Political Punch

I cannot believe my ears. This a.m., I heard on a cable news program that the CEO of Lehman Brothers stood to still make 65 BILLION, yes BILLION and that is 65, with this last proposed bailout check.

I am aware that the proposed bailout legislation crashed and burned yesterday.

May I offer humbly the following proposed 5 year solution?

1) Have the US Govt. offer subsidies to any homeowner with adjustable rate mortgages, who’s payments will or have escalated.

2) Have the US Govt guarantee any mortgage for any new purchases, or capital for small business owner, for people with a credit score of (_____)

3) Upon request, the US Government purchase any home, on the market for than 180 days, at it’s July 1, 2007 assessed value. Commission local brokers to sell purchased homes like any other house, marking it down 1% per month until sold.

This simple solution will ease the pain on Main Street, stabilize prices on Wall Street, and allow the chips to fall where they may on corporate America. NO BAILOUT. Remember that it’s the uncertainty causing the fluctuation. Offer a REAL solution and the markets will calm. It’s simple, transparent and digestable.

George Jobel

I propose a million taxpayer march on Washington DC. It is easy to ignore paper, phone, and electronic communications. Let them deal with us face to face. I am willing to pay our exorbitant gas prices to drive to DC to see our illustrious leaders face to face and have them explain to a million of us why we must fund the rich and Wall Street

No one ever mentions the primary reasons
for this "crisis", and de-regulation is not among them. Foremost are the FED, and the printing of fiat money, money
that is backed up by---nothing. There is a term for Governments that control the economy. That word is FASCISM! This Republic is now as dead as the CONSTITUTION. So much for 'conservative' Republicans.

No Re-election for any member who goes along with it!

Wall Street bailout: What is Bush thinking!!! To all Senators and Rep.s, please vote NO on the Wall Street Bailout. Do not sell-out America's future. Think of our youth. DO NOT GAMBLE AWAY OUR YOUTH'S FINANCIAL FUTURE!

Goldman Sachs stole your investments. Bush regime = Paulson and Cox.

Contact your state reps and let them know that Wall Street gets no $700B deal unless every H1B visa recipient gets sent home so that Americans can work. There is no worker shortage and the temporary workers do not buy homes or invest in our economy.

Obama/Biden 08!

mccain has placed reasonable limits on executive pay.

where the hell is obama?
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Looking for Carly to pass her the meme.

"The expansion of unregulated Savings and Loans in the 1980s brought on the collapse of that industry, a crippling of the economy, and left taxpayers holding the bag. Maybe that was only happenstance. Those pushing for the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act may not have known what they were doing.

The deregulation of the California electricity market, along with the protections provided to Enron through Phil Gramm's lobbyist-written legislation brought blackouts, fiscal and political chaos, and left taxpayers holding the bag.
But the people who engineered that event -- people like Gramm and Greenspan -- had already seen what happened with the S&Ls. They should have known better. Still, perhaps that was only coincidence.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis that has not only come so close to utterly destroying the markets, but has ruined the value of many people's homes and left millions with mortgages they can't pay, was also the outcome of the deregulation created by these men.
The very predictable outcome. When taxpayers are left holding the bag for $1 trillion this time around, it's hard to believe it's any sort of accident."

Mission really Accomplished

"Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

“It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

No matter what happens, republicans always blame Clinton.
The only president to leave a surplus.

that's to be expected when you have the republican's record of the last 8 years --

alpaig52:

to answer your question, a brief summary: you can easily find the whole speech if you look.

March, 2008
In a speech at Cooper Union in New York, Senator Barack Obama proposed relief for homeowners and an additional $30 billion stimulus package to address the nation’s economic woes.

Mr. Obama outlined six principles that he said “should guide the legal reforms needed to establish a 21st century regulatory system.”

But he cautioned that the “change we need goes beyond laws and regulation – we need a shift in the cultures of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.”

He also criticized John McCain’s economic plan as something that “amounts to little more than watching this crisis happen.

“While this is consistent with Senator McCain’s determination to run for George Bush’s third term, it won’t help families who are suffering, and it won’t help lift our economy out of recession,” he said.

September 02, 2008
The Republican Party platform took aim yesterday at President George W. Bush and presidential nominee John McCain for supporting big-government bailouts.

Republican platform 2008:

"`We do not support government bailouts of private institutions,'' according to the text, adopted at the national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. ``Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself.''

Jeru You didn't answer the question though about where has Obama been in regards to asking for oversight in these past three years? Oh, I forgot, he's been too busy running for President since the day he walked into the doors of the Senate. Why don't you do a little critical thinking and do a search on an article by Brody Williams on "Big Business prefers Obama, CLinton to McCain" which you can also find on the Green Change site. Maybe the Club for Growth's paper "John McCain's Tenous Record as an Economic Conservative".

