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Sept. 29, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:28
September 29, 2008, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Barack Obama expresses tepid support for the bailout plan.
Wonder why that is, since it's his party's.
Since it's his whole party's bailout plan, why tepid support?
Greetings, my friends, from the EIB Southern Command in beautiful South Florida.
I would like to dedicate today's program and the Dow Jones Industrial Average today to the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank, ladies and gentlemen.
It's Rushland Boy and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Great to have you with us.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Let me tell you what we have coming up.
And a note to the board ops at our affiliate radio stations.
I'm going to be taking the first break in this hour a little sooner than usual because I have the most amazing YouTube video.
It runs about eight and a half minutes.
We've had to chop it up here into individual sound bites.
It will make clear exactly who is responsible for this fiasco that is going on in Washington the past week and now in the debate in the House of Representatives, which is simply surreal.
The vote upcoming, regardless how the vote turns out, I am not going to quit today until everybody listening to this program understands who's responsible for what is going on.
And it's the very same people who have put themselves in charge of even more power over that, which they totally 100% screwed up.
My hope is to get it all in in one segment without having to chop it up.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to do an extensive parsing of the debate on Friday night between Obama and McCain.
I saw a different debate than, of course, a lot of the commentators.
I reject this notion that because Obama was the underdog and therefore he came out okay and finished in a tie that he thus won.
I reject the whole spin of that.
I reject the whole conventional wisdom.
The last 45 minutes of that debate, John McCain wiped the floor with Barack Obama.
The problem is the first 30 minutes, he didn't.
On matters of the economy, it's going to boil down to what people remember.
Now, let's talk about this crisis for just a second.
I'm wondering just how big a crisis this really is.
The Democrats have been saying it's a crisis.
The president has been saying it's a crisis, but has anybody actually been treating it as a crisis?
Now, by this, I mean something very simple.
The Democrats had the votes all last week to do this.
They could have avoided a week of angst.
They could have avoided a week of anxiety.
They could have avoided a week of nervousness, but they didn't.
The Senate is not going to vote on this.
Take this up until Wednesday, regardless what happens in the House today.
Now, they have all been talking about a doomsday scenario in the terms of a Great Depression or so forth, but they have not been treating it like a crisis.
They have been creating a crisis mentality.
35 days before an election, they have created in everybody's mind that there is a crisis in the U.S. economy that only immediate action can stave off and resolve.
The problem is there has been no immediate action.
We still don't have a piece of legislation.
We still don't have a piece of legislation that everybody can easily understand.
We don't have any votes on this yet.
All we have is a bunch of people working 24-7.
Whoa, we've never gotten harder work out of people.
We're spending all this time.
But the fact of the matter is, this is manufactured crisis.
Manufactured side.
I'm not saying something doesn't have to be done here, but if it were as desperate as they have said that it is, they had the votes to fix this.
They had the votes to take all the credit for the fix without involving the Republicans.
They did not have to make all these maneuvers designed to get the House Republicans on board in order to give them cover.
Let's face it, a crisis is a crisis.
So this crisis that the Democrats have created around this bailout, I am convinced, is a political ploy in part to get everybody nervous, upset, and worried to death about their own personal financial situation going into this election.
As to the debate, it is fascinating, folks.
I read some of the coverage in the drive-by media of the debate.
The stories are almost identical from the first Kerry-Bush debate, nearly identical to the ones written over the weekend here about Obama and McCain, even with some of the same bylines.
Stories about Kerry making gains in the battleground states from 2004.
Same stories about Obama making gains in the battleground states after their first debate.
We predicted it.
I just want you to be aware of it.
The media is in full-fledged destroy mode.
They're out to destroy Sarah Palin.
All of these, you know what the top four emailed stories in the New York Times, as they say today, are the top four emailed stories, or maybe even five, all have to do with Sarah Palin.
Nobody, apparently, who reads the New York Times is emailing or reading their stories on the economy on this crisis, on this doomsday.
It's all about Sarah Palin.
You're going to have to buck up out there, folks.
You're going to have to gut it up.
