Why The American Political Class Continues To Just Be Pond Scum - Part 1

I struggled to come up with as theme and title of today’s discussion. Rather than get cute or inventive let’s call it for what it actually is: the American political class is comprised of a just downright pond scum set of people. They lie, they cheat, they are greedy, they have no integrity, and they are incapable of resolving any of the major issues facing the country today. And the sad thing about it is that they have hijacked our political processes so that they continue to go unpunished with their despicable and dishonest behavior. 

1) We have recently found out that the Obama administration actually did wiretap the Trump Presidential election phones in an unprecedented attack on the integrity of our voting processes. In no previous national election did the current President order a government invasion of privacy of an opposing party’s Presidential candidate. 

But up until now, the Obama administration falsely claimed that it was not wiretapping a political opponent. Consider the public comments of former Director Of National Intelligence director under Obama, James Clapper:

• Last year Clapper went on national television on the Meet The Press Sunday news show when Trump claimed that the government under Obama had wiretapped his campaign.
• Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Clapper point blank if the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump to which Clapper responded: “But I will say that, for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against– the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign. I can’t speak for other Title Three authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity.”
• Todd then specifically asked Clapper if there was an FISA (secret court) order or FBI effort to wiretap Trump, two things that we now know actually occurred, to which Clapper responded: 

      TODD: Yeah, I was just going to say, if the F.B.I., for instance,         had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would           that be information you would know or not know?
      CLAPPER: Yes.

      TODD: You would be told this?

     CLAPPER: I would know that.

     TODD: If there was a FISA court order–

     CLAPPER: Yes.

     TODD: –on something like this.

     CLAPPER: Something like this, absolutely.

     TODD: And at this point, you can’t confirm or deny whether            that exists?

     CLAPPER: I can deny it.

But we should not be surprised that Clapper lied with a straight face to the whole country. Remember a few years ago how he denied in Congressional testimony, when he was under oath, and then claimed he “forgot” that the Obama administration via the NSA was spying on every American’s electronics communications. These people have no morals and no shame.

2) Let’s move onto one of the greatest political liars of all time, Hillary Clinton. We have talked a lot about her historical lies, like when she claimed she landed under hostile gunfire in Bosnia, when she falsely claimed that all of her grandparents were immigrants, etc. Kyle Smith, writing for the National Review on September 20, 2017, brought us up to date on some of Hillary’s more recent lies:

• Hillary Clinton: “As the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received [via her private, unsecured computer server] was marked as classified.” False, since FBI Director James Comey said that was not true. Politifact, a liberal leaning fact checker, said it was a lie and the Washington Post gave Hillary four Pinocchios for this lie.
• Hillary Clinton: setting up the private server was not sinister, it was just a matter of “convenience” since it enabled her to carry only one electronic device. Given that she had a staff that probably numbered in the hundreds to take care of her every need and whim, she obviously had enough people who could schlep different devices around for her. The liberal leaning Washington Post gave this empty claim three Pinocchios.

I did not include all of her excuses of why she blew the election to Donald Trump, racism, sexism, the Russians, husbands forcing their wives to vote for Trump, Comey, etc. since they may not be classified as lies, she may actually believe these fantasies. In which case, they are not lies, just Hillary being so out of touch with reality.

3) Antifa is a collection of anarchists and violent thugs. They have attacked those that disagree with their violent tenets, they have attacked police officers, and police horses. They are a seriously deranged set of violent agitators.

Which has not stopped Hillary Clinton from taking money from her failed Presidential bid to actually fund this violent, vile, and anti-freedom group of people. According to Jane Kristy, writing for the eHeadlines website on September 19, 2017:

• Clinton’s Super PAC “Onward Together” sent over $800,000 to violent Antifa groups.
• The money went to the group Onward Together according to FEC filings, which in turn sent out funding to at least five Antifa groups.
• However, the one group that denied getting Hillary money via Onward Together did point out that Hillary linked groups had been helpful in getting their message of violence out into the world.

I wonder if those that contributed to Hillary’s Presidential run are happy with her now taking some of those funds to finance masked street thugs who would shred the Constitution if they could?

4) Early in Obama’s first term he showed disdain for Wall Street bankers, calling them “fat cats,” and blaming them for the Great Recession. He then proceeded to execute the following accomplishments:

• Number of bankers indicted by Obama for almost crashing the domestic and world economy - none
• Number of bankers prosecuted by Obama for almost crashing the domestic and world economy - none
• Number of bankers sent to jail by Obama for almost crashing the domestic and world economy - none

So even though Obama lambasted the bankers, none of them ever were in serious trouble of paying their debt to society for their hi jinks. And now we may know why Obama never went after the fat cat bankers. According to Kristie McDonald, writing for the eHeadlines website on September 19, 2017:

• Obama gave three speeches in the past month in front of different bank personnel and audiences and collected a cool $1.2 million for just three speeches.
• For example, he collected $400,000 for a single speech he gave to clients of Northern Trust.
• He also gave a secret speech to the private equity group, the Carlyle Group.
• Let’s review how much Obama supposedly disdained these bankers back in 2009 that are eventually going to add millions of dollars: “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on wall Street. They’re still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in — in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we’ve got 10 percent unemployment.”

