybody in the country be angry with you right now?” – while asking Frank to remove himself as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which oversaw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, O’Reilly was uncharacteristically reticent about another factor in Frank’s personal life which bear upon these institutions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank’s relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.

And they have every reason to be skeptical; Moses and Frank were lovers who lived together from 1987 until 1998.

“It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?

“If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have – or at least what’s not in the stock market – that this would be considered germane,” added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. “But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard.”

Double standard? The standard for the first declared gay Democratic Congressman and a gay lover involved in a financial meltdown under a Republican president’s term is to knock the Republican president, as did the first female Speaker of the House, Rep Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), or to ignore it, as did most of the MSM.

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.

Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank.

Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis.

“I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Clinton said recently. …”

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/why_barney_frank_resisted_addi.html

Barney Frank protests (and sputters and bullies) too much

By Michelle Malkin

“…Have you seen the video of a Harvard student challenging Barney Frank to take responsibility for his role in the subprime crisis?

Watch.

His defensive bullying and sputtering and ranting about “right-wing attacks” speaks for itself.

So do the FOIA records that Judicial Watch obtained and released yesterday, which I linked yesterday. A reminder for Barney Frank (and ammunition for the next time a brave student wants to take him on again): …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/07/barney-frank-protests-and-sputters-and-bullies-too-much/

Barney’s Great Adventure

The most outspoken man in the House gets some real power.

by Jeffrey Toobin

“…According to Frank, at the root of the real-estate crisis was a misguided notion that homeownership should be available to all people—what President Bush has called “the ownership society.” “The ‘I told you so’ here is that homeownership is a nice thing but it is not suitable for everybody,” Frank said at Boston College. “There are people in this society who don’t have enough money to be homeowners, and there are people whose lives are not sufficiently integrated for them to take on the responsibility to be a homeowner. And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership.” He said that many people would always be renters, and that there was nothing wrong with this. “We need to get back in the business of building rental housing and preserving the housing we have,” he said. …”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/12/090112fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=2

New Documents Uncovered by Judicial Watch Show Congress Ignored Corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for Years

Contact Information:
Press Office 202-646-5172, ext 305

Washington, DC — April 2, 2009“…Congress Warned on Fannie and Freddie Misdeeds, yet Liberals in Congress Blocked Attempts to Rein in the Government Sponsored Enterprises

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that as part of its ongoing investigation of the government’s role in the financial crisis it has uncovered new documents. The documents show that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even while liberals in Congress continued to block attempts to regulate the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).

Judicial Watch obtained the documents from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated December 4, 2008. Judicial Watch requested records related to members of Congress activity regarding the policy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase lending to individuals with poor credit risk, as well as correspondence and records about contacts between FHFA and Fannie and Freddie. Among the important documents: …”

http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/apr/new-documents-uncovered-judicial-watch-show-congress-ignored-corruption-fannie-mae-and

American’s Watchtower

Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer’s Role in the Fannie Mae Failure

“…Besides their total ignorance about the troubles that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were headed towards is the fact that these two men, and other Democrats, helped to make the problem worse.

In fact, Frank & Co. made matters worse by pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take on greater risk. They wanted more loans to people who might not qualify for traditional bank financing. And, as The Wall Street Journal has pointed out, Frank “pressured regulators to ease up on their capital requirements

These companies were forced to loan money to people who couldn’t afford it in the interest of “being fair.” Rules were relaxed and money was loaned and predictably low income families defaulted on loans that they never had any business getting in the first place and now you and I have to pay for it.

Another liberal policy and another liberal failure. And now we must all pay for it. But hell, they meant well. …”

http://americaswatchtower.com/2008/09/17/barney-frank-and-chuck-schumers-role-the-fannie-mae-failure/

Joseph Gyourko on Fannie, Freddie, and the Housing Bust

Deconstructing the Subprime Crisis

Wall Street’s Day of Reckoning: The Fannie & Freddie Bailout

Franklin Allen on Lessons from the Subprime Crisis

Franklin Allen on Past Crises

Richard Herring on Mortgage-backed Securities

Susan Wachter on Securitizations and Deregulation

Background Articles and Videos

Senate bailout bill keeps growing

“…To calm voters fearful of bank failures, the $100,000 cap on federal insurance for deposits would also be raised to $250,000—a concession backed by both parties but also aimed at community banks who can be helpful in building small town support for the larger bill.

With each permutation, the bill has steadily grown in size. Treasury’s initial plan was about three pages long. The House version, which failed, stretched to 110. The Senate substitute now runs over 450 pages. And tucked away in the tax provisions is a landmark health care provision demanding that insurance companies provide coverage for mental health treatment—such as hospitalization—on parity with physical illnesses.

Really a bill onto itself, the mental health parity measure has been a bipartisan priority for top lawmakers in both chambers but has stalled because of disagreements again over how to pay for its estimated $3.8 billion five-year cost. In the current climate, that seems to be no longer a stumbling block, and if the Treasury plan becomes law, it will also. …”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081001/pl_politico/14161

List of Earmarks, etc… [Rich Lowry]

…apparently in the bailout bill (based on a list going around). Pretty outrageous. Isn’t this in John McCain’s wheelhouse?

New Tax earmarks in Bailout bill

– Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)

– Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)

– 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)

Tax earmark “extenders” in the bailout bill.

– Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)

– American Samoa (Sec. 309)

– Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)

– Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)

– Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)

– Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)

– Railroads (Sec. 316)

– Auto Racing Tracks (317)

– District of Columbia (Sec. 322)

– Wool Research (Sec. 325)

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2M5NzllNmNlODkyNmU2NzU5NTgwYmIxMDBkNTVmMzg=

McCain will support earmark-stuffed Senate Crap Sandwich; Obama: Me, too!

By Michelle Malkin

“…McCain has made his battle against earmarks the hallmark of his campaign. He couldn’t stop talking about them for the first half of the last week’s first presidential debate.The Senate bill is stuffed with earmarks to grease its passage. I repeat:

– Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)

– Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)

– 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)

Tax earmark “extenders” in the bailout bill.

– Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)

– American Samoa (Sec. 309)

– Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)

– Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)

– Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)

– Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)

– Railroads (Sec. 316)

– Auto Racing Tracks (317)

– District of Columbia (Sec. 322)

– Wool Research (Sec. 325)

McCain supports them all.

Business as usual.

No earmark left behind. …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/01/mccain-will-support-earmark-stuffed-senate-crap-sandwich/

Why I Oppose the Wall Street Bailout

Dick Armey

“…This week, Congress will vote on the largest federal bailout in history—$700 billion in spending authority to purchase the troubled assets of Wall Street’s major investment houses. As a free market economist I unequivocally oppose this legislation because it violates the basic working tenets of free market capitalism and individual responsibility. Equally important to me, it likely violates our Constitution and stands in direct contradiction to the founding principles of our great nation.

Granting the Treasury broad authority to buy troubled assets from private entities poses a significant threat to taxpayers and fundamentally alters the relationship between the private economy and the federal government. Despite the sweeping breadth of the proposed bailout, there is virtually nothing in the bill that addresses the underlying problems that created the housing bubble and the oversized and over-leveraged financial services sector that grew with it. Taxpayers have become Wall Street’s newest financier, with little more than a promise—and a report to Congress on “regulatory modernization”—that Congress will not let this happen again. …”

“…Despite the publicly-voiced concerns of many of us – both in and out of government – about Fannie and Freddie, the GSEs’ defenders in Congress turned a blind eye to the inherent weaknesses in the system. The financial system held together as long as housing prices continued to increase. As the housing market weakened, it became evident that the value of mortgages underlying the new financial instruments was too low to meet the necessary financial obligations. As the true market value became evident, the market for these mortgage backed securities (originated by Fannie and Freddie) dried up as investors triggered a flight to safety. Considering the fact that many of these firms were leveraged by as much as 30-to-1, the retrenchment was severe.The large government intervention that Congress is proposing would create changes whose effects will linger long into the future. The Treasury plan would fundamentally alter the workings of the market, rewarding poorly run investment firms at the disadvantage of prudent ones, and transferring the burden of risk to the taxpayer. At the same time, the $700 billion proposal does not offer fundamental reforms required to avoid a repeat of the current problem. Congress has been reluctant to reform the government sponsored enterprises that lie at the heart of today’s troubled markets, and there is little to suggest their resolve to pass the necessary reforms will increase in the wake of a bailout.