You're going to understand exactly what's happening as far as what the media is trying to do with the willing accomplices of Obama and the Obama campaign.
And you're also going to have to realize that the McCain campaign does not get the ideological aspect of this.
Now, last week, and it was evidence in the debate, they just, McCain had three or four chances to end Obama's campaign Friday night.
He had, how about when Obama was saying nobody's talking about losing in Iraq?
Really?
Really?
How many times you guys waved the white flag before the surge even started?
He could have finished Obama Friday night and didn't because he just doesn't look at things ideologically.
You can drive around in various parts of the country.
You'll see Obama signs everywhere.
You won't see McCain signs.
People that want McCain signs can't get them.
It's going to be up to us, folks, to turn out.
It's going to be up to us.
This is going to be a referendum on Barack Obama as President of the United States, as I have said, from the get-go.
One last thing on this bailout before we go to the early break here.
Let me read to you the preamble of the United States Constitution.
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, not ensure it, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Let me read to you Section 1, short title of the Bailout Bill.
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, Section 2, Purposes, provides authority to the Treasury Secretary to restore liquidity and stability to the U.S. financial system and to ensure the economic well-being of Americans.
This absurdity is better known as socialism.
Our government is going to pass a law that has as its stated purpose the Secretary of the Treasury ensuring the economic well-being of Americans.
No, ladies and gentlemen, that is not what is in the United States Constitution.
Some Hugo Chavez or some Brazilian president attacked the U.S. over the weekend, saying that the U.S. Constitution is out of whack.
Somebody needs to tell him the U.S. Constitution is not in play anymore.
The U.S. Constitution has been abrogated and is being tossed overboard, section by section, by the Democrat Party and the American left.
We'll be right back.
Stay with us.
What you are about to hear, ladies and gentlemen, is informative, educational, and stunning.
It is Democrat after Democrat defending all of these fraudulent mortgages.
Freddie Mac attacking those who were raising concerns.
You're going to hear Democrats viciously attacking the effort to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the root of the problem here requiring this so-called bailout.
Every black member of the committee defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, every Republican begging for more regulation, you will not believe what you're going to hear.
They defend Franklin Reigns, every one of them.
It is Barney Frank saying safety and soundness is not an issue.
Republicans are on the attack one after another, Democrats defending one after another.
You know, I don't get excited about YouTube stuff going around because there's so much YouTube stuff, but this stuff is exciting.
It's huge.
You got Barney Frank.
Franklin Reigns actually saying these assets are riskless.
So here is, we're going to start with every speaker that is, and this is a hearing from 2004, a 2004 hearing, Republicans begging for regulations and Democrats defending Fannie and Freddie.
We start here with Representative Richard Baker, Republican from Louisiana.
It is indeed a very troubling report, but it is a report of extraordinary importance, not only to those who wish to own a home, but it's to the taxpayers of this country who would pay the cost of the cleanup of an enterprise failure.
The analysis makes clear that more resources must be brought to bear to ensure the highest standards of conduct are not only required, but more importantly, they are actually met.
We're talking here about Fannie Mae.
Maxine Waters starts the defense.
To nearly a dozen hearings where, frankly, we were trying to fix something that wasn't broke.
Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Reigns.
Here now is Gregory Meeks, Democrat New York.
As well as the fact that I'm just pissed off at Ophelio, because if it wasn't for you, I don't think that we'd be here in the first place.
And now the problem that we have and that we're faced with is maybe some individuals who wanted to do away with GSEs in the first place, you've given them an excuse to try to have this form so that we can talk about it and maybe change the direction and the mission of what the GSEs had, which they've done a tremendous job.
There's been nothing that was indicated that's wrong, you know, with Fannie Mae.
Freddie Mac has come up on its own.
And the question that then presents is the competence that your agency has with reference to deciding and regulating these GSEs.
And so I wish I could sit here and say that I'm not upset with you, but I am very upset because what you do is you give, you know, maybe giving a reason to, as Mr. Gonzalez said, to give someone a heart surgery when they really don't need it.