Sean Coffey, a Democratic donor, talking to Bloomberg, kind of summed up what we all know how Obama has no pride when it comes to personal greed: “Not everyone’s going to be a Jimmy Carter, who does purely good works after he gets out. I don’t think getting any grief for doing this is going to bother him [Obama] at all.”

So let’s review what we already knew: the political class lies (as we see with Clapper and Trump’s wiretapping), Hillary lies (about her illegal computer server), Hillary is funding anarchists with money that was never intended to be used for that purpose (funding of Antifa groups,) and Obama shows no shame, taking money from the very people he supposedly despised and falsely berated. 

More pond scum behavior to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

January, 2016, Bonus Post, By The Numbers: Obama's Hisotricxall Bad Economic Performance

This is the next post this month in our continuing theme of “by the numbers.” We do this theme occasionally where we look at the reality of the numbers in the world and not the lies, deceptions, and spin of the American political class. I used to work for a boss whose favorite quote was: “There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the correct number.” By looking at the statistics, trends, and numbers in our world we can cut through the politicians’ smoke screen to truly understand what is going on and hopefully, remedy the issues of the day.

Yesterday, was supposed to be the final “by the numbers” post for this month but we just came across a set of economic numbers that are worth reviewing in order to put the current economic recovery in perspective on how bad it is compared to other recoveries over the past 80 years. These numbers are espeically relevant given that the President recently bragged about how good the economy is doing.

Remember, always believe the numbers before you believe our politicians, numbers do not lie but politicians do.

We have often and recently discussed the reality that the so-called Obama recovery since the end of the last recession has been anemic, weak, and spotty for a number of valid number reasons:

• There are over 45 million Americans receiving food assistance from the Federal government every month which is about 50% higher than the number that were receiving food assistance prior to the recession despite the recession having ended over six years ago.
• The true measure of unemployment, the government’s U6 measure, shows almost 10% of Americans are unemployed, a recession-like level.
• Over 14 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed would like a full time job but cannot find one.
• Over 60% of Americans when polled said they have less than $1,000 in savings and a large number of them say they have NO savings.
• Wage and income growth has been very small to non-existent depending on how and when you measure it over the Obama administration.
• A great many of the new jobs that have been created during the Obama administration have been in lower paying industries, e.g. retail and food services, partially accounting for the low/no growth in wages.
• The labor participation rate is as low as it has been since the stagflation years of the Carter administration with over 94 million American adults not in the workforce today.

These meager economic results were attained despite the following three powerful tailwinds that should have created outstanding economic recovery support:

1. The Obama administration launched a massive (and failed) $800 billion economic stimulus program.
2. Record low energy costs should have spurred growth and spending in both the business and consumer markets.
3. The Fed pumped trillions of paper dollars into the economy.

And yet despite these tailwinds, the Obama administration and the Washington political class failed to generate robust economic growth.

How do these economic failure numbers stack up against post recession economic recoveries on a historical basis, as reported by the Wall Street Journal? Not good, according to official government numbers and history:

• The top line reality is that Obama has presided over the worst economic recovery numbers in the past 8 decades.
• From 2012 through 2014, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of about 2% according to recently revised numbers from Obama’s Commerce Department.
• That estimate is down .3% from previous Commerce Department estimates.
• Since the recovery started in June of 2009, the average annual economic growth has been 2.2%.
• That is more than .5% worse than the next weakest economic recovery since the early 1930s.
• Over the first five years of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. economy expanded slower than during any five-year period since just after the end of World War II, averaging less than 1.3% per year.
• According to work done by Peter Ferrera writing in Forbes, the U.S. economy has not come close to reaching its long term average annual growth rate of 3.3% during the Obama years, with the best one year growth rate getting only up to 2.8%.
• Total GDP growth in the five years after the end of the Great Recession under Obama has been 10.2%, which makes it the worst five year post recession recovery, trialing the second worst showing, George W, Bush’s recovery rate which was 15.1% and the 30% recovery rate when John Kennedy was elected.

Long term, short term, growth, unemployment, there no numbers, measurements or perspectives that can lead to any other conclusion but that Obama and the current Washington class has done an embarrassing bad job at creating a strong and robust economic climate. The addition of thousands and thousands of new regulations, the raising of taxes, massive new government debt, excessive and wasteful government spending, the whole Obama Care anti-growth and anti-business rules, regulations, and taxes and the failure to fix our public schools have colluded to establish the Obama administration as the most economic ignorant and useless Presidency of all time. 

The numbers do not lie.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

December, 2015, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Bomb Detecting Elephants, Social Security Ineptness, TSA Insanity and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity post we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

So let’s get started with the latest insanity:

1) A primary, continuing theme in our political class insanity series is the fact that the Washington political class and the Federal government it oversees waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year from wasteful spending, inefficient operations, and outright criminal fraud. 

