On the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the $700 billion bailout, much of the attention has to be placed on the men and women we elect to Congress, as they bear a large share of the blame! Most of the blame though, rests with President Bill Clinton and his appointees who earlier mishandled the administration and finances of those agencies.
And I am also disappointed and disgusted when I see liberal Democrats leading this charge to give it all back to those big corporations after hearing their liberal "Messiah" on the campaign trail constantly railing at his opponent that the Republicans are responsible for giving huge tax breaks for those same big corporations.
So what's going on? On the one hand, "THE ONE," says the big corporations get big tax breaks but then his party leads the charge to also bail them out of the mess that they made of the mortgage lending business. Do you think that it is payback time for all the big campaign contributions they received from those same corporations that they pretend to speak out against? And all of them wind up having the "working man" and the "little people" thinking the liberals are working to help them.
Or, as Chuck Colson says, "the people who are going to steer this plan through Congress are the very characters who brought us this crisis." And one of the main characters is a fellow named Barack Hussein Obama who owes these wheelers and dealers, big-time. These two main financial institutions, Fannie and Freddie, have spent more than $200 million lobbying Congress according to Floyd Brown of ExposeObama.com.
Brown reports that Obama has gotten more than $100 thousand in contributions. Well, after all, two of the main culprits in this affair are former Chief Executive Officers of Fannie Mae, Franklin Delano Raines (Clinton's budget director) and Jim Johnson, (Mondale's campaign manager), both of whom took multi-millions totaling more than $100 million as their severance packages (often called "Golden Parachutes.")
Both of these men have been involved as Obama's campaign advisory associates. Obama's $100K share of the Fannie and Freddie loot wasn't the biggest as he was in third place; the two big beneficiaries were CT Senator Dodd and MA Congressman Frank, both with leadership roles in financial matters in the two houses of Congress.
People often wonder where Obama accumulated all the wealth that has allowed him to buy a million-plus dollar home after never having held any sort of employment that could have produced an income large enough. Community activists certainly don't have incomes like that even if Jesus was involved in that line of work, as one of Obama's campaign workers announced recently with a straight face. But it seems that we're beginning to find out where some of it came from: Your tax dollars laundered by Fannie and Freddie.
Liberal Democrats have made great efforts to lay the blame for this fiscal crisis at the feet of the Republicans, but Terry Jones of Investor's Business Daily (IBD) on September 24, 2008 writes that government got deeply involved in the housing market initially in 1977 when Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act. This measure pushed Fannie and Freddie into loaning housing money to minorities.
In 1993 it really took off when Clinton rewrote the rules turning two semi-private mortgage funding firms into a "semi-nationalized monopoly" that provided cash to markets and "made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies..." leading to "corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse." Clinton made more changes and told the National Association of Realtors in 1994 that "more Americans should own their own homes."
Then again in 1995 Clinton ordered his Treasury Department Secretary Rubin, to make even more changes to the rules which resulted in loans "being made on the basis of race, and often little else."
IBD continued: "Later, Clinton's HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, made decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way since they could borrow at lower rates than banks. By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion US mortgage market.
"Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans. Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got donations from Fannie and Freddie and spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities."
Fannie and Freddie MUST be privatized if they are to continue. Contributions to elected officials, like bribes, MUST be discontinued. Most of the blame for this crisis lies with politicians: Liberal, Democrat politicians, right up to and including, Barack Hussein Obama. Think about it when you are voting.
Gerald A. “Jerry” McConnell, 92, of Hampton, died Sunday, February 19, 2017, at the Merrimack Valley Hospice House in Haverhill, Mass., surrounded by his loved ones. He was born May 27, 1924 in Altoona, Pa., the fifth son of the late John E. and Grace (Fletcher) McConnell.
Jerry served ten years with the US Marine Corps and participated in the landing against Japanese Army on Guadalcanal and another ten years with the US Air Force. After moving to Hampton in 1957 he started his community activities serving in many capacities.
He shared 72 years of marriage with his wife Betty P. (Hamilton) McConnell. In addition to his wife, family members include nieces and nephews.