That's Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York, attacking the regulator who was testifying about the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2004.
Ed Royce, Republican, California.
In addition to our important oversight role in this committee, I hope that we will move swiftly to create a new regulatory structure for Fannie Mae, for Freddie Mac, and the federal home loan banks.
Democrat response, Representative Lacey Clay, Democrat, Missouri.
This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Reigns.
Ed Royce, again.
There is a very simple solution.
Congress must create a new regulator with powers at least equal to those of other financial regulators, such as the OCC or the Federal Reserve.
Do you see what's shaping up here?
This is pure politics, and it boils down to, I think it comes up to, you can't avoid observing its racial politics.
We had a bomb, a time bomb, waiting to go off at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has gone off.
It has gone off.
We had regulators testifying brought in by Republicans and Democrats saying, what do we need to do to stop this time bomb?
What do we need to do to defuse it?
Well, we need new regulations.
We need new oversight.
No, you don't.
You're not going to get away with sitting here kicking people out of their houses, and you're not going to conduct a lynching of Franklin Reigns.
Now, Franklin Reigns, just stick with this.
Gregory Meeks here attacks the regulator yet again.
What would make you, why should I have confidence?
Why should anyone have confidence in you as a regulator at this point?
Sorry, Congressman.
O'Fail did not improperly apply counting rules.
Freddie Mac did.
O'Fail did not try to manage earnings properly.
Freddie Mac did.
So this isn't about the agency engaging in improper conduct.
It's about Freddie Mac.
This is the Democrats going after Ken Starr investigating Bill Clinton.
This is attacking the regulator, attacking somebody who's saying, look, we all know now, looking back in 2004, we all know the regulator's right.
We all know the Republicans are right.
We all know that the time bomb was ticking.
We know that the time bomb has gone off.
The Democrats are now using the time bomb to blame the private sector for this.
Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, to this day are claiming that what went wrong is the private sector greed on Wall Street.
What is obvious is that what went wrong is Democrats in Congress propping up a failed institution for whatever reasons.
Minority interests, interests of the poor, votes from those interests defending Franklin Reigns, who was a thief.
Franklin Reigns stole money out of Fannie Mae and had the employees there backdate and falsify letters and so forth, assets, postdate them, predate them to show that they were worthful when they were worth something when they were worth less.
That's how he scored his big payday.
You can see the wagons being circled here, and it boils down to that the Democrats on the committee had no desire to have this fixed.
They had no desire for any of the problems to actually be properly enumerated.
Now, the Drive-By Media covered none of this.
This is all from C-SPAN.
None of this is from cable television or needing news programs or any of the sort.
Christopher Shays, Republican from Connecticut, asks, how many in this room are on the payroll of Fannie Mae?
And we passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which was a very tough response to that.
And then I realized that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wouldn't even come under it.
They weren't under the 34 Act.
They weren't under the 33 Act.
They played by their own rules.
And I'm tempted to ask how many people in this room are in the payroll of Fannie Mae, because what they do is they basically hire every lobbyist they can possibly hire.
They hire some people to lobby, and they hire some people not to lobby so that the opposition can't hire them.
Now, this is, again, another indictment of Fannie Mae.
But let's go back and listen to Representative Lacey Clay, Democrat Missouri, describe what he thinks is really going on here.
This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Reigns.
was not about the political lynching of anybody.
And there's the racial, it's not even covert.
There's the overt racial aspect of this that nobody is discussing and nobody is talking about.
But it all happened in a committee in the House chambers, House office buildings in 2004.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that there were people who tried to stop this.
The Republicans.
And again, just to illustrate, if there were a single Republican and Democrats can pin this on, there would have been congressional hearings.
You'd have heard his name mentioned all weekend long.
There is no such Republican in existence who can be made to take the heat for that.
Here is Representative Arthur Davis, Democrat Alabama defending executives at Fannie Mae.
The concern that I have is you're making very specific, what you have correctly acknowledged, broad and categorical judgments about the management of this institution, about the willfulness of practices that may or may not be in controversy.
You've imputed various motives to the people running the organization.