This point was driven home again in an article by The Hill back in May, 1015. The article featured some of the waste that was uncovered by a Senate oversight committee headed by Senator John McCain called “America’s Most Wasted.” Highlights of that analysis included the following atrocities:

• The Federal government spends almost $300 billion a year on hundreds of expired Federal government programs.
• This number was based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis that was released back in January. 
• Some of these programs included Army research done relative to bomb detecting elephants ($50,000), puppet shows in Vermont, and the creation of a dog bite prevention website ($391,000).
• $225 million was incorrectly sent by the Social Security Administration to 106,000 citizens. 
• The National Guard has spent $49 million on advertising agreements with pro sports leagues to support recruiting.
• The government spent $14 million on a program at the Department of Agriculture to develop a catfish inspection office even though the Food and Drug Administration already has one.
• The EPA spent $15,000 to study pollution from backyard barbeques.

Nowhere in the Constitution is it stated that taxpayer wealth should be used to study barbeque smoke, puppet shows, redundant catfish inspections, etc. And of this expense is being wasted while tens of millions of Americans are either homeless, hungry, or unemployed. Pathetic insanity.

2) As a result of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve printed trillions dollars of money to try to restart economic growth. Given that we are talking about TRILLIONS of dollars, one would hope that someone, somewhere was tracking that flow of the trillions and making sure that it was being used the way it was intended to be used.

But as always when dealing with politicians and the government operations they are supposed to be overseeing, that is a false hope. Take a look at the following video where a Congressman is asking the head of the inspector general organization within the Federal Reserve if anyone, anywhere is tracking those TRILLIONS of dollars. I guarantee that you will be shocked by the non-answers and half baked answers the head inspector general gives. 

The bottom line is that the Federal government printed and distributed TRILLIONS of dollars and has no idea whether it did any good, where that money went, how it was used, etc.:

http://realitieswatch.com/9-trillion-dollars-missing-federal-reserve/

3) While the inspector general at the Fed is obviously not doing her job, as the previous video shows, the inspector general at the Social Security Administration (SSA) continues to uncover massive ineptness and fraud within that organization. Figure this one out. The latest audit from the Social Security Administration found that SSA erroneously sent out $128.3 million in so-call “low-dollar” overpayments between 2008 and 2013. The SSA recognized their mistake and tried to recover the overpayments, a good thing.

Unfortunately, they are so incompetent that it cost them $323 million in expense to try and recover the $128.3 million and ended up collecting only $109.4 million. Thus, they ended up spending almost three times the amount of money that they recovered, making a waste of taxpayer money even worse, spending over $213.6 million at the end of the day in an effort to recover $128.3 million. You cannot make up this nonsense. 

4) The following video is short but gives a concise insight of how large, unwieldy and freedom threatening government has become. Rather than repeat all of the scary stats within the video, just consider the following nuggets:

• 21.3 million people, or 16% of the voting population works for some level of government in this country. Thus, a huge voting bloc that would want to extend and enlarge their own salaries, benefits, etc., has a big say who is elected to the detriment of non-government employees who are responsible for the well being of these government employees.
• Before the last recession started, the average total compensation package (i.e. wages, benefits,etc.) for those not working in government was about $61,000 a year while the compensation package for the average government employee was $123,000. If anything, as you will see in the video, that gap has probably gotten worse since the recession started.

See the rest of the depressing news at:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xOAgT8L_BqQ

5) Let’s finish today’s political class insanity with another visit to the buffoons over at the TSA, that government entity that is supposed to protect the traveling public. Of all the government organizations we talk about, the TSA has to be the inept, incompetent group of government employees when it comes to doing their job effectively and efficiently.

We already discussed the reality that when a field test was done to find out how often a fake weapon or bomb could be smuggled past TSA screeners, those screeners failed a whopping 95% of the time to identify and confiscate the dummy weapons and bombs. This is just one of many screw ups we have covered relative to the TSA over the years.

And to that history of ineptness, we add the following failure. The Associated Press recently reported that a convicted male sex offender used a stolen female boarding pass assigned to a female to pass through TSA security screening and almost made it onto a plane in Utah. The guy allegedly took a boarding pass that a woman passenger had accidently left behind at a check-in kiosk and used it to get past TSA.

Fortunately, the woman who lost her boarding pass got a replacement boarding pass which likely led to the discovery that the guy was not the name on the woman's original boarding pass. So not only did the TSA screeners fail to see that the id presented to get past security was not the same name on the boarding pass, they did not even question the reality that a guy was trying to get through security with a boarding pass with a distinctive female name on it. Insanity and dangerous at the same time.

That will do it for this today’s political class insanity from the worst set of politicians ever to serve the country. More tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Retro 5: Who Really Caused The Great Recession? Part 1 - "Duped America" Highlights

Given family engagements in town this week, we will be rerunning some of our most popular posts, posts that have garnered the most attention and which showed that we are currently enduring the worst set of politicians America has ever had.