The credit crisis and the lack of oversight over government-subsidized lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac occurred on the watch of George Bush, and many blame his economic team for their lack of oversight in the collapse. Barack Obama has made this point one of his major campaign themes, arguing that John McCain would provide more of the same failures that Bush did. However, what many do not recall is that Bush wanted to tighten oversight with a new regulatory board for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government recipients for the express purpose of addressing bad loan practices — and Democrats blocked it.

The New York Times reported this five years ago:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

This should have been a no-brainer, right? With hindsight, we can see that the Bush administration had accurately diagnosed the problem in the lending market and had a plan to address it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reluctantly supported the plan. However, Democrats objected (emphases mine):

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Sounds a little like the Democratic denial of problems in Social Security, doesn’t it? Nothing to see here, no crisis on the horizon. Everybody just move along, now. The Democrats had forced lenders to assume more risk at lower interest rates in the 1990s, as IBD points out today, and they didn’t want to countenance an end to their populist policies:

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment 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.

It was the Bush administration that wanted to rein in the madness in the credit markets, and the Democrats who wanted to extend the Clinton policies that created the crisis we have now. After the fit hit the shan, as Michelle says, these same Democrats want to shift blame back to the administration that wanted to increase oversight and curtail risk in lending practices while reducing patronage at the giant GSEs.

The Bush administration isn’t blameless in letting this get out of hand, but clearly the origins of the disaster and the efforts to keep bad policies in place fall on the Democrats in this case.

Update: John Lott points me to a March column he wrote at Fox News explaining the underlying causes of the debacle. Forcing lenders to make questionable loans and blocking tougher regulation of the government-supported entities was a recipe for collapse, and Lott explained it six months before it happened.

What's really hilarious is that SEN DODD is the KING of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign donations and he's in just about every photograph of the guys pushing the bailout. I wonder how much he'll get if it passes?

Rex As long as Obama has been taking more money from Wall Street then McCain then mission is not accomplished.
Everyone standing around him the other day was part of the whole Clinton period of deregulating the banking industry while not ensuring any consumer protections in the whole deal.
You've got Pelosi and Kerry who have personally invested in some of these institutions among others. You have Johnson and Raines and others around Obama who have ties to this mess and
lobbyists on Obama's staff just like McCain has. You can even out the playing field between these two and match lobbyists and associates and the question still is where was Obama while this was all happening? What bill did he put forth like McCain did in 2005?

Gee, Obama was fundamentally against NAFTA and now he's not. He fundamentally didn't support FISA until he decided to support it. He fundamentally felt public financing was the right way to go until he decided it wasn't. Where was Obama when McCain put forth the Federal Housing Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 which would put more oversight into secondary mortgage enterprises? The one Democrats blocked both attempts of because they feared that tightening regulations of Fannie Mae andd Freddie Mac would reduce their committment to financing low-income and affordable housing. They knew at the time that oversight was broken. They knew Freddie Mac was manipulating its accounting to mislead investors and that Fannie Mae employees were intentionally manipulating financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. McCain, this week, talking about the need for more oversight and talking about Wall Street being a bunch of crooks is not something he just said this week to win an election- he's been saying it since 2003. I'm not going to defend Republicans for their vices BUT are people really that stupid to think the Dems aren't up to their necks in this mess also? That they couldn't have done something or at least not blocked the bill in 2005. You have both Repubs and Dems sitting on banking and financing committees who've gotten money from almost every institution implicated in this mess. You have Obama, after Dodd, taking more money from Wall Street then anyone and you expect change or have hope in this one man who is as much old politics and entrenched in a corrupt political system as the rest? If Obama would have committed to public financing I wouldv'e had a bit more respect for him and believed he really might be the real deal, but he's not. At least if McCain gets in he won't be worrying about his reelection the minute he walks through the White House doors like Obama will be- and if you're worried about being reelected then nothing is going to change.

WHOOPS.......so what exactly is the money for?

•-> McCain: My Campaign Manager Had Nothing To Do With Freddie Mac Since 2005... "And I'll Be Glad To Have His Record Examined By Anybody Who Wants To Look At It"

McCain Campaign Manager on the Freddie Mac Payroll .. Thru .. August 2008

The McCain campaign has spent days attacking Barack Obama for his 'ties' to executives of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But tonight the New York Times reports that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's lobbying firm has been receiving $15,000 monthly payments from Freddie Mac through last month.

Mission Accomplished

Common Sense :

I'm for investigating all of the last 8 years...
top to bottom

only then... will we really have achieved

Mission Accomplished