You went to the board and put a 48-hour ultimatum on them without having any specific regulatory authority to put that kind of ultimatum on them.
That sounds like some kind of an invisible line has been crossed.
How about that?
You went to the board, you put a 48-hour ultimatum on them without having any specific regulatory authority to put that kind of ultimatum on them.
What kind of authority are these same people asking for now?
They'll let the Treasury Secretary ensure the public welfare, the Treasury Secretary of all people.
So as this goes on, you can clearly see, you can clearly hear, there was no desire on the part of the Democrats to even acknowledge that there was a ticking time bomb.
Christopher Shays, again, Republican from Connecticut.
Fannie Mae has manipulated, in my judgment, Ofeo for years.
And for Ofeo to finally come out with a report as strong as it is, tells me that's got to be the minimum, not the maximum.
Ofeo is the regulatory agency that is under attack here.
What Shays is saying is that Fannie Mae has manipulated the regulator for years and the regulator can take it no more.
The regulator says, look, I can't sweep this under the rug anymore.
To come out with a report as strong as it is detailing the problems and the ticking time bam status of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
What Shays is saying is it's got to be worse than they're saying.
Given how they've been manipulated in the past, Barney Frank.
Etc.
You seem to be saying, well, these are in areas which could raise safety and soundness problems.
I don't see anything in your report that raises safety and soundness problems.
Don't see anything in your report.
This is the guy in charge of fixing this now.
I don't see anything in your report that raises safety and soundness problems.
I don't see a ticking time bomb.
I don't know nothing going on here.
There's nothing wrong here.
Maxine Waters heaps praise on Franklin Reigns.
Under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Reigns, everything in the 1992 Act has worked just fine.
In fact, the GSCs have exceeded their housing goals.
What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission.
A mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100% loans.
To people who can't pay them back, that's brought the system to a screeching halt and a perceived crisis.
We need to focus on the regulator.
Barney Frank says it was the private sector that caused this.
are Democrats in Congress trying to destroy the credibility of the regulator while you have been led to believe that there wasn't enough regulation, that the private sector was running a bunch, running around like a bunch of drunken cowboys.
I hope you're getting the picture.
There is more to this.
All right, here's what we're up against, folks, or not up against it, but here's what we're dealing with.
Senator McCain and Sarah Palin are in Columbus, Ohio doing a rally right now.
McCain's out there promising to, in the midst of all this, McCain's promising to end pork barrel spending.
The Democrats are in the process of stealing the country, and he's out there talking about earmarks.
This is what I meant in the early part of the program where he does not ideologically understand or get or care what's going on.
This is not about earmarks.
All the earmarks in the world do not add up to the country being stolen by a political party for its own political purposes, which is precisely what's happening here.
Now, back to these sound bites here from the 2004 House hearing.
The regulator who's being attacked, I need you to know who this guy is.
His name is Armando Falcone Jr.
He was the director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Ofeo, who is being attacked by all the Democrats on the committee in the soundbites, which we will resume shortly.
There is a story here from the Washington Post back pages.
December 28, 2004, there are no awards for Moxie in regulating, but if such a program is ever established, supporters of Armando Falcone Jr., director of Ofeo, would probably nominate him.
The tiny agency was created in 92 to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-backed housing financiers with assets and mortgage guarantees adding up to more than $3 trillion.
It has David and Goliath features, a tiny agency taking on a gigantic company.
Falcone, an unknown regulator, paid $158,000 a year going up against Franklin Reigns of Fannie Mae, who received $16.8 million in cash compensation in 2003 alone.
Three months ago, Falcone and his agency dropped a bombshell, a report that concluded Fannie Mae committed numerous accounting and earnings mistakes.
The investigation began after members of Congress blamed Ofeo for missing similar problems at Freddie Mac.
And this is what Chris Shays was talking about.
So the guys at Ofeo says, okay, we looked the other way, but we're going to get tough here.
That brought the Democrats out to attack Falcone.
And that's what you're listening to in the soundbites that we will resume here in just a moment.