MONDAY, MAY 14, 2012

Who Really Caused The Great Recession? Part 1 - "Duped America" Highlights

One character flaw about President Obama that constantly bugs me and which we have discussed many times before in this blog (see:http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2009/08/blame-game-part-2.html), is his refusal to accept any responsibility for the failures of his administration. In his mind, the mostly non-existent accomplishments of his Presidency are due to a variety of external forces including:

- His favorite whipping boy excuse, the Bush administration. Never mind that the country's economy really started to come apart (soaring unemployment and soaring national debt and budget deficits when the Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid took over Congress in 2007 after the 2006 midterm elections), as the following graphs illustrate (double click on the graphs to get a bigger picture):

- The Japanese tsunami.
- ATM machines.
- Europe's financial woes.
- The Arab spring, which increased oil prices.
- Wall Street
- Banks
- Congress.
- Republicans, even though from 2007 through the end of 2011 the Democrats controlled 80% of the Federal government:

There is any old saying that goes as follows: "Don’t tell me how rocky the sea is, just bring the darn ship in." Obama has never understood this concept. No one forced him to be President. Any good manager coming into a new job should assess what the situation is and then try to progress from that point.

That is what leaders do, they look forward. Obama continues to look back to blame anyone or any organization for the failures and inadequacies of his administration. Rather than focus on the future and how to get there, he wastes time and energy to cover his own shortcomings. Blaming others in the past does not calm the seas he inherited and does not bring in the darn ship.

But if he honestly did look into the past, which I doubt he is capable of doing, he would not like what he sees. In the next two days we will present an argument that says the Great Recession was not caused by the following factors:

• The Bush administration
• The Japanese tsunami
• ATM Machines
• Europe's financial woes
• The Arab Spring
• Republicans in Congress
• Republicans in general
• Wall Street
• Banks

What really caused the Great Recession and the destruction of wealth, high unemployment, and general economic malaise that still haunts us today, were Washington Democrats. It was not Wall Street, it was not greedy banks, it was not Bush, it was not Republicans, etc.

It was purely and simply the insistence of Democrats in Washington that home ownership in predominantly Democratic voting areas be made easier to accommodate. That was the single root cause of all of our current economic troubles. Sure, Wall Street banks took advantage of the situation for a while to make big profits. Sure, mortgage lenders made shady deals to close mortgages and make their money upfront.

But as we will try to prove over the next two days, based on experts in the industry, none of this happens without the aiding and abetting by Obama's fellow Democrats and Obama himself. His career profited politically by allowing the malfeasance to continue until the crash, an economic crash that wiped out banks, mortgage dealers, construction jobs, home building companies, housing equity wealth, stock market wealth, job growth, etc.

Today we will review the work of Richard Bernstein who has written a book called "Duped America." According to his bio on his website:


Author Richard Bernstein, a former lifelong Democrat, has organized this masterpiece into 31 short easy-to-read chapters. In each and every chapter Bernstein explains how the Democrat Party and their allies in the Mainstream Media have repeatedly attempted to dupe Americans. Each chapter is filled with enough facts to allow you to become more than just knowledgeable about each subject. Duped America is so thoroughly researched it has almost 1,000 footnotes.


Included below is a chapter from the book that he allows anyone to download from his website and thus, I am pretty sure he would not have a problem with me including it here. I am referencing his work since many of the statistics and historical facts he refers to I have already confirmed in previous posts in this blog, making me feel comfortable enough that he has his sources and statistics correct.

The chapter he allows people to download concerns the decades of housing policy abuses by Democrats in Washington that eventually led to the Great Recession. Let me list a few highlights/excerpts from the chapter before you read it in total and let me know what common thread Mr. Obama would realize if he read the chapter himself (the link to Mr. Berstein's website can be accessed viahttp://www.dupedamerica.com/):

• Democrats created the lax mortgage policies that precipitated the crisis while simultaneously stifling Republican efforts to prevent it.
• The history of the crisis started with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law by Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
• When Democrat Bill Clinton became President in 1992, he broadened the Community Reinvestment Act in ways Congress had never intended.
• When the Republicans attempted to restore fiscal sanity by paring back the CRA, they were stymied by Democrats.
• Democrats such as Barney Frank (D-MA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) allied with the Clinton administration to broaden the acceptability of these risky mortgage loans.
• In 1995, an unrestrained ClintonDemocratic administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push home ownership in America to new heights – regardless of the compromise in credit standards that this would require.
• Democrat Clinton legalized the securitization of these mortgages, which allowed Fannie and Freddie to finance everything by buying loans from banks, then repackaging and securitizing them for resale on the open market.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were big campaign donors, with the bulk of their money going to Democrats.
• Between 1989 and 2008, the leading recipient of Fannie/Freddie campaign money was Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee Chairman, who collected more than $165,000. In second place was then-Democrat Senator Barack Obama, who, in just three years in the U.S. Senate, took in $126,000. Third, was MassachusettsDemocrat John Kerry, who received $110,000.
• Since the 1990s, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been run by Democrat appointees.
• From 1991 to 1998, Fannie Mae was led by James Johnson, a long-time aide to formerDemocrat Vice President Walter Mondale.
• Johnson’s successor as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines, had previously served as a budget director to Democrat President Bill Clinton.
• In July 2003, Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and John Sununu (R-NH) introduced legislation to address regulation of them [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac]. The bill was blocked by theDemocrats.
• But the legislation [which was reintroduced in 2005] didn’t become law for a single reason:Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the Senate Banking Committee.
• Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) now admitsDemocrats were in error.