In addition to the moral hazard inherent in the proposal, the plan makes it difficult to move resources to more highly valued uses. Successful firms that may have been in a position to acquire troubled firms would no longer have a market advantage allowing them to do so; instead, entities that were struggling would now be shored up and competing on equal footing with their more efficient competitors. The financial services sector is over-leveraged and too large. Winding this down will, indeed, impose painful costs. Congress is seeking to explicitly transfer these costs to taxpayers, who will underwrite a new government plan devised to correct the old government plans. Taxpayers are being called upon to make a significant sacrifice, with little evidence to suggest that the troubled markets will be settled. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the latest intervention will delay the required adjustments in the financial services sector. The $700 billion intervention is just the largest, latest in a series of failed bailouts with no guarantee that the desired outcome will even be achieved. …”

http://www.freedomworks.org/informed/issues_template.php?issue_id=3031

SUMMARY OF THE “EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008”

I. Stabilizing the Economy

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) provides up to $700 billion to the

Secretary of the Treasury to buy mortgages and other assets that are clogging the balance sheets

of financial institutions and making it difficult for working families, small businesses, and other

companies to access credit, which is vital to a strong and stable economy. EESA also establishes

a program that would allow companies to insure their troubled assets.

II. Homeownership Preservation

EESA requires the Treasury to modify troubled loans – many the result of predatory lending

practices – wherever possible to help American families keep their homes. It also directs other

federal agencies to modify loans that they own or control. Finally, it improves the

HOPE for Homeowners program by expanding eligibility and increasing the tools available to the

III. Taxpayer Protection

Taxpayers should not be expected to pay for Wall Street’s mistakes. The legislation requires

companies that sell some of their bad assets to the government to provide warrants so that

taxpayers will benefit from any future growth these companies may experience as a result of

participation in this program. The legislation also requires the President to submit legislation

that would cover any losses to taxpayers resulting from this program from financial institutions.

IV. No Windfalls for Executives

Executives who made bad decisions should not be allowed to dump their bad assets on the

government, and then walk away with millions of dollars in bonuses. In order to participate in

this program, companies will lose certain tax benefits and, in some cases, must limit executive

pay. In addition, the bill limits “golden parachutes” and requires that unearned bonuses be

returned.

V. Strong Oversight

Rather than giving the Treasury all the funds at once, the legislation gives the Treasury $250

billion immediately, then requires the President to certify that additional funds are needed ($100

billion, then $350 billion subject to Congressional disapproval). The Treasury must report on the

use of the funds and the progress in addressing the crisis. EESA also establishes an Oversight

Board so that the Treasury cannot act in an arbitrary manner. It also establishes a special

inspector general to protect against waste, fraud and abuse.

EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008

Oct 1, 2008 – –

EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008

Oct. 1, 2008—

The latest version of package legislation which includes the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act can be found here: Click link

For one-page summary of the EESA: Click link

For section-by-section analysis of the EESA: Click link

http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Articles.Detail&Article_id=76b1aea4-39b8-404f-b3cd-f8b6c46e3b14&Month=10&Year=2008

Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

“…OpenCongress Summary:The bailout would allow the government to use up to $700 billion in taxpayer money – $350 billion initially, and the rest with Congress’s approval – to buy troubled assets from struggling financial institutions. It would also establish a program whereby the government would offer insurance to companies for their assets rather than buying them. Additionally, the bill establishes “appropriate standards” for the compensation of executives at companies that sell assets to the government, creates a congressional oversight panel and requires the government take equity stakes in bailed out companies. …”

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h3997/show

Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

http://publicmarkup.org/bill/emergency-economic-stabilization-act-2008/

Dick Armey speaks at ALEC Part 1

Dick Armey speaks at ALEC Part 2

Dick Armey speaks at ALEC Part 3

LOL

Bird & Fortune: George Parr, Conservative MP

Background Articles and Videos

THE REAL SCANDAL

HOW FEDS INVITED THE MORTGAGE MESS

“…PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mort gage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards – done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards – no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards – at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.

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. …”

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02052008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_real_scandal_243911.htm

Bailout Fails!

Go Viral: STOP THE BAILOUT OR…. DEPRESSION?

Ron Paul Sept 25 2008 part 1

Ron Paul Sept 25 2008 part 2

Ron Paul: Bailouts NOT constitutional on Glen Beck

Kill the bailout: The House floor debate is on; Bill fails

“…220 against, 195 for, 19 not voting…

1:50pm Eastern…the Crap Sandwich fails …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/29/kill-the-bailout-the-house-floor-debate-is-on/

Privatizing Gains, Socializing Losses… Part 1

Privatizing Gains, Socializing Losses… Part 2

Dennis Lockhart on current mortgage-credit crisis – PART 1

Dennis Lockhart on current mortgage-credit crisis – PART 2

Dennis Lockhart on current mortgage-credit crisis – PART 3

Dennis Lockhart on current mortgage-credit crisis – PART 4

Dennis Lockhart on current mortgage-credit crisis – PART 5

Dennis P. Lockhart

“Dennis P. Lockhart (born February 1, 1947) is President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He assumed office on March 1, 2007.

From 2003 to 2007, Lockhart served on the faculty of the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He also was an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. From 2001 to 2003, Lockhart was managing partner at the private equity firm Zephyr Management, L.P.. Prior to this position, he worked for 13 years at Heller Financial, where he served as executive vice president and director of the parent company and as president of Heller International Group.

Lockhart held various positions, both domestic and international, with Citicorp/Citibank (now Citigroup) between 1971 and 1988. Early in his career with Citibank, he served in Saudi Arabia, Greece and Iran. From 1978 to 1986, he served in Atlanta as senior corporate officer of the Southeast office of Citibank. From 1987 to 1988, he was head of the firm’s Latin American debt-to-equity swap investment program. He was also a member of the board of directors of several companies

Lockhart earned his B.A. from Stanford University in 1968 and his M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 1971. His daughter, Dorsey Lockhart, is a Presidential Management Fellow at the State Department in Washington, D.C. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_P._Lockhart

Background Articles and Videos

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/10/03/do_facts_matter

Do Facts Matter?

by Thomas Sowell

“…The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain– which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama’s rhetoric and the media’s spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years– including the present year– denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today’s financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration “right-wing ideology” of “de-regulation” that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter? …”

Bank Mess Started With Gov’t Intervention

By THOMAS SOWELL

“…Blaming the lenders is the party line of congressional Democrats as well. What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from “predatory” lending practices.

Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.

It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.

All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money.

Banks’ Dilemma

The practice of not lending in some neighborhoods was demonized as “redlining” and the fact that minority applicants were approved for mortgages only 72% of the time, while whites were approved 89%, was called “overwhelming” evidence of discrimination by the Washington Post. …”

“…Laws and regulations pressured lending institutions to lend to people that they were not lending to, given the economic realities.

Forced Lending

The Community Reinvestment Act forced them to lend in places where they didn’t want to send money, and where neither they nor politicians wanted to walk.

Now that this whole situation has blown up in everybody’s face, the government intervention that brought on this disaster in is supposed to save the day.

Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others — regardless of what the facts may be. Politicians get away with this to the extent that we gullibly accept their words and look to them as political messiahs.”

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=301532605156669

Inside Obama’s Acorn
By their fruits ye shall know them.

By Stanley Kurtz

“What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.

This is a story we’ve largely missed. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “motor-voter” bill. In fact, Obama’s Acorn connection is far more extensive. In the few stories where Obama’s role as an Acorn “leadership trainer” is noted, or his seats on the boards of foundations that may have supported Acorn are discussed, there is little follow-up. Even these more extensive reports miss many aspects of Obama’s ties to Acorn. …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI=&w=MA==

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

“ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a community organization of low- and moderate-income families that addresses housing, schools, neighborhood safety, health care, job conditions, and other social issues that affect its members. With a membership of over 350,000, ACORN is organized into more than 850 neighborhood chapters in over 100 cities across the United States, as well as in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. The organization was born out of the American Civil Rights Movement. ACORN was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke, George Wiley, and Gary Delgado.^[1] Maude Hurd has been National President of ACORN since 1990.

ACORN groups work through direct action, negotiations, and with public officials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now

ACORN

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities.

http://www.acorn.org/

OBAMA’S ACORN EXPOSED PART 1 OF 2

OBAMA’S ACORN EXPOSED PART 2 OF 2

Rep. Waters Speaks About Obama at ACORN

What is a Community Organizer?

