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Dems give props to Obama
Before the House’s vote on the economic rescue package, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure to say the word “bipartisan” every two seconds. She didn’t want to run the risk of losing Republican votes, which GOP leaders said she did last time with her less-than-complimentary remarks about Republican values.
But after the vote, the tone was different. Dems immediately gathered a press conference to shower compliments on their presidential nominee Barack Obama for bringing in votes to ensure the bill’s passage. Pelosi made sure to drop his name multiple times.
Obama did call several “no”-voting representatives to bring them around to his way of seeing things. Looks like it worked, with 32 more Dems voting “aye” than on Monday.
The Republicans haven’t, so far, snuck in plugs for John McCain for helping to pass the bill. They may still, but both Republicans and Democrats – even the “aye” voters – don’t view this bill as some sort of victory, since it was so expensive and loaded with pork. It’s hard to take credit for spending $700 billion, no matter what side of the issue you’re on.
back to top40 Comments to “Dems give props to Obama”
Most fascinating to me was how they also stated repeated how this bill was SO MUCH BETTER than the bill they rejected previously. No credit was given to those that rejected it and no apologies for excoriating them in the press a week ago.
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So it looks like the necessary vote changing happened on the Dem side (32 votes when only 23 were needed). Doesn’t look so bipartisan to me. Sounds like Pelosi was being generous.
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This is interesting.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/easescredit.asp
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It won’t seem so generous in a few weeks when the economy is still in the tank and everyone is trying to distance themselves from their “Yea” votes.
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NEWS FLASH: Dems Give Props to Obama!
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Now that they’re taking credit for the solution, will they begin to take credit for the problem?
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It is amazing you would have thought that Obama was responsible for the entire thing.
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Outkast,
Is that a real NEWS FLASH or a USED ONE?
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Great link KBells #4. Even better is the original article which clearly predicts this financial meltdown over 8 years ago.
This is clearly the result of racial tampering by Democrats. Of course they would block all attempts to correct the problem since it was their initiative. What we now call a problem is precisely what Democrats have been calling a solution for years. Then when it all melts down they blame everyone else.
How can we ever correct the problem, if Congress is unwilling to admit what the problem is?
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Good video Serious George #7. I am surprised that a single Democrat actually did admit the problem. Shocking!
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Personally I would be embarrassed to take credit for this bill. And given the pork added including tax cuts addeed to satisfy Republican holdouts, if I were a Democratic politician I would criticize the Republicans for their childish fit in not approving the original bill which had less port.
I still can’t understand how anyone believes attaching a tax cut to a $700 billion spending bill makes financial sense.
Here’s a Democratic Rep. who voted against the bill and isn’t crediting Obama with anything to do with this mess.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/03-11
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Xion: And it was Democrats who made financial institutions extend loans to anybody who walked in the door? Not just lower-income people, but people who had little or no income? It was Democrats who made lenders decide that they didn’t need to see documentation of jobs? It was Democrats who set up teaser-rate ARMs with enormous increases after the teaser period ended? It was Democrats that made lenders package up these bad loans into securities instruments and use them for their own transactions?
It was Democrats that made overpriced houses start losing paper value — leading to foreclosures and people upside-down in houses they spent too much for — three years ago? It was Democrats who made people think it was smart to take out huge home equity loans to buy boats and cars just before their house’s market value fell?
Bull.
The Democratic-led push for affordable housing has been one small piece of the problem. A lot more of it has been greed and shortsightedness on the part of the lenders, and Republican-led deregulation.
Republicans have been trying to blame it all on the Clinton-era Community Reinvestment Act, even though the documented fact is that institutions covered under the CRA have been less likely to have been behaving irresponsibly than those that aren’t.
How about we knock off the partisanship (”your side is to blame!” “no, your side is!”) and just agree that it’s a complex problem with a number of different contributing factors and everybody involved has made some mistakes?
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The Republicans haven’t, so far, snuck in plugs for John McCain for helping to pass the bill.
Actually, McCain is running ads criticizing Obama for voting for the “bailout.”