Obviously, the common theme is that the seeds for the destruction of the housing market which led to the destruction in the banking industry which led to high unemployment was planted long ago and tended to fruition by Democratic Presidents, Congressmen, and bureaucrats.

But these are just the headlines. If you really want to be depressed, please read the following downloaded chapter from Mr. Bernstein. The details are far worst according to his research and writings. The political class selfishness, personal enrichment, and abuses of power make their duping of us even more egregious.

****************************
MORTGAGE CRISIS…

Americans wondering who was responsible for the mortgage crisis should ask themselves a question: is owning a home a privilege or a right? Despite the meltdown in 2008, the seeds for the mortgage crisis were sown much earlier by a Democrat Party long convinced home ownership was an entitlement.

As this chapter shows, once that basic premise became conventional wisdom, it was all downhill from there. If one listens to the mainstream media and many Democrats, the blame for the mortgage crisis rests with the Republicans and the Bush administration. They’ve convinced the public that Democrats had nothing whatsoever to do with our current financial woes.

Precisely the opposite is true: Democrats created the lax mortgage policies that precipitated the crisis while simultaneously stifling Republican efforts toprevent it. The history of the crisis started with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law by Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

The law was designed to foster home ownership in low-income communities by pushing banks to aggressively lend to low and moderate income people. At first, it was easy to comply with the CRA. Banks merely had to demonstrate that they did not discriminate in making loans in poor and black neighborhoods.

When Democrat Bill Clinton became President in 1992, he broadened the Community Reinvestment Act in ways Congress had never intended. In 1995, rather than submit legislation that the Republican-led Congress was certain to reject, Clinton bypassed Congress entirely, ordering the TreasuryDepartment to rewrite the CRA rules.

 As a result, banks were forced to fulfill loan “quotas” in low income neighborhoods. That wasn’t the only problem. CRA also allowed community activist groups such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), for whom Barack Obama once worked in Chicago, and NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) to file complaints that could affect a bank’s CRA rating.

Failure to comply with CRA or a bad rating meant a bank might not be allowed to expand lending, add new branches or merge with other companies. Banks with poor CRA ratings were also hit with stiff fines. This rewrite of CRA gave activist groups like ACORN and NACA unprecedented power. Protests often held in bank lobbies or in front of the homes of bank officials, coupled with threats of litigation, allowed these groups to extort huge sums of money from financial institutions.

In response, financial institutions began allocating more funds to low-income, high risk borrowers.Loans started being funded on the basis of race and often little else. CRA became an excuse for lowering credit standards.

Many Democrats have claimed that banks subject to the CRA represented few of the mortgages that led to our current problems. Not true. Nearly 4 in 10 subprime loans made between 2004 and 2007 were funded by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and Indy Mac. Many other subprime lenders not covered by the Act were, in effect, beholden to CRA mandates because they were owned by banks that were subject to it.

Since CRA only covered banks, the Clinton administration created a separate department at Housing and Urban Development to police “fair lending” policies at other institutions such as Countrywide and lending behemoths, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The result? Countrywide made more loans to minorities than any other lender, and not surprisingly, was one of the first lenders overwhelmed by loan defaults. As groups like ACORN ran their intimidation campaigns against local banks, they eventually hit a roadblock. Banks told them they could afford to reduce their credit standards by only a little – since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refused to buy up these risky loans for resale on the secondary market.

ACORN realized that unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks wouldn’t make enough loans to individuals with bad credit histories or with very little money for a down payment. Democrats such as Barney Frank (D-MA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) allied with the Clinton administration to broaden the acceptability of these risky mortgage loans. When the Republicansattempted to restore fiscal sanity by paring back the CRA, they were stymied by Democrats — and by ACORN.

In 1995, an unrestrained Clinton administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push home ownership in America to new heights – regardless of the compromise in credit standards that this would require. Fannie and Freddie were given massive subprime lending quotas, which would increase to about half of their total business by the end of the decade.

Then came the single most catastrophic decision leading to the housing crisis: Clinton legalized the securitization of these mortgages, which allowedFannie and Freddie to finance everything by buying loans from banks, then repackaging and securitizing them for resale on the open market.

Thus, began the meltdown. In 1997, Bear Stearns handled the first securitization of CRA loans — $385 million worth — all guaranteed by Freddie Mac. Subsequently, a subprime market that had been a relatively modest part of the mortgage business with $35 billion in loans in 1994 soared to $1 trillion by 2008.

Regrettably, this massive bundling of subprime mortgages wound up poisoning the entire mortgage industry. Fannie and Freddie used their “affordable housing mission” to avoid restrictions on their accumulation of mortgage portfolios. They arguedthat if they were constrained, they wouldn’t be able to adequately subsidize affordable housing. As a result, by 1997, Fannie was offering mortgages witha down payment of only 3 percent. By 2001, it was purchasing mortgages with “no down payment at all.”

 By 2007, Fannie and Freddie were required by Housing and Urban
Development to show that 55 percent of their mortgage purchases were to low and moderate income borrowers, and, within that goal, 38 percent of all purchases were to come from underserved areas (usually inner cities).