Lou Dobbs – Electoral Fraud Threat to Democracy

Obama complicit in voter fraud? — Obama’s ACORN connection

Acorn / Voter Fraud / Obama and Community Organizers

More ACORN Allegations

ACORN Vote Fraud

Representative from ACORN

ACORN Convention Member Speak Out

ACORN National Convention 2008, Detroit

ACORN Grassroots Democracy Campaign

Advocacy Group Partners With Countrywide

Shocking!—Democrats Trying to Give Bailout Money to Obama’s Owner ACORN

Community Reinvestment Act

“The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law that requires banks and thrifts to offer credit throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services, a practice known as “redlining.” The purpose of the CRA is to provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to underserved populations and commercial loans to small businesses. It has been subjected to important regulatory revisions. …”

“…Criticism

“…Critics claim that government policy encouraged risky lending^[7] and the development of the subprime debacle through legislation like the CRA. Economics professor Stan Liebowitz writes that banks were forced to loan to un-credit worthy consumers with “no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.” The chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, is said to have “bragged” that to approve minority applications “lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit.”^[8] Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress disagrees, and quotes statistics that he claims show “independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts.” He faults then-Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan for “cheering the subprime boom” in the banking industry.^[9] Economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo counters Gordon, stating that independent mortgage companies are “middlemen” between banks, including those regulated by the CRA, and consumers and that in any case the CRA had caused tens of billions in defaults on mortgages by unqualified borrowers.^[10] Economist Yaron Brook concluded succinctly, “The Government Did It:” through the stick of the CRA [and] the carrot of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the fed created the mortgage market debacle. ^[11] …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

Subprime Pols

Government has been the principal factor preventing the “affordable housing” that politicians talk about so much.

By Thomas Sowell

“…In short, government has been the principal factor preventing the “affordable housing” that politicians talk about so much.Politicians have also been a key factor behind pushing lenders to lend to borrowers with lower prospects of being able to repay their loans.The Community Reinvestment Act lets politicians pressure lenders to lend to people they might not lend to otherwise — and the same politicians are quick to cry “exploitation” when the interest charged to high-risk borrowers reflects that risk.

The huge losses of sub-prime lenders, some of whom have gone bankrupt, demonstrate again the consequences of letting politicians try to micromanage the economy.

Yet with all the fingerpointing in the media and in government, seldom is a finger pointed at the politicians at local, state, and national levels who have played a key role in setting up the conditions that led to financial disasters for individual home buyers and for those who lent to them.

While financial markets are painfully adjusting and both lenders and borrowers are becoming less likely to take on so much risky “creative” financing in the future, politicians show no sign of changing.

Why should they, when they have largely escaped blame for the disasters that their policies fostered? …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjgwYzI4Njg3OWMxOGUzYmY0ZDMwYzYwNzkzYjc1NDI=

The Right Stuff…

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, September 19, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Subprime Crisis: President Bush’s financial team is now proving its mettle — and its expertise. Led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, it crafted a reasonable, workable response to the subprime meltdown.

“…Like so many others, we believe that government should largely remove itself from functioning markets. But in a case such as this, where a market has been seriously damaged due to regulatory excess, an obligation exists to help undo the damage.

That’s the case now with the subprime crisis and housing collapse, both largely due to decades of congressional incompetence.

With world credit markets seized up and little to show for piecemeal U.S. efforts to deal with the growing financial panic, Paulson and others on the Bush financial team late last week shifted course, crafting a systematic answer to the markets’ meltdown.

This was leadership writ large. Paulson spent decades on Wall Street as a trader and top executive at one of its flagship firms, Goldman Sachs, and his experience and market wisdom showed.

His controversial decision to create a new financial entity, modeled broadly on the 1980s-era Resolution Trust Corp., may just spell an end to this financial crisis. Congress, which has mostly sat on the sidelines during this crisis, should approve it right away.

Unlike the RTC, which owned actual properties, the new agency that Paulson’s Treasury is creating will buy up the impaired mortgage-backed securities and hold them for resale when the market turns favorable again.

For ailing financial markets, this was welcome tonic. At this point they care less about details of the agency than limiting the contagion of the subprime crisis so it will no longer contaminate global banks and investors’ balance sheets. Mission accomplished. …”

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=306716096379423

Dispelling The ‘Deregulation’ Myth

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, September 19, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Politics: A dubious and dangerous idea seems to be gaining strength — that government caused the financial crisis by giving capitalism free rein. If anything, it hasn’t done enough of that.

“So why did banks and investment houses get into so much trouble? It will take a long and exhaustive post-mortem to answer that question fully, but one point is already clear: They made mistakes that had nothing to do with the 1999 law.

Commercial banks threw lending standards out the window in their rush to get new business. Like S&Ls of the 1980s, they would have gone wild without Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Washington, if anything, egged them on, but not because of free-market dogma. Banks and mortgage brokers were pumping up the homeownership numbers in America, and politicians were eager to take credit for that.

Wall Street, meanwhile, became a victim of its own innovation. It created new classes of derivative investments that spread — and, through leverage, amplified — the risk from the subprime mortgages produced by the banks. A new multitrillion-dollar market emerged almost overnight, lacking in transparency and reliable price signals. With their asset values in doubt, investment banks lurched toward insolvency.

If regulators failed here, it wasn’t because of policies adopted years before. It was more of the same story that has played itself out over and over in modern finance: Innovation races ahead of the rules. Crises tend to take almost everyone by surprise — including the major players as well as the regulators.

Careful study in the aftermath can lead to smart policies that cushion the blows of future shocks, but it doesn’t prevent them entirely. Nor should it. Capitalism needs some room for trial and error, bringing out new ideas and testing them in adversity.

In this respect, Gramm-Leach-Bliley has turned out to be smart policy indeed. By repealing the rule against banks owning investment firms, it has led to at least two crucial mergers — JPMorgan Chase absorbing Bear Stearns and Bank of America merging with Merrill Lynch. Morgan Stanley may be the next investment house to find shelter in a well-capitalized commercial bank.

You can spot the theme here: By taking down an outmoded firewall, the law is helping the financial industry cope with a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. Far from being the cause, this instance of deregulation, or whatever you call it, is part of the cure.”

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=306716557967194

Congress Lies Low To Avoid Bailout Blame

BY TERRY JONES

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/18/2008

“…Until now, Congress has been surprisingly passive. As Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, “no one knows what to do” right now.

Funny, since it was a Democrat-led Congress that helped cause the problems in the first place.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently barked “no” at reporters for daring to ask if Democrats deserved any blame for the meltdown, you saw denial in action.

Pelosi and her followers would have you believe this all happened because of President Bush and his loyal Senate lapdog, John McCain. Or that big, bad predatory Wall Street banks deserve all the blame.

“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” Pelosi said recently, as she vowed congressional hearings.

Only one problem: It’s untrue.

Yes, banks did overleverage and take risks they shouldn’t have.

But the fact is, President Bush in 2003 tried desperately to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from metastasizing into the problem they have since become.

Here’s the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: “The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”

Bush tried to act. Who stopped him? Congress, especially Democrats with their deep financial and patronage ties to the two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie. …”

“…In the name of diversity, banks began making huge numbers of loans that they previously would not have. They opened branches in poor areas to lift their CRA ratings.

Meanwhile, Congress gave Fannie and Freddie the go-ahead to finance it all by buying loans from banks, then repackaging and securitizing them for resale on the open market.

That’s how the contagion began.

With those changes, the subprime market took off. From a mere $35 billion in loans in 1994, it soared to $1 trillion by 2008.

Wall Street eagerly sold the new mortgage-backed securities. Not only were they pooled investments, mixing good and bad, but they were backed with the implicit guarantee of government.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac grew to become monsters, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. mortgage loans. At the time of their bailouts this month, they held $5.4 trillion in loans on their books. About $1.4 trillion of those were subprime.

As they grew, Fannie and Freddie grew heavily involved in “community development,” giving money to local housing rights groups and “empowering” the groups, such as ACORN, for whom Barack Obama once worked in Chicago.

Warning signals were everywhere. Yet at every turn, Democrats in Congress halted attempts to stop the madness. It happened in 1992, again in 2000, in 2003 and in 2005. It may happen this year, too.

Since 1989, Fannie and Freddie have spent an estimated $140 million on lobbying Washington. They contributed millions to politicians, mostly Democrats, including Senator Chris Dodd (No. 1 recipient) and Barack Obama (No. 3 recipient, despite only three years in office).