Besides voting for it, Obama was out front for it, in contrast to McCain, who displayed remarkable leadership by advertising his presence in Washington and also voting yes, but without actually promoting anything.
If Emily Belz is looking for incoherence, she’ll find it among Republicans, who are against pork, regulation, and socialism, but have now determined that America needs government to provide pork, regulation, and socialism. Not to mention the schizophrenia of blaming Nancy Pelosi for sabotaging the first vote and taking offense over the conclusion that Republicans vote on emotion instead of principle.
Belz is correct that it’s “hard to take credit” for the plan, but that’s what Democrats are doing, though not by claiming the plan is perfect. Dissension among Democrats is not over the principle that Government must intervene, but over the most logical method of putting tax dollars at risk on behalf of the financial system. Some Democrats want massive stimulus, assistance to homeowners, and direct recapitalization of the banking system leading to acquisition and some form of “nationalization.” These things are the next logical steps if Paulson’s efforts fail.
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Sorry for the long posting but this article from the Boston Globe is too important to ignore and needs to be read by every American.
BT
Jeff Jacoby
Frank’s fingerprints are all over the financial fiasco
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / September 28, 2008
Email| Print| Single Page| Yahoo! Buzz| ShareThisText size – + ‘THE PRIVATE SECTOR got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it.” That’s Barney Frank’s story, and he’s sticking to it. As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by “bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector,” Frank said; the country is in dire straits today “thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best.” And that philosophy goes “back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, ‘Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.’ ”
In fact, that isn’t what Reagan said. His actual words were: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Were he president today, he would be saying much the same thing.
Because while the mortgage crisis convulsing Wall Street has its share of private-sector culprits — many of whom have been learning lately just how pitiless the private sector’s discipline can be — they weren’t the ones who “got us into this mess.” Barney Frank’s talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn’t wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so – or else.
The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and “redlining” because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.
The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to “meet the credit needs” of “low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.” Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this “subprime” lending by authorizing ever more “flexible” criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor,” the Fed’s guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as “valid income sources” to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.
As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn’t take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. “What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?” I asked in this space in 1995. “Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today’s self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?”
Frank doesn’t. But his fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that “these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis.” When the White House warned of “systemic risk for our financial system” unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.
Now that the bubble has burst and the “systemic risk” is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: “The private sector got us into this mess.” Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
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You can be sure that Democrats will run Congressional investigations in which Republicans can call witnesses and take evidence. Everyone’s head will be on the block. Republicans like BT will have the challenge of demonstrating that they want to know what went wrong as opposed to what Barney Frank did wrong, or didn’t.
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BT: See #13.
Fact: No government program ever made lending institutions relax their standards for creditworthiness. They did that all on their own. The CRA and other affordable-housing initiatives attacked actual discrimination — where racial minorities or people living in certain neighborhoods had a harder time getting loans due to factors other than their actual creditworthiness.
Fact: No government program inflated or deflated the price of houses.
Fact: No government program required financial institutions to package bad loans into shaky securities instruments and use them for their own transactions.
Fact: Institutions covered under the CRA have been much more responsible in their lending practices than those that aren’t. They are the least of this mess.
I know conservatives are far more interested in blaming Democrats for the problem than they are in actually solving it, but Jacoby’s accusations don’t hold up.
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John Stewart satirizes McCain’s incoherence as Gollum, “an old man corrupted by his quest for ultimate power.”
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Additional fact: No government program told homeowners to go out and get huge home equity loans based on the paper value of their house. Nor did any government program require lenders to make those loans.
I refinanced my house a few years ago and found the value, on paper, had doubled. The lender encouraged me to add more than $100,000 to the mortgage — getting it in cash — because I could. Now the value has dropped. It’s still worth more than I paid for it in 2001, but quite a bit less than it was in 2005.
Barney Frank did not tell the lender to try to convince me to overextend myself.
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(PS … I did not take the bait.)
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Funniest bumper sticker yet:
“Frodo failed, Bush has the ring”
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It’s all my fault.