Meeting these goals almost certainly required them to purchase loans with low down payments and other deficiencies that would characterize them assubprime or Alt-A. The decline in lending standards was also facilitated by competition. Fannie and Freddie were now competing with private-label mortgage lenders such as investment and commercial banks to fulfill the affordable housing requirements imposed by Congress.

The inevitable result? Everyone was scraping the bottom of the mortgage barrel in search of new borrowers. Once the looser lending standards were offered to low and middle income buyers, it was naïve to believe that they wouldn’t lead to more relaxed standards for higher-income and prime borrowers as well. This spreading of looserstandards to the prime market greatly increased the availability of credit for mortgages, and ultimately led to the bubble in housing prices.

Unsurprisingly, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were huge campaign
contributors to Congress, spending millions to ensure no reform would be implemented to restrict them. In all, 354 members of Congress receivedfunds. The bulk of the money went to Democrats.

Between 1989 and 2008, the leading recipient of Fannie/Freddie campaign money was ConnecticutDemocrat Chris Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee Chairman, who collected more than $165,000. Dodd opposed restrictions on Fannie and Freddie and pushed hard for the continuance of subprime loans. In second place was then-Senator Barack Obama, who, in just three years in the U.S. Senate, took in $126,000. Third, was Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, who received $110,000.

Since the 1990s, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been run by Democrats. From 1991 to 1998, Fannie Mae was led by James Johnson, a long-time aide to former Democrat Vice President Walter Mondale. Johnson made headlines in 2008 when Barack Obama picked him to chair his vice presidential selection committee. He had to resign in disgrace when it was revealed he had taken out at least five below-market real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corporation.

Johnson’s successor as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines, had previously served as a budget director to President Bill Clinton. From 1995 to 2005, Raines pocketed nearly $100 million in compensation before leaving because of a scandal involving profit and loss reports manipulated to increase his annual bonuses.

Another well-known Democrat, Jamie Gorelick, served as vice chair of Fannie from 1998 to 2003. Prior to that, she was Janet Reno’s Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton years, when the Clinton Justice Department was aggressively compelling banks to make subprime loans to unworthy borrowers.

And Rahm Emanuel, current White House Chief of Staff, also served as a director at Freddie Mac. Most Americans are not aware that Fannie and Freddie, while lining the pockets of politicians, also funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of leftist groups and causes promoting the Democrat agenda.

The grantmaking arms of Fannie and Freddie – specifically the Fannie Mae Foundation and the Freddie Mac Foundation – gives tens of millions of dollars each year to predominantly left-wing organizations such as the American Civil LibertiesUnion; the NAACP and National Urban League;pro-illegal immigration groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Council of La Raza; pro-Democrat community activist groups like ACORN; and former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center.

The Republicans were not oblivious to Fannie and Freddie’s problems. Bush’s 2001 budget called runaway subprime lending a “potential problem”and warned of “strong repercussions in financial markets.” In July 2003, Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and John Sununu (R-NH) introduced legislation to address regulation of them.

The bill was blocked by the Democrats. 30 In September 2003 Bush’s Treasury Secretary, John Snow, proposed what The New York Times called “the most significant regulatory overhaul (of Fannie and Freddie) in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”

Did the Democrats in Congress welcome reform? Here’s how Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee,responded:

“I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored entities we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in crisis…. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury…. I believe that we, as the FederalGovernment, have probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals.”

In 2005, Republican Senators Hagel, Sununu, Dole, and later John McCain reintroduced legislation to once again address regulation of Fannie and Freddie. In essence, the bill would have required Fannie and Freddie to eliminate their investments in risky subprime loans. According to Kevin Hassett, writing in Bloomberg.com, “if that bill had become law, then the world today would be different.”

But the legislation didn’t become law for a single reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the Senate Banking Committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democrat opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the bill.

Had the bill passed in 2005, the mortgage meltdown would have been far less intense. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, approximately $1 trillion of these terrible mortgage loans were funded by Fannie and Freddie at a time when housing prices were at their highest. When housing prices fell dramatically, losses from those mortgages turned out to be tremendous.

Bottom line: if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t buying these subprime loans, the market for them would likely not have existed. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) now admits Democrats were in error:

“Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues, I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourageaffordable home ownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by the regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democraticcolleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.”

**********************************
Edward R, Murrow once eloquently stated: "Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions." I do not intend to tell anyone who to vote for in November. However, I do ask that any voter fulfill their major obligation to be as informed as possible and not be easily swayed by shallow slogans like Hope, Change, Winning The Future, Forward, etc.

Understand the root causes of our problems like Mr. Bernstein does above relative to the current economic situation we are stuck in. It takes some work but both our personal and national futures depend on understanding the motives of our usually selfish politicians and how their actions have caused so much pain and agony. Unless you understand the root causes and causers of our problems, we will never find the solutions to resolve them.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2015,Part 9, Political Class Insanity: Obama's Failed Promises, The Failed Promises Of Home Ownership Rates, Silk Scarves Or Bribes, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that the American political class has dropped on our heads in the past month or so. We do this review every month in order to continually prove our view that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of our country. Their inane quotes, their failed programs and laws, their wasteful spending, their ineptness, and continued focus on their own careers and self enrichment at the expense of taxpayers is constant and disgraceful.