The Clinton White House used Fannie and Freddie as a patronage job bank. Former executives and board members read like a who’s who of the Clinton-era Democratic Party, including Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Jim Johnson and current Rep. Rahm Emanuel.

Collectively, they and others made well more than $100 million from Fannie and Freddie, whose books were cooked Enron-style during the late 1990s and early 2000s to ensure executives got their massive bonuses.

They got the bonuses. You get the bill.”

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=16&artnum=1&issue=20080918

Analysis: Washington’s Trillion Dollar Wall Street Bailout

James Pethokoukis

“…Is a bailout necessary?
Look, the financial system probably couldn’t take another week like the one we just went through. Stocks plunging, credit markets freezing. As economist Robert Brusca puts it, “The proposed US government rescue plan comes at the end of a week of almost unprecedented turmoil on world financial markets amid a crisis of confidence in banks.”

The government had to get ahead of the curve and quit reacting on a case-by-case basis. If you look at banking crises in Japan and Sweden, for instance, all roads eventually led to a government bailout with taxpayer money at risk. The rule in these cases seems to be the sooner, the better. If you want more evidence, markets around the world and here in the United States are soaring on this news. Strategist Richard Bernstein of Merrill Lynch, in a research note, says the bailout plan is “an opportunity for the government to solve the on-going problems through one system-wide solution.” …”

“…As long as we have markets and humans there will be bubbles, whether in stocks, homes, Beanie Babies, tulips, or whatever. But as far as the housing/credit bubbles go, I think it could have been avoided. Alan Greenspan cut rates too low and left them there for too long, creating an extreme financial situation that Wall Street tried to profit from. Uncle Sam also fed into that market distortion by making greater homeownership a national goal, using both tax policy and the regulation like the Community Reinvestment Act to, essentially, push capital into homes. And were regulators as tough as they could have been? Obviously not. …”

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/9/19/analysis-washingtons-trillion-dollar-wall-street-bailout.html

More on the diversity racket and the home loan debacle

By Michelle Malkin

“…Referencing my column yesterday on illegal immigration and the mortgage mess, Hans Bader at Open Market shares his experience. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails with similar stories. Tip of the iceberg:

When I and my wife, a legal alien, bought our house, the mortgage company told me that if my wife were an illegal alien, rather than legal, we would have qualified for certain loan programs with big banks. But because she was a legal alien waiting for her green-card (which she had recently applied for), we didn’t qualify.

Mark Krikorian, an activist against illegal immigration, argues that “we’re in this mess, ultimately, because our political elites thought it was good social policy to encourage banks to give mortgages to uncreditworthy people, resulting in what Sailer months ago called the “Diversity Recession” (if this doesn’t work, make that the Diversity Depression). In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus ‘creditworthiness’ was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness. Because, after all, isn’t everyone entitled to credit?” …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/25/more-on-the-diversity-racket-and-the-home-loan-debacle/

The Mother of All Bailouts = The Death of Fiscal Conservatism

“…Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson just wrapped up his press conference announcing the Mother of All Bailouts. He said a “bold” approach was needed to achieve “stability” in the market.

Let me translate that.

“Bold” = Massively massive, taxpayer-funded rescue.

“Stability” = Privatizing profits and socializing losses on a scale we have never seen before in our lifetimes.

I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the “fundamentals of the market are great!” line.

The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.

Yes, yes, crony Democrats are to blame for much of how we got here. You don’t need to recite all the talking points back to me. I’ve been writing about the Fannie/Freddie debacle for years.

But it is September 19, 2008. And this is a Republican White House presiding over the Mother of All Bailouts. Every step along the way since stimuluspalooza began last summer, we’ve heard that every bailout step was just a one-off. Each step was supposed to calm the markets. Each new government intervention and allocation of taxpayer dollars was supposed to achieve “stability.” Each new package of goodies rewarding irresponsible behavior and bad financial decisions was supposed to prevent new ones. …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/19/the-mother-of-all-bailouts-the-death-of-fiscal-conservatism/

Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage Crisis.

Deconstructing the Subprime Crisis

Joseph Gyourko on Fannie, Freddie, and the Housing Bust

Franklin Allen on Past Crises

Franklin Allen on Lessons from the Subprime Crisis

Jeremy Siegel on the Resilience of American Finance

Richard Herring on Mortgage-backed Securities

Susan Wachter on Securitizations and Deregulation

Wall Street’s Day of Reckoning: The Fannie & Freddie Bailout

Housing Bailout For Deadbeats Gamblers Liars Thieves

Part 1 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

New York Investing meetup organizer Daryl Montgomery discusses the origins of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the first episode of a multi-part series. The New York Investing meetup is an organization of 1800 independent traders and investors that provides unbiased stock market education and analysis. We also have a blog,”The Helicopter Economics Investing Guide” which can be found at:

http://nyinvestingmeetup.blogspot.com

Part 2 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 3 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 4 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 5 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

The Big Lie – The U.S. GDP Figures

Patrick Byrne and Don Harrold – Part One

Patrick Byrne and Don Harrold – Part Two

Patrick Byrne on Naked Short Selling

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P1

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P2

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P3

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P4

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P5

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P6

Rush On Franklin Raines

Hey Barack, Who’s Franklin Raines

LOL

Solution to Our Economic Problems…

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Bill Clinton…

Barack Obama is a freaking Socialist…

Time for a Second American Revolution!

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

~William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth, Part II, (Act IV, Scene II)

“Although I profoundly believe in the basic principles of democracy as the only effective method which we have yet discovered of making peaceful change possible, and am therefore much alarmed by the evident growing disillusionment about it as a desirable method of government, much assisted by the increasing abuse of the word to indicate supposed aims of government-I am becoming more and more convinced that we are moving towards an impasse from which political leaders will offer to extricate us by desperate means.”

~Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty

Background Articles and Videos

McCain’s Scapegoat

“”The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public’s trust. If I were President today, I would fire him.”

Wow. “Betrayed the public’s trust.” Was Mr. Cox dishonest? No. He merely changed some minor rules, and didn’t change others, on short-selling. String him up! Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It’s also un-Presidential.

Take “naked” shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short — betting that it will fall in price — without first borrowing the shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing.

The rules announced Wednesday will increase penalties and close loopholes that exempted broker-dealers from the rules against naked shorting. They also make it clear that deliberately selling short a stock whose shares cannot be borrowed is fraud under the Securities Exchange Act. That’s all to the good, we suppose; fraud is fraud. But regular short selling is not fraud. It adds valuable information to the market about what investors believe to be the price direction of a stock. Demonizing short-sellers as a band of criminals, or barring short-selling outright in financial stocks, as regulators in the U.K. did Thursday, removes information from the market.

Then there’s Mr. McCain’s tirade against the “uptick rule,” a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock after a rise in that stock’s price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule’s effect on stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it “protected” no one. The SEC’s permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC’s commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007. …”

“…In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. He’ll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore, circa 2000.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178318884054675.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

The Rescue Mission
By the Editors

“…With his call for the creation of such an agency, McCain is finally on the right track. His harangues against boardroom greed and vague calls for more regulation were not adequarte for the moment. We were dismayed to hear him attack short-sellers in his speech Thursday. Short-sellers were among the first to blow the whistle on firms that gambled recklessly on home prices.

For allegedly failing to crack down on short-sellers, McCain also called on Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox to resign. We will always admire Cox for his achievements in Congress. But as SEC chairman, he granted exemptions that allowed the big five investment banks to play fast and loose with their capital requirements. As a result, three of those five banks no longer exist. If they and they alone had to deal with the consequences, this wouldn’t be a problem. But these institutions grew too big to fail, and now taxpayers are on the hook for $29 billion worth of Bear Stearns’s bad assets. McCain is right to demand that the chief regulator during a financial crisis be held accountable, even though he is wrong about the reasons why.

Compared to McCain, Obama’s speeches on the financial crisis have offered little substance. McCain seized the opportunity Thursday to point out that Obama’s planned tax hikes would come at the worst possible time for the fragile U.S. economy. So far, that economy has weathered the storm admirably thanks to relatively low tax rates. McCain’s tax plan is obviously more pro-growth than Obama’s, but it needs more middle-class relief to have real mainstream appeal.