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STEVEG
Please provide links to your FACTS. I am very interested in reviewing them for myself. Thanks.
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That’s exactly right BT #15. SteveG refuses to read the NY Times articles KBells posted corroborating that point and predicting this meltdown nearly a decade ago.
FACT: Barney Frank’s lover for many years was Herb Moses a Fannie Mae executive who created the Title One program pushing subprime loans to minorities who couldn’t pay.
If that is not a conflict of interest, tell me what is. The Congressman charged with banking oversight was sleeping with the banker who created the loan program that ran Fannie and Freddie into the ground. And guess who we put in charge of fixing the mess?
I’ll tell you who is to blame … we are for allowing Barney Frank to remain in Congress. He should be in prison, not prancing around all the news programs.
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Xion: I’ve responded to this story on at least two threads now. I read the article. The article is correct but it is NOT the smoking gun you think it is.
Here is a link to a piece in BusinessWeek that discusses this a bit.
Here is another article on it.
The Clinton administration urged more lending to people who had previously had a hard time getting loans due to discrimination, NOT due to bad credit. The administration in fact specified that the loans were to be made according to sound banking policies.
The lax standards came from the lenders themselves.
Deny this all you want. I know many conservatives wake up every morning and chant “It’s all Clinton’s fault” six times before getting out of bed, so if it comforts you blame him, be my guest. But it won’t be true, or helpful.
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Funny how the “liberal” New York Times suddenly becomes a credible source when you think it supports your opinions.
Here’s the key passage from that article. Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers.
Now you see the word “Clinton” and that’s probably all you need. But look again. This article says nothing about the nature of the “pressure” or what legal mechanisms it involved. But the article also identifies stock holders and lenders as other sources of pressure, all insisting that Fannie Mae make more loans to subprime borrowers.
Funnily, none of that penetrates your thought processes. You just see a way to blame Clinton (by ignoring a lot of what the article does say and imagining things it does not say) and that’s good enough for you.
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SteveG, I am not blaming only Clinton; I am blaming everyone. The first step in fixing a problem is identifying what went wrong. I focused on the Democrats only because liberals think they can do no wrong and because a few Democrats are especially involved in this. But I could care less what party they are in.
I am furious with McCain right now for not being a maverick on the bailout and not ‘naming names’. But implicating someone in your own party is something no liberal is capable of.
You quote two paragraphs above (#26), yet you will only admit half of it. Of course banks are at fault since they gave out the loans. But since Congress was charged with oversight they are ultimately to blame.
If a lion gets out of the zoo who do you blame, the lion or the zookeeper? Banks do what banks do. But since Congress threatened them to lower their standards or face discrimination lawsuits and since the loans were government backed they were more than happy to take on more risk.
It turns out that a few Congressman specifically charged with oversight of the banks didn’t do their jobs. Even worse, they were actively involved in pressuring banks to give out those subprime loans. But one Congressman was involved more than any other. Who cares what party he is in?
Barney Frank was on the banking commission charged with banking oversight since 1981, yet he was pushing these loans more than anyone. He received $40,000 from the bank.
Worse than that, there was the conflict of interest. He had a 10 year “affair” with the guy who created Title One loans at Fannie Mae which turned out to be the root cause of this whole collapse. Together they ran Fannie Mae into the ground, but liberals and the MSM treat him like a financial genius and he is now more powerful than ever.
But you won’t admit any of this because that Congressman happens to be from your party. And you will stick to the party line until your dying breath. If Barney Frank were a Republican you would agree with every word I am saying and he would be on the front page of every paper and would be under investigation.
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I am still shocked that conservatives are legitimizing homosexuality by focusing on Barney Frank’s financial misdeeds and not blasting him for having a boyfriend.
How do we know he doesn’t cheat on his boyfriend, either?
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Let me try this again at a 5th grade level.
Let’s say I am a Congressman in charge of banking legislation and oversight and my wife is an executive of the largest government run mortgage lender in the world.
Congress sets it up so that this bank can borrow at 1% but lend out at 7%. Congress and the bank pocket the difference. Let’s see … I wonder what they are going to do?