This month could be one of the worst ever, given the backlog that needs to be discussed. The insanity will cover a full range of areas where today’s politicians continue to disappoint and fail us. As always, the new ways they find to screw up is never ending and always creative.

Today is the ninth update to the insanity for this month:

1) Starting with the Carter administration and accelerated during the Clinton administration, mostly Democratic politicians strived to make homeownership more affordable for Americans. This lead to the Federal government, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taking on more and more less creditworthy customers and their mortgages which led to the housing bubble which led to the Great Recession.

In turn, the Great Recession led to record high foreclosure rates, trillions of dollars of wealth lost in the housing market, high unemployment, major banks and financial institutions going out of business or requiring billions in taxpayer bailouts, and the American taxpayer getting stuck paying billions and billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Throughout all of this heartache, stress, and cost at least more American own their homes today, right? Wrong, consider the percentage of homeownership as reported by the U.S.Census over time:

Back in the Carter years and through most of Clinton’s years, the homeownership rate in America stayed pretty constant at around 65%. Six years after the Great Recession ended, after trillions of dollars of wealth was lost as a result of the housing induced recession, the homeownership in America is….about 65%. We have come full circle as a result of the political class’s actions in the housing market. And have nothing to show for it except a weakened economy and trillions more in national debt. A typical Washington program, no progress at great cost. Insane.

2) Followers of this blog know that the Washington political class has never been a beacon of integrity and honesty over the years. This reality was driven home again in a short article that appeared in the May 29, 2015 issue of The Week magazine:

• The House Ethics Committee is looking into a foreign trip that was made by ten members of Congress and 32 members of their staffs to Azerbaijan. 
• While the trip apparently did not cost the American taxpayer any direct money, those on the trip were allegedly showered with expensive gifts and tens of thousands of dollars in trip expenses. 
• The gifts included such items as silk scarves, expensive native rugs, and crystal tea sets with the travel expenses alone costing almost $113,000.
• The trip was secretly sponsored and paid for by the Azerbaijani oil company, SOCAR, who was looking to to have a gas pipeline project it wants to do with Iran exempted from the current economic sanctions the West has placed on Iran.

If Washington politicians had any sense of integrity they would have simply said “No” to the exemption request because that is why the sanctions are in place. Instead, they milked their positions and possibly compromised their integrity for a few scarves and rugs and an expensive trip. Pathetic.

3) We have covered the many failed promises, lies and deceptions of this President too many times to count over the years:

• If you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it under Obama Care. False.
• If you like your current doctor, you can keep him under Obama Care. False.
• Annual insurance costs will go down up to $2,500 for American households under Obama Care. False.
• We will go through every line of the Federal budget to root out wasteful spending. False.
• We will reduce the annual Federal deficit by half by the end of my first term in office. False.
• I will operate the most transparent administration in the history of the country. False.

We could go on and on but you get the idea, this administration has either failed to deliver on every promise or never had any intention of delivering on any promise, using lies and deceptions just for election purposes. And another one of those grandiose promises was broken according to a recent Businessweek article:

• In 2011, the President boldly stated that: “I’m directing our departments and our agencies to make sure 100% of the vehicles they buy are fuel-efficient or clean-energy cars and trucks by 2015. Not 50%, not 75% - 100% of our vehicles.”
• Fast forward to the Businessweek article: In the past six years, only  7% of the Federal government vehicle purchases have fulfilled Obama’s 2011 goal of 100% of vehicles purchased be fuel efficient or clean energy.

Close, missed this goal by just 93%. But I guess this is a better performance than the TSA which failed 96% of the time to find test bombs and weapons at its airport checking stations.

Really sad that whenever we hear Obama boldly state something, anything, we have to assume it is false, a lie, or will never happen, given his poor track record on everything from the budget to Obama Care to government vehicle purchases. Unfortunately, if he should ever tell us something important that is true, we are likely to never believe him, given his abysmal track record of false and empty statements over the years.

That will do it for today’s political class insanity and also this month's insanity. It is not as if we covered it all but after eight posts, and the depressing news that each post contained relative to the ineptness of America’s politicians, it is time to move on to other depressing topics.

Rest assured that the same time next month we are likely to have just about as many examples of wasteful spending, political greed, inept government programs, and who knows what new insanity awaits the American taxpayer.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2014, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Revisiting The Great Recession, State Funded Booze In Virginia, And Gunless In D.C.

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and governments around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

This is our sixth post in this month’s series so the insanity continues to flow out of the political class and into our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms. New insanity continues today:

1) Probably the most frequently quoted person in this blog is Albert Einstein and the most frequent Einstein quote is: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And that is how we start off today’s insanity.

According to a recent Washington Times article by Stephen Moore, the Federal government has decided to get back into the subprime mortgage lending arena, supporting the housing market by backing mortgages taken out by those consumers that might not be able to afford them. That’s right, it worked so well the first time, resulting in the Great Recession, millions of home foreclosures, hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funded bailouts, and other chaos, that the Feds want to do the same idiocy again.

