House GOP Pulls a Michael Corleone

Reader Comments
Back to blog

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
AL GORE, DURING THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES STATED ....."IF YOU ELECT GEORGE BUSH AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, YOU BETTER HOPE HE DOSEN'T DO FOR THE U.S. WHAT HE DID FOR THE STATE OF TEXAS".
Well, what did G.W.Bush do for the state of Texas when he was Governor?
Bush used a budget surplus to push through Texas's largest tax-cut of over two billion dollars. The result was that Texas' budget bloomed by 40% to over 100 Billion Dollars under Governor Bush. As Governor, Texas was the state with the largest volume of air pollution in the nation, and forty-ninth in spending on the environment. As Governor, Bush supported a last-minute attempt by a Republican senator to pull $250,000,000 out of kindergarten funding and use it for tax cuts. The list go's on and on, do you see any similarities to the present condition of the United States of America?
They teach history for a reason...."THOSE THAT FORGET THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT".
Ever since the republicans, under Richard (I am not a crook) Nixon, decoupled the Dollar from the Gold Standard due to the increased runaway spending of the Vietnam War, we have been on a slippery slope towards economic ruin. The mad-dog , $10 Billion Dollars a month spending on the Iraq war is merely a repeat of the Vietnam War Economics. The crisis we are facing today is the result of a dollar that is not worth the paper it's printed on. The rest of the world is slowly coming to the same conclusion and if something isn't done post-haste, they will start dumping the toilet paper we call the U.S. Dollar and cutting their losses before we take them down with us. As to the $700 Billion Dollar bail-out, it's for the Chinese and other sovereign wealth funds that are demanding that their investments be made good or they will proceed to cash out while they can. Well I guess SOCIALISM is bad for the public but good for WALL STREET as it helps foreign banks recover their losses.
I have said this time and time again, the American population, on average, as a whole, reads, writes and comprehends at an 8th Grade Level. The Republicans know that they are dealing with a bunch of 14 year old’s who don't pay attention to what is really going on. That is how they were able to destroy this Country in only 8 years. Our educational system, for the majority of us, is a joke. Analytical thought is uncommon, and the reality is that this is a country that runs on credit and credit alone. We don't make anything that people want, except weapons and war, we have a "negative" savings rate and a large percentage of the population that thinks Sarah Palin is an excellent choice for Vice President.
Guess What, George W. Bush Senior, recently bought over 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay's northern "Chaco" region. The Bush land is close to a new U.S. military installation,and near a huge tract of land purchased by Rev. Sun Myung Moon. This land also sits astride Latin America's largest water aquifer, the Guarani aquifer. The Paraguayan Senate voted last summer to “grant U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction.” and immediately afterwards, 500 heavily armed U.S. troops arrived with various planes, choppers and land vehicles at Mariscal Estigarribia air base.
SOMEHOW I DON'T THINK THE BUSH FAMILY IS BETTING ON AMERICA, DO THEY KNOW SOMETHING THAT WE DON'T. PAY ATTENTION AMERICANS, EXAMINE WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU. THINK ABOUT YOU AND YOUR CHILDRENS SURVIVAL.

Marcus Taylor of CA 6:15PM September 27, 2008

What are these 30 something GOPers doing. I am 43 and have been a Rep my whole life. I have never seen my party screw something up so bad. This is middle class relief. We can't get loans, buy houses, cars, our 401K's are getting killed and you have this Cantor dude running around like Alan Greenspan. He is the smartest guy in the room. Scary. If they screw this up and don't get this thing passed I will vote straight Democrat out of protest. Throw these bums out and lets start over. Pandering for the cameras is a joke when we are looking at Great Depression. There has been enough carnage on Wall Street. Bodies are everywhere. Enough is enough

Chris of NC 11:00PM September 26, 2008

Everything I know about the Republicans' actions I heard from Democrats through their wholly owned subsidiaries in the media. There is a fine line (Ha!) between bias and outright propaganda.

Max of WI 9:36PM September 26, 2008

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable
Terry Jones
Wed Sep 24, 7:19 PM ET
One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?
The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.
While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.
Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.
But those rules weren't enough.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market -- a staggering exposure.
Worse still was the cronyism.
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 their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.
Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.
Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.
From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.
The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.
Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

bill clinton of NE 9:18PM September 26, 2008

If the American people believe Dodd, Frank, Reed, Peolsi, and Bush for a socialistic bail out, and McCain can't or won't stand up for capitalism, putting all the above down, then America doesn't have a chance. Spanish will become the official language of the USA and anyone speaking Obamas middle name will be labeled a terrorist

SimonSez of CA 8:43PM September 26, 2008

Getting rid of George Dubya will not solve the problem. Since we are on the subject of Michael Corleone, then we must state as he would that the current problem is "not personal, but it is business." Thus, any personal attacks are irrelevant at this juncture or at any other when doing business.

Oleg Khaghani of NY 8:09PM September 26, 2008

BINGO!

Steve C of PA 5:07PM September 26, 2008

I agree that tax payers should not be the ones footing the bill to bailout Wallstreet. However, taxpayers are not completely without fault themselves.
I for the last 6 years I have opposed the financial practices that have put us in this situation today. During those same 6 years many of my fellow tax payers have enjoyed the fruits of those corrupt practices and only now that it is failing are making a stink of it. "Oh ye hypocrites", now you have morals? Now you have a problem with how things are working because you're losing money?
I believe the House GOP intentions are good, but now they are only causing more damage.

Mike Olson of WA 4:28PM September 26, 2008

The Republicans would have greater success if they would simply keep George out of the meetings. He is a deadduck President despised by the world and juvenile by nature. If he has his way once again I fear the end of America!!!

Ray Fisher of NM 3:30PM September 26, 2008