Obviously, the more this government backed bank lends, the more Congress and the bank executives make. So I fight for years to relax the rules and my wife carries it out. Eventually we run the whole operation into the ground and walk away filthy stinking rich.
Ever heard of Bonnie and Clyde?
Can any liberal on planet earth ever admit that maybe, just maybe it is possible for another liberal to do something wrong … ever?
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He should be in prison, not prancing around all the news programs.
I really can’t let that kind of homophobic bigotry pass by on Worldmag without standing up to it.
It’s a perfect example of why we can’t have and adult discussion on Worldmag or in this country about the problems that face us.
It also, sadly, shows the hatred and contempt that dwells in the hearts of conservative Christians.
Xion should apologize for it. At a minimum the homophobic, hateful comment should be shoved where the sun doesn’t shine.
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Anlir
Check out your hateful comments, no one mentions the word “hate” – “hateful” – “hatred” here more than you do — throw in ‘bigoted” as well — its always directed at anyone you believe finds homosexuality sinful, and disagrees with you.
Your bigoted remarks are tiresome, to those who are Believers and do not agree with you.
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That’s hilarious. Anlir, you really should create a dictionary of all the words no one is allowed to say any more. Who put you in charge of the censorship committee?
Can you or anyone answer what I have said, or is it easier to just keep changing the subject?
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There is no doubt that Xion’s words were deliberately chosen as a slur on Barney Frank. That a conservative Christian issued another slur on Worldmag is not surprising. It’s why adult dialog is all but impossible on here. What a witness for Christ Xion is!
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From now on all posters on WMB are hereby forbidden from ever naming Santa’s reindeer again, by order of the language Czar. Any mention henceforth of Dancer or Prancer or Vixen will be met with a swift scolding. Words having to do with musicals and fashion are also banned until further notice. You have been warned!
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This is precisely why Barney Frank can cause a national banking catastrophe and still be treated like a financial genius, because politicians prefer economic ruin to the career ending accusation of discrimination or intolerance.
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XION – Your analogy to the lion/zoo keeper is very good; however, I believe it is too kind.
Having read a LOT over the past two weeks, it is my opinion that the government said to the zoo keeper, let the lion out. Maybe not directly, but indirectly, using the CRA regulations as the key to open the cage.
If you wanted to get money from the Fed at 1%, you had to prove that you were complying to the CRA. To comply with the CRA, a certain percentage of your loan portfolio had to be to low income borrowers. The issues faced by the banks were:
1. Low income borrowers typically don’t have a lot of credit history, thus they have a low credit score.
2. Low income borrowers typically cannot afford the typical 20% down required by conventional loans.
3. Low income borrowers typically cannot afford the increase to the monthly payment on a house if they have to by mortgage insurance (PMI) because they cannot afford the typical 20% down.
4. Low income borrowers cannot always come up with the documentation required for a conventional loan (two years of W-2s, bank statements, etc.).
This is 4 of many reasons why there was a challenge in complying with the CRA using traditional lending practices. So, enter the “Exotic” loans: No Document Loans, 100% Loans, Piggy-Back Loans (the 20% down payment is a second mortgage), Sub-Prime Loans. All backed (as XION stated) by the federal government via Fannie Mae.
I have an amazing analysis done by Credit Suisse where they detail these loans. Anyone paying attention could have (and did) see this coming for a long time. Warnings were issued, warnings were not heeded.
More frustrating than the fact that “social engineering” blinded a lot of well-meaning liberals, is that the majority of the American public just isn’t interested enough to understand what we are talking about, and they don’t have the attention span to learn it. Because of this, the Dems can lie to the American public and state that it was “all the Republicans Fault.”
As XION states, there is certainly enough blame to pass around. Barney Frank is the epi-center.
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Anlir – 34
I don’t see that at all. What I do see is you tagging along as usual, looking for a crumb to mumble and grip about.
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Nicely state MD. Thanks Victoria.
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McCain recently gave Obama props where props were due. It wasn’t the whole problem, but give credit where credit is due for those who played their part.
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