A mortgage trust of the sort McCain has proposed looks increasingly like the least bad option for taxpayers. Congress should act on this idea before it adjourns for fall — before taxpayers become the unwitting owners of any more troubled financial firms. …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGM2OTUyYzczNTQwNDFjNzliZTFhMjQ0NjViZjVkNTM=

SEC chairman rebuke distances McCain from Bush

“…”Chris Cox is the most capable person I’ve ever known,” James C. Miller III, director of the Office of Management and Budget in the second Reagan White House, told The Washington Times. “I wish Senator McCain would focus on the getting President Bush’s other appointees to the SEC confirmed by the Senate.”

“…Mr. Miller said Mr. Cox had been forced to operate without other Senate-confirmed members of his commission for some time. “Chris heads a commission, not a dictatorship, and for a time was without a quorum for a long time,” he said.

One Republican official managed to defend Mr. McCain and Mr. Cox.

“It shows McCain is not afraid to take on fellow Republicans at any time,” said Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member and former California Republican Party chairman. “On the other hand, I don’t see how Chris Cox is responsible. …”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/19/sec-chairman-rebuke-distances-mccain-from-bush/

Congress Lies Low To Avoid Bailout Blame

BY TERRY JONES

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/18/2008

“…Until now, Congress has been surprisingly passive. As Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, “no one knows what to do” right now.

Funny, since it was a Democrat-led Congress that helped cause the problems in the first place.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently barked “no” at reporters for daring to ask if Democrats deserved any blame for the meltdown, you saw denial in action.

“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” Pelosi said recently, as she vowed congressional hearings.

Only one problem: It’s untrue.

Yes, banks did overleverage and take risks they shouldn’t have.

But the fact is, President Bush in 2003 tried desperately to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from metastasizing into the problem they have since become.

Bush tried to act. Who stopped him? Congress, especially Democrats with their deep financial and patronage ties to the two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie. …”

“…In the name of diversity, banks began making huge numbers of loans that they previously would not have. They opened branches in poor areas to lift their CRA ratings.

Meanwhile, Congress gave Fannie and Freddie the go-ahead to finance it all by buying loans from banks, then repackaging and securitizing them for resale on the open market.

That’s how the contagion began.

With those changes, the subprime market took off. From a mere $35 billion in loans in 1994, it soared to $1 trillion by 2008.

Wall Street eagerly sold the new mortgage-backed securities. Not only were they pooled investments, mixing good and bad, but they were backed with the implicit guarantee of government.

Warning signals were everywhere. Yet at every turn, Democrats in Congress halted attempts to stop the madness. It happened in 1992, again in 2000, in 2003 and in 2005. It may happen this year, too.

They got the bonuses. You get the bill.”

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=16&artnum=1&issue=20080918

Analysis: Washington’s Trillion Dollar Wall Street Bailout

James Pethokoukis

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/9/19/analysis-washingtons-trillion-dollar-wall-street-bailout.html

The Mother of All Bailouts = The Death of Fiscal Conservatism

Let me translate that.

“Bold” = Massively massive, taxpayer-funded rescue.

“Stability” = Privatizing profits and socializing losses on a scale we have never seen before in our lifetimes.

I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the “fundamentals of the market are great!” line.

The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.

Yes, yes, crony Democrats are to blame for much of how we got here. You don’t need to recite all the talking points back to me. I’ve been writing about the Fannie/Freddie debacle for years.

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/19/the-mother-of-all-bailouts-the-death-of-fiscal-conservatism/

McCain Misfires

“…John McCain has just demonstrated his vulnerability as a presidential candidate. Speaking from prepared remarks at an Iowa rally today, he said that he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This outburst demonstrates McCain’s ignorance, his impetuousness and his vindictive streak. Not bad for one remark.

McCain blames Cox for creating open season for “short sellers,” speculators who bet that a stock may go down. It’s true that short sellers helped to sink financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, and that they are now attacking the stock prices of the two remaining big investment banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. It is also true that last year Cox made short selling easier. But McCain’s threat to fire the SEC chairman is still outrageous.

The most basic reason is that a presidential candidate should not go about publicly pressuring the chairman of a regulatory agency. Government agencies are supposed to be professional and technocratic. They are not supposed to be political footballs. The more politicians brow-beat agency bosses, the less their technocratic decisions will be respected. McCain is damaging the machinery of government, dragging it into the mire of partisan discord. This is not consistent with his image as a good-government crusader.

Next, McCain’s comment is outrageous because his view of short sellers is crass. Betting that a stock will go down is just as legitimate a way to make money as betting that it will go up. Short sellers help to deflate bubbles before they get too much air in them. They dig into the books of companies and frequently are the first to blow the whistle on fraud. In normal times, at least, short sellers help markets to price stocks as they should be priced, thereby promoting the allocation of scarce capital to the firms that use it best. When Cox abolished a roadblock in the way of short sellers last year, he was doing the right thing.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2008/09/mccains_outrageous_outrage.html

John McCain singles out a fellow Republican for blame in Wall Street meltdown

Don Frederick

“…McCain did note that the chairman is a presidential appointee, though he avoided mentioning the particular president who put in office the fellow he so disdains. But other omissions were more telling.

Aside from not naming the chairman — Chris Cox (above) — McCain neglected to tell his cheering audience that this benighted public servant brought a sterling, and solidly Republican, resume to his job when he assumed it in August 2005. Cox was a one-time legal aide in Ronald Reagan’s White House who, staring in 1989, represented an affluent House district in California for many years (its core was Newport Beach). In Congress, he was a major player in formulating GOP policy, including a generally hands-off regulatory approach to business that McCain also advocated.

Here’s more on Cox’s background: After whisking through the University of Southern California in three years, he earned both a master’s in business administration and a law degree from Harvard. While still in the House, the Almanac of American Politics wrote that his “intellect and range of interests are impressive.”

Cox was confirmed for the SEC post on a voice vote — with nary an objection heard — by the Senate. The chamber’s members included McCain and Barack Obama (though we do not know whether either were on the floor at this moment).

No reaction yet from Cox to McCain’s attack on him. But boy, wouldn’t we love to know who he ends up voting for later this year (maybe he’ll pass on the presidential part of his ballot). …”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/john-mccain-sin.html

Six in 10 Oppose Wall Street Bailouts

But majority of Americans support the government helping people stay in their homes

“…A new Gallup Poll, conducted March 24-27, shows that 6 in 10 Americans oppose the federal government taking steps to help prevent major Wall Street investment companies from failing.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/106114/Six-Oppose-Wall-Street-Bailouts.aspx

Never Sell America Short
We’ve been through worse, and we can fix what ails us now.

By Larry Kudlow

“…A gathering consensus also seems to be forming around a new version of the Resolution Trust Corporation, which effectively disposed of bad savings-and-loan assets in the early 1990s. A new RTC could purchase underwater assets that proliferate through the financial system and are clogging the credit and loan arteries of our banks.

We clearly are in an emergency moment. But the government should opt for smart regulatory action rather than broad-based interference that could stifle the free economy. On Thursday afternoon, as rumors spread that Paulson was talking President Bush into a new RTC, the stock market soared 400 points. That’s what I call an endorsement.

The pessimists are now talking about the end of capitalism or a permanent decline of America. I don’t believe that for one moment. Specific regulatory reforms can get us out of this fix. And most of all, policymakers must maintain the low-tax, low-inflation, open-trade formula that has propelled this nation’s economy and produced so much prosperity for so long.

I say, never sell America short.”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWNjZjZkZWQ0NzkxNDAwNzNjMWUzYmMzY2M4YWU2ODU=

Exposing Naked Short Sellers; Stopping Manipulative Traders

Senator Tester questioning Cox

Does Short-selling Need the SEC’s Oversight?

Ackman on Short Selling

SEC Chairman Cox on Naked Short Selling Anti-Fraud Rule

Naked Short Selling LEGAL from 2005 till this week?! P1

Naked Short Selling LEGAL from 2005 till this week?! P2

SEC Extends Short Selling Limits

Naked Short-Selling Ban Ends Tonight; Abusive Trading?

SEC Revs Up Short-Sale Crackdown – March 6

Jeremy Siegel on Bear Stearns, the Rate Cuts and Inflation

Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage Crisis.