Details from the article include the following:

• The Obama administration announced it wants to provide more support to a weak housing market by bending the home lending rules to make it easier for banks to make loans and marginal buyers to take on a mortgage.
• Ÿ For example, the Federal Housing Finance Agency will lower down payment requirements from an already too low 5% to a insanely low 3% on many loans that are eligible for Federal mortgage insurance assistance and backing, one of the main contributors to the housing meltdown that led to the Great Recession.
• How stupid is this new policy? Consider a study done by researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas which looked at some 30 million mortgages issued before the housing bubble burst in 208. They found that “[t]he evidence strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house” — i.e., whether they paid a high or low down payment. This study found the down payment was a much stronger prediction of whether a loan would end up in default than the credit score of  the borrower.
• Since many homeowners had no equity tied up in their homes because of the low, low down payment requirements, they simply walked away from the homes since they had nothing to lose and let the homes fall into foreclosure, saddling taxpayers with the default bills via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Before the recession, many people could get a home mortgage, backed by the American taxpayer, with little or nothing for a down payment, the exact behavior the Federal Housing Finance Agency is now pursuing.
• The Federal Housing Finance Agency is even considering suspending some of the rules that had required higher fees on riskier loans. 

Did the Washington political class learn nothing from the causes of the Great Recession? Oh, I forgot. Remember a couple of days ago we went through a Politico list of the biggest political campaign donors over the past three months? Remember who was the second heaviest contributor to political campaigns? It was none other than the National Association of Realtors, the group of people who are most likely to enrich themselves with looser mortgage rules. 

Thus, maybe politicians did learn the lessons from the Great Recession, they just don’t care since the political money from realtors across the country is too good to pass up. Anyway, why should they care, it is the taxpayer that will pay to clean up the newest mess that these new looser mortgage rules eventually cause. The definition of insanity….

2) A recent article from The Week magazine pointed out that alcohol abuse kills about 88,000 Americans every year. Thus, one would not think it would be a good idea for government at any level to subsidize alcohol addiction, given the damage it does to health, families, and health care costs.

One could think that but one would be wrong, at least in the state of Virginia. According to a recent Heritage Foundation article:

• The city government of Richmond is probably going to put up $31 million of taxpayer money, combined with $4 million from the state government, to build a brewery on the James River.
• The plan is for the city to build the brewery, i.e. take on all of the up front risks and then lease it back to the Stone Brewing Company who will operate it.
•  Stone Brewing is promising to hire 288 local workers to work at the brewery once it is built. 
• But simple math shows that the city and state will be paying out $36 million to generate 288 jobs, assuming they all materialize, at a cost of a whopping $125,000 a job. How long will it take for the city and state to break even when they forked out so much money upfront, to a company that is not even based in the state. Stone is based in California.

Lets try and estimate that payback rate:

• The weighted average state income tax rate in Virginia is probably about 5%.
•  Let’s assume on average each of those 288 workers makes $50,000 a year.
• Thus, each year each brewery worker will pay about $2,500 in state income taxes.
• If we divide this estimated annual state income tax ($2,500) into the cost per employee at the brewery ($125,000) we see that the payback period is 50 years to break even.

The payback period is probably longer since some of those 288 workers were probably already paying income taxes from another job, not all 288 brewery workers are likely coming from Virginia’s unemployment ranks and that $50,000 salary estimate might be too high, also resulting in a longer payback period.

Insanity to spend $35 million of taxpayer money on a brewery of all things that likely has a payback period of over 50 years to break even when so many Americans die every year from alcohol abuse.

3) The insanity is crazy not only at the Federal level and the state level but also at the local political level. Consider this harebrained scheme from politicians in Washington D.C.:

• District of Columbia Councilman David Grosso recently told an audience that, “I think we ought to get rid of guns in the city and that police shouldn’t have guns.”
• Fellow Councilman Jimmy Wells spoke up to defend such the notion, noting there are entire countries where police don’t carry deadly weapons.
• Grosso went on to defend his position with the following rationale: “I think we have to reimagine the way that we relate to one another, across the board, and that includes [the D.C. police department],” as quoted in the Washington Post. “When you have a gun it changes the dynamic completely. If we had a police force that could be trained to de-escalate situations without a gun like in other countries, I think we’d be in a better place. … Call me a radical, but I’m trying to change things in our city.”

I would not call him a radical, I would call him so out of touch with reality that he cannot even recognize reality if it hit him over the head. Does he really think that local thugs, drug dealers, etc. are going to give up their evil ways, and weapons, because a police officer has been trained to verbally defuse situations? In Chicago the police kept their guns, it was only the law abiding civilians who lost their guns, and Chicago became one of the most violent cities in the country. 

How much more violent would Chicago have become , and D.C. would become, if even the police were disarmed? Crazy talk from an out of touch political class. 

That will close out the insanity for today. Local politicians who believe that criminals can be verbally talked out of their criminal ways, state politicians that find it okay to build a money losing brewery for a company that is about 3,000 miles away, and Federal politicians who want to recreate the conditions for a Great Recession II. And we are still not done with the latest insanity from all politicians at all levels of government.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w