Deconstructing the Subprime Crisis

Joseph Gyourko on Fannie, Freddie, and the Housing Bust

Franklin Allen on Past Crises

Franklin Allen on Lessons from the Subprime Crisis

Susan Wachter on Securitizations and Deregulation

Wall Street’s Day of Reckoning: The Fannie & Freddie Bailout

Housing Bailout For Deadbeats Gamblers Liars Thieves

Part 1 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 2 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 3 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 4 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Part 5 – Exposing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Origins

Patrick Byrne and Don Harrold – Part One

Patrick Byrne and Don Harrold – Part Two

Patrick Byrne on Naked Short Selling

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P1

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P2

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P3

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P4

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P5

Bud Burrell on FSN about short selling, hedgefunds …P6

Rush On Franklin Raines

Hey Barack, Who’s Franklin Raines

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

“The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (commonly known as the SEC) is an independent agency of the United States government having primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry/stock market. The SEC was created by section 4 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (now codified as 15 U.S.C. § 78d and commonly referred to as the 1934 Act). In addition to the 1934 Act that created it, the SEC enforces the Securities Act of 1933, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, the Investment Company Act of 1940, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other statutes.

The SEC is composed of five commissioners, of which no more than three can be from a single political party. Currently the SEC commissioners are; chairman Christopher Cox (R), Kathleen L. Casey (R), Troy A. Paredes (R), Luis A. Aguilar (D) and Elisse B. Walter (D).^[1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Securities_and_Exchange_Commission

SEC Biography: Chairman Christopher Cox

“Christopher Cox is the 28th Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was appointed by President Bush on June 2, 2005, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate on July 29, 2005. He was sworn in on August 3, 2005.

During his tenure at the SEC, Chairman Cox has made vigorous enforcement of the securities laws the agency’s top priority, bringing ground breaking cases against a variety of market abuses including hedge fund insider trading, stock options backdating, fraud aimed at senior citizens, municipal securities fraud, and securities scams on the Internet. He has assumed leadership of the international effort to more closely integrate U.S. and overseas regulation in an era of global capital markets and international securities exchanges. He has also championed transforming the SEC’s system of mandated disclosure from a static, form-based approach to one that taps the power of interactive data to give investors qualitatively better information about companies, mutual funds, and investments of all kinds. In addition, as part of an overall focus on the needs of individual investors, Chairman Cox has reinvigorated the agency’s initiative to provide important investor information in plain English.

For 10 of his 17 years in Congress, Chairman Cox served in the Majority Leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives. He was Chairman of the House Policy Committee; Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security; Chairman of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security; Chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security (the predecessor to the permanent House Committee); Chairman of the Task Force on Capital Markets; and Chairman of the Task Force on Budget Process Reform.

In addition, he served in a leadership capacity as a senior Member of every committee with jurisdiction over investor protection and U.S. capital markets, including the House Energy and Commerce Committee (as Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee); the Financial Services Committee; the Government Reform Committee (as Vice Chairman of the full Committee); the Joint Economic Committee; and the Budget Committee.

Among the significant laws he authored were the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which protects investors from fraudulent lawsuits, and the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which protects Internet users from multiple and discriminatory taxation. His legislative efforts to eliminate the double tax on shareholder dividends — the subject of a thesis he authored at Harvard University in 1977 — led to the enactment in May 2003 of legislation that cut the double tax by more than half.

http://www.sec.gov/about/commissioner/cox.htm

‘Serious Times’ For Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac’s New Regulator

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

“…”These are very serious times for the mortgage market,” James B. Lockhart III, director of the nascent Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, said in an interview after briefing more than 400 employees at a meeting in the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington. “We [will] need more people, not less.”

President Bush created FHFA this week when he signed a sweeping housing rescue bill into law. The agency merges three existing federal entities into a new, tougher regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The agency will also oversee the nation’s 12 Federal Home Loan Banks, which, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were chartered by Congress to improve the nation’s housing capacity.

FHFA combines the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OHFEO), which has been overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with the Federal Housing Finance Board, which regulates the home loan banks and a small unit of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Authority over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been greatly expanded. Lockhart, the director of OHFEO, became the head of FHFA when the president signed the housing bill Tuesday morning. Bush can now nominate a new director of FHFA and ask the Senate to confirm him or her to a five-year term. But congressional observers don’t expect any change at the top until a new president takes office next year.

The existing employees of the three agencies will be formally transferred to the FHFA no later than July 30, 2009. But Lockhart said that is likely to happen much sooner, perhaps this fall. …”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080102927.html

Federal Housing Finance Agency

“…The Federal Housing Finance Agency is an independent federal agency created as the successor regulatory agency resulting from the statutory merger of the Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB) and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), absorbing the powers and regulatory authority of both entities, with expanded legal and regulatory authority, including the ability to place government sponsored enterprises into receivership or conservatorship.^[1]^[2]^[3]

The enabling law establishing the FHFA is the Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008, which is Division A of the larger Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, Public Law 110-289, signed on July 30, 2008 by President George W. Bush. One year after the law was signed, the OFHEO and the FHFB shall go out of existence. All existing regulations, orders and decisions of OFHEO and the Finance Board remain in effect until modified or superseded. James B. Lockhart III, the director of OFHEO, is the director of the new FHFA.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]

On the day of the law’s signing, James Lockhart stated:^[8] …”

Conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

“…On September 7, 2008, FHFA director Lockhart announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA.[11][3] The action is “one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades”.[12] U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson , appearing at the same press conference, stated that placing the two GSEs into conservatorship was a decision he fully supported, and said that he advised “that conservatorship was the only form in which I would commit taxpayer money to the GSEs.” He further said that “I attribute the need for today’s action primarily to the inherent conflict and flawed business model embedded in the GSE structure, and to the ongoing housing correction.”.[13]

In the announcement, Mr. Lockhart indicated the following items in the plan of action for the conservatorship:

On September 8, 2008, the first day of the conservatorship, business will be conducted normally, with stronger backing for the holders of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), senior debt and subordinated debt.
The Enterprises will be allowed to grow their guarantee MBS books without limits and continue to purchase replacement securities for their portfolios, about $20 billion per month, without capital constraints.
As the conservator, the FHFA will assume the power of the Board and management.
The present CEOs have been dismissed, but will stay on to help with the transition.
Appointed as CEOs are Herb Allison, for Fannie Mae and David M. Moffett for Freddie Mac. Allison is former Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch and for the last eight years chairman of TIAA-CREF. Moffett is the former Vice Chairman and CFO of US Bancorp. Their compensation will be significantly lower than the outgoing CEOs. They will be joined by equally strong non-executive chairmen.
Other management action will be very limited. The new CEOs agreed it is important to work with the current management teams and employees to encourage them to stay and to continue to make important improvements to the Enterprises.
To conserve over $2 billion annually in capital the common stock and preferred stock dividends will be eliminated, but the common and all preferred stocks will continue to remain outstanding. Subordinated debt interest and principal payments will continue to be made.
All political activities, including all lobbying, will be halted immediately. Charitable activities will be reviewed.
There will be financing and investing relationship with the U.S. Treasury via three different financing facilities, to provide critically needed support to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the liquidity of the mortgage market. One the three facilities is a secured liquidity facility which will be not only for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and also for the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks that FHFA also regulates. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Housing_Finance_Agency

Naked short selling

“Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of selling a stock short without first borrowing the shares or ensuring that the shares can be borrowed as is done in a conventional short sale. When the seller does not then obtain the shares within the required time frame, the result is known as a “fail to deliver.”

In the United States, naked short selling is covered by various SEC regulations. In 2005, “Regulation SHO” was enacted to curb the practice, requiring that broker-dealers have grounds to believe that shares will be available for a given stock transaction, and requiring that delivery take place within a limited time period.^[1]^[2] As part of its response to the crisis in the North American markets in 2008, the SEC issued a temporary order restricting fails to deliver in the shares of 19 financial firms deemed systemically important.^[3] Effective September 18, 2008, following the the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history by Lehman Brothers, the SEC made permanent and expanded the rules to remove exceptions and to cover all companies.^[4]

Some commentators have contended that despite existing regulations, naked shorting is widespread and that the SEC regulations are poorly enforced, although the SEC has denied these claims. However, the SEC and others have also defended the practice in limited form as beneficial for market liquidity. Its critics have contended that the practice is susceptible to abuse, can be damaging to targeted companies struggling to raise capital, and has led to numerous bankruptcies.^[4]^{[citation needed] …”}

“…Extent of naked shorting

Regulators downplay the extent of naked shorting in the US. At a North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) conference on naked short selling in November 2005, an official of the New York Stock Exchange stated that NYSE had found no evidence of widespread naked short selling, and alleged “fear mongering that there’s this rampant naked shorting that’s gone unregulated.”^{[citation needed]} Cameron Funkhouser, NASD senior vice president of market regulations, noted that although companies have alleged stock manipulation through the Berlin stock exchange, the NASD has seen not one instance of naked short selling [on the Berlin stock exchange]”. An official of the SEC said that “While there may be instances of abusive short selling, 99% of all trades in dollar value settle on time without incident.”^[7] Of all those that do not, 85% are resolved within 10 business days and 90% within 20.^[7]

The SEC’s short selling FAQ also cites common misconceptions about the practice, such as the belief that naked shorting causes “phantom” shares to enter the market, as one source of confusion over the practice’s market effect. Naked short selling, the SEC said, would not increase a company’s shares outstanding shares nor result in “counterfeit shares.”^[2] Short seller David Rocker contended that failure to deliver securities “can be done for manipulative purposes to create the impression that the stock is a tight borrow.” In such a situation, the failure to deliver would be on the part of “longs,” not “shorts.”^[8]

Statistics on failures to deliver securities are sometimes used as evidence of naked short selling in specific stocks. However, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission stated in January 2008 that “fails-to-deliver can occur for a number of reasons on both long and short sales. Therefore, fails-to-deliver are not necessarily the result of short selling, and are not evidence of abusive short selling or ‘naked’ short selling.”^[9]

However, Robert J. Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, has claimed that naked short selling has cost investors $100 billion and driven 1,000 companies into the ground.^[10] Ralph Lambiase, head of the Connecticut Securities Agency and the NASAA, declared his disappointment at how the industry was handling the issue as a whole.^{[citation needed] …”}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling

Deep Capture

http://www.deepcapture.com/

Background Articles and Videos

Leadership Speaker Series: George Soros (Part 1 of 2)

“…CPL director David Gergen interviews George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute. …”

Leadership Speaker Series: George Soros (Part 2 of 2)

“..CPL director David Gergen interviews George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute. …”

Neil Cavuto’s interview of George Soros Part 1

Neil Cavuto’s interview of George Soros Part 2

Charlie Rose – George Soros / Arianna Huffington

“…Segment 1: Billionaire philanthropist George Soros talks about his new book, The Age of Fallibility.

Segment 2: We conclude with Arianna Huffington, editor of the blog The Huffington Post. Her new… ”

George Soros

“George Soros (pronounced /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/,^[2] Hungarian IPA: [ˈʃoroʃ]) (born August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, as György Schwartz) is a Hungarian-born American financial speculator, stock investor, philanthropist, and political activist.^[3]

Currently, he is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros

George Soros Web Site

http://www.georgesoros.com/

George Soros says more banks will go under; speaks of a “meltdown” and the 1930s
By Newsnight interviews George Soros
Sep 17, 2008, 08:33

“…Soros: “Well I’m afraid we are not through it at all. In some ways we are heading into the storm rather than coming out of it. And right at this minute we are at the very precarious moment because the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers has thrown the financial markets into turmoil.”

Newsnight: What do you think will happen? More banks go under?

Soros: Well, certainly more banks but maybe not the size of Lehman. But right now an even larger company, American International which is an insurance company is under pressure and a rescue is being prepared and the question is whether it will be successfully put together.

Newsnight: So was it right then to step in? Do you think AIG should be rescued? Do you think Lehman should have been rescued?

Soros: Whether Lehman should have been rescued depends on whether the financial system survives it or not. If the financial system survives it, then it was the right thing to do to let them go bust. If there is a meltdown, then it wasn’t because one thing is clear that you musn’t allow the financial system to collapse as it did in the 1930s. They’ve been reluctant to put taxpayers money at risk but if necessary, I’m sure they will do it.

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_28248.shtml

GUIDE TO THE GEORGE SOROS NETWORK

“George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth. A New York hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion. His management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since 1979, his foundation network — whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) — has dispensed an estimated $5 billion to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros. (The President of OSI and the Soros Foundation Network is Aryeh Neier, who, as Director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, personally created the radical group Students for a Democratic Society in 1959.) With assets of $859 million as of 2005, OSI alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to these various groups, whose major agendas can be summarized as follows:

promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
promoting socialized medicine in the United States
promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather … the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike …”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=589

Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute

“…Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI) include the following. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the “Groups” section of DiscoverTheNetworks.org): …”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Organizations%20Funded%20Directly5.htm

From the great editors at the Investor Business Daily:

The Soros Threat To Democracy

“…George Soros is known for funding groups such as http://MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute, which gave him “legal and media advice”?

That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

That’s not the only case. Didn’t the mainstream media report that 2006’s vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?

Turns out that wasn’t what happened, either. Soros’ OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.

So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI’s glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI’s 2006 annual report.

Meanwhile, OSI cash backed terrorist-friendly court rulings, too.

Do people know last year’s Supreme Court ruling abolishing special military commissions for terrorists at Guantanamo was a Soros project? OSI gave support to Georgetown lawyers in 2006 to win Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — for the terrorists.

OSI also gave cash to other radicals who pressured the Transportation Security Administration to scrap a program called “Secure Flight,” which matched flight passenger lists with terrorist names. It gave more cash to other left-wing lawyers who persuaded a Texas judge to block cell phone tracking of terrorists.

They trumpeted this as a victory for civil liberties. Feel safer? …”

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/ibd-the-george-soros-threat-to-democracy

IBD Editorials

George Soros & MoveOn.org

In this exclusive series, IBD takes a look at George Soros, MoveOn.org and the impact they’re having on the Democratic Party and American politics.

The Soros Threat To Democracy

Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

George Soros: The Man, The Mind And The Money Behind MoveOn

The Left: The smear ad published against Gen. Petraeus has drawn attention to its sponsor, MoveOn.org. But the fingerprints of the group’s chief financial backer, George Soros, were all over it. Who is this man and what is he up to?

A Party Bought And Paid For

Election 2008: MoveOn.org once crowed that it had bought and owned the Democratic Party. With the Senate now blasting its tactics, that’s an open question. But not, apparently, for Democrats running for president.

http://ibdeditorials.com/series4.aspx

The Evolving Agenda of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance

“…The Democracy Alliance, as we observed in the January 2008 issue of Foundation Watch (”Billionaires for Big Government: What’s Next for George Soros’s Democracy Alliance?”), is slowly maturing and becoming more focused in its objectives.

Could it be that the Democracy Alliance has finally adopted a firm business plan?

Since its founding in 2005, the DA, a liberal donors’ collaborative that aims to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups–a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement, has focused on fairly well-established pressure groups, watchdogs and think tanks, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations, and political action committees (PACs). These bread-and-butter liberal groups have included:

Media Matters for America
Center for American Progress
People for the American Way
New Democratic Network
Progressive Majority
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Center for Progressive Leadership
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
EMILY’s List
America Votes
Sierra Club
Center on Budget and Policy …”

“…The Democracy Alliance’s “Letter of Interest” invited applications for the 2009/2010 giving cycle from all nonprofit groups on the left, but expressed special interest in organizations that do the following types of work:

* Building power and capacity in key constituencies: engagement and issue advocacy work with key constituencies, primarily Latinos and young people, as well as African Americans and unmarried women.
* New media and technology: content generators, aggregators and distributors that disseminate and amplify progressive messages.
* Law and legal systems: working to advance and protect progressive values and policies at all levels of the legal system.
* Early stage idea generators: focusing on progressive idea generation and development at the early and middle stages of the idea cycle including journals, academic networks, books, and non-traditional think tanks..
* Content generation: focusing on traditional and new media vehicles that are capable of developing and effectively promoting progressive ideas.
* Civic engagement coordination: achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in mobilization and participation work through collaboration and coordination and creating economies of scale.
* Civic engagement tools: increasing capacity and availability of data services, including online organizing services for civic engagement groups.
* Election reform: focusing on structural reforms of our democratic process that will increase voter participation among progressive constituencies.
* Youth leadership development: building on the youth development part of the leadership pipeline that includes looking for organizations targeting young people that work at scale.
* Mid-career nonprofit leadership development: building on the mid-career development part of the leadership pipeline that includes looking for organizations working at scale. …”

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4920

George Soros’ Social Agenda for America

Drug Legalization, Euthanasia, Immigrant Entitlements and Feminism

“Summary: The February issue of Foundation Watch examined the philanthropy of the billionaire financier George Soros. It found that Soros-funded groups supported increased government spending and tax increases, and opposed the death penalty and President Bush’s judicial nominees. In this article author Neil Hrab looks at Soros grants in four other policy areas: drug legalization, euthanasia, immigrant entitlements, and feminist organizing. …”

http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/x3770435801.pdf

Is Global Warming Alarmist James Hansen a Shill for George Soros?

By Jake Gontesky

“…The claims against anthropogenic global warming skeptics are often the same: they’re all shills for big oil or other industry wishing to poke holes in the ‘consensus theory’ of global warming (which isn’t a consensus at all). Under the so-called “politicization of science” program, George Soros’ (the favorite fundraiser of many democrats) has reportedly given as much as $720,000 to Hansen to help package his alarmist claims and get them pushed by the mainstream media (The Soros Threat to Democracy):

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?

That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.

So he got some big paychecks from Soros – but was there a quid pro quo? The evidence certainly indicates as much:

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

Did Soros’ funding pay off? You be the judge. Do a quick google search on James Hansen to read any of the thousands of mainstream media stories touting Hansen’s claims of censorship by the Bush administration. This wouldn’t be the first time credibility questions have been raised regarding Hansen and his alarmist claims [see “When does 1,400 Media Interviews = Muzzled” (03/20/07)].

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jake-gontesky/2007/09/26/global-warming-alarmist-james-hansen-shill-george-soros

Friedrich Hayek

“Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (May 8, 1899 – March 23, 1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher known for his defence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-20th century. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.^[1] One of the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics, he also made significant contributions in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with ideological rival Gunnar Myrdal “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”^[2] He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.^[3] He is considered to be one of the major forces of change from the dominant interventionist and Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century back to towards classical liberalism after the 1980s. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek

Karl Popper

“Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994) was an Austrian and British^[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is known for repudiating the classical observationalist/inductivist account of scientific method by advancing empirical falsification instead; for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, “the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy”^[2] and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the “open society” possible. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

Capitalism Doesn’t Work, Mr. Gates?
I just have to smile when billionaires turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows.

By Larry Kudlow

“…

The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it’s no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We’re talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro’s failed economic model, he’s sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.

Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn’t a bad thing at all. It doesn’t mean that America is heading downwards. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.

The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It’s a good thing. It’s the key to unlocking a nation’s prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man.

Another billionaire, George Soros, the Davos partygoer who finances near every left-wing political-action group on both sides of the Atlantic pond, recently wrote in the Financial Times that the era of capitalism is coming to an end. Soros, of course, has been predicting this for at least twenty years — through the greatest world boom in history. And how was it that Soros made his money? Trading currencies in the technologically advanced world financial markets, the very same markets that were spawned by 20th century free-market capitalism.

So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when their buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors.

Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn’t noticed, it was a miserable failure. …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzMyNDA1MWQyMWMwOTQ3YTk4NDM1ZDNlZWU0MTlkMWU=

McCain and Leadership in a Time of Financial Crisis

By Ed Lasky

“…Since Barack Obama seems to have hung up the hope and change mantra for now to adopt the populist demagoguery that has sunk Democratic presidential hopefuls in the past, McCain should practice some jujitsu and turn Obama’s argument against him.

Barack Obama is the hedge-fund candidate in terms of findraising according to the New York Times. He and his fellow Democrats — including New York Senators Schumer and Clinton — are the darlings of Wall Street. Obama has enjoyed outsized donations from hedge fund managers and Wall Streeters.The granddaddy of all hedge fund monsters is George Soros, who was also Barack Obama’s early presidential race sugardaddy. Soros has also been talking down the economy while profiting from the mortgage meltdown. Soros is the chief donor to a wide variety of 527 groups (including MoveOn.Org) that have been working to assure Obama’s election.
Obama raised almost $400,000 dollars from the employees of the now kaput Lehman Brothers-topping all other candidates, though Senators Clinton, Schumer and Dodd did quite nicely .

Two other leading donors to the left are Herbert and Marion Sandler, who have worked with Soros to promote left-wing causes. This husband and wife founded Golden West Financial, a savings and loan that was a huge player in the mortgage market. Did they see the writing on the wall when they sold their company to Wachovia for billions of dollars before the mortgage meltdown?

Why do you think Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other leading lights of the Democratic Party castigate oil companies and not hedge fund managers? The paydays of Wall Street players dwarf those of oil companies. Their profit ratios can be astronomical compared to those of oil companies. They can wreck the financial markets that are the lubrication for the rest of the economy.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/mccain_and_leadership_in_a_tim.html

Gloves off: Now, Obama calls for prosecuting GOP donor; Update: AIP responds

By Michelle Malkin

“…I noted this morning that the Obama campaign’s Chicago-style thug effort to shut down the independent ad on Bill Ayers is part of the larger effort to intimidate conservative donors and curtail the free speech of The One’s critics.

It’s getting uglier, people.

Obama’s lawyer has sent a second letter to the Justice Department calling for the head of Dallas billionare Harold Simmons, who funded the Ayers ad that the Obama campaign doesn’t want the public to see.

Feel the chill:

Obama general counsel Bob Bauer today sent a second, sharper letter to the Justice Department, directly attacking the Dallas billionaire funding a harsh attack ad, Harold Simmons.

“We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American issues Project, and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard (sic) Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits,” he wrote.

He called the group’s activities “patently illegal.”

Bauer made the case that Simmons’ group [is not] fulfilling its […] nonprofit charter because it hasn’t spent any money on anything other than attacking Obama. Simmons’ spokesman, Christian Pinkston, told me yesterday that plans to, and dismissed the complaints as an effort to lawyer away charges the campaign can’t rebut.

I posted AIP’s rebuttal here yesterday. And as I’ve noted today and will note again: Obama has some nerve whining about campaign finance integrity after getting caught hiding $800,000 in ACORN payments.

What’s going on? Simple: The Left has its George Soros sugar daddy and can’t stand that conservatives have their own committed benefactors. They’ve got a massive non-profit infrastructure funded with taxpayers and operating flagrantly in an illegal, partisan manner (hello, ACORN Watch!). They want the playing field all to themselves. And they are fighting for that turf by any means necessary.

Can they do it?

No, they can’t. Not if you don’t let them. …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/26/gloves-off-now-obama-calls-for-prosecuting-gop-donor/

Charlie Rose: February 23, 2001

“…A conversation with George Soros, the international philanthropist and chairman of Soros Fund Management, about his new book, “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism”. Soros discusses… ”

Charlie Rose: August 2, 1994

“…First, philanthropist George Soros, founder of the world’s most successful hedge fund, shares some of his ideas for revitalizing America’s inner cities. Then, Hugh Price talks about what he hopes …

Authors@Google: George Soros

“…George Soros appears in conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussing his new book “The Age of Fallibility: Consequence of the War on Terror” as part of the Authors@Google series. … ”

Soros Compares President Bush To Nazis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DuafAqAHrc&feature=related

George Soros Part 1

“…George Soros Part 1 Interview on April 8, 2008…”

George Soros Part 2

“…George Soros Part 2 Interview on April 8, 2008…”

George Soros Part 3

“…George Soros Part 3 Interview on April 8, 2008…”

George Soros on Housing Prices June 2006

O’Reilly: George Soros is funding Media Matters,John Edwards

O’Reilly calls Democratic support group dangerous, evil

“…George Soros, Paul Begala, and David Brock are O’Reilly’s “American Axis of Evil” for planning to spend money against Republican John McCain. Does anyone recall him in this high dudgeon over the Swift Boat ads?…”

Raymond T. Pronk

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~Victor Hugo

An Idea Whose Time Has Come – G. Edward Griffin – Freedom Force International

The Capitalist Conspiracy – G Edward Griffin

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 1]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 2]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 3]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 4]

G. Edward Griffin – Creature from Jekyll Island [Part 5]

The Movie: Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 5)

THE GREAT CON JOB – DYLAN RATIGAN – 1 (APRIL 8 2010)

Glenn Beck-04/19/11-A

Glenn Beck-04/19/11-B

Background Articles and Videos

G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #1

G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #2

Ed Griffin Collectivism

Milton Friedman – Collectivism

Milton Friedman – The Proper Role of Government

Ayn Rand – Reason vs Force

Obama Pledges Unlimited Funds to Fannie Mae, Freddie

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LET THEM FAIL ! NO BAILOUT ON MY BEHALF JIM ROGERS

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U.S. Move to Cover Fannie, Freddie Losses Stirs Controversy

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EVIDENCE FOUND!!! Clinton administration’s “BANK AFFIRMATIVE ACTION” They forced banks to make BAD LOANS and ACORN and Obama’s tie to all of it!!!

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Posted by Barbara Kiviat