Now, a follow-up story, and I referenced this moments ago, the AP, April 19th, this year.
Franklin Reigns, former chief executive Fannie Mae, and two other top executives are paying a total of nearly $31.4 million over their roles in 2004, accounting scandal in a settlement that the government announced Friday.
What was happening here, ladies and gentlemen, is that false signatures were used to aid Fannie Mae bonuses.
And the same regulator that these people are attacking in the 04 hearing that you're going to hear us resume in a moment are now attacking Falcone for bringing all of this to light.
This is from the Washington Post of April 7th of 2005.
Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a manipulation that triggered multi-million dollar bonuses for top executives, said Armando Falcone Jr., director of Ofeo, said the entries were related to the movement of $200 million in expenses from 98 to later periods.
Now, I just say all this to refresh your memory.
The regulator found the abuses.
The regulator, these are more than abuses.
These are crimes.
There were crimes.
In 2004, we are playing for you sound bites of a House committee hearing in which the regulator, Mr. Armando Falcone, is explaining what he found.
The Democrats on the committee have decided to attack him, to discredit him, because Fannie Mae Freddie Mac has become, for them at that time, a way to get their constituents into houses they can't afford.
It was a ticking time bomb.
Everybody knew it then.
The Ofeo guy, Falcone, Bush, McCain, a number of Republicans were trying to sound the warning bells about the ticking time bomb.
The Democrats didn't want to hear it, started attacking the regulator and everybody else saying there was a problem under the basis that this would challenge and harm this new affordable housing.
Affordable housing, thus now defined as people who can't afford houses being allowed to live in them at taxpayer expense.
Pure and simple.
That's what affordable housing is.
Let's resume now.
Maxine Waters, just to replay this, heaping praise on Franklin Reigns.
Under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines, everything in the 1992 Act has worked just fine.
In fact, the GSCs have exceeded their housing goals.
What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission.
A mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100% loans.
Now, you're probably saying, well, why hasn't all this been mentioned by the Republicans in the past week?
Why hadn't somebody stood up and said, hey, folks, the problem that we supposedly have a crisis with was tried to be solved or attempted to be solved numerous times and cite all this.
The Republicans that you're hearing here, are many of them still in the Congress, could have stood up and said, I can't answer the question.
I don't know.
I don't know why they're not standing up and saying this.
I think everybody's become affected by the crisis, the psychological crisis here that has successfully been manufactured by the Obama campaign and the Democrats in the media just five weeks prior to the election.
Here is Democrat Lacey Clay of Missouri.
I find this to be inconsistent and a rush to judgment.
I get the feeling that the markets are not worried about the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae, as Ofeo says that it is.
But of course, the markets are not political.
Oh, isn't that a bit?
The markets are not political, but the regulator is political all of a sudden.
The regulator who has found accounting disasters, fraud, and theft throughout Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can't be trusted because he's political.
These guys want to believe the market back in 2004.
The market, by the way, Congressman Clay was being intimidated by a number of Democrats.
If you don't continue to make and service these loans, then you're going to be investigated.
Here's Barney Frank again, same hearing.
But I have seen nothing in here that suggests that the safety and soundness are an issue, and I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as a kind of a general shibboleth when it does not seem to me to be an issue.
Barney Frank, four years ago, there's no problem here.
I've seen nothing in here to regulators' testimony that suggests the safety and soundness are an issue.
I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as a kind of general shibboleth.
These guys knew it.
They saw it.
It was staring them right in the face, and they wanted to attack the regulator.
And now the very people.
Let me ask you a question.
You go into the hospital for a heart bypass.
The doctor performing the surgery screws it up.
You ask him to do it again on the basis he knows best what went wrong?
Or do you go find a new doctor?
No, I'm being serious.
Ask yourself.
You go in for some sort of surgery and you find out that a finger was amputated by mistake.
Somebody got a report wrong.
Chart wrong.
Do you go back to the guy who amputated your finger and read the chart and say, fix this?
It's what we're doing here.
The very people who designed this, they designed this to fail.
It did fail.
The very people who knew that it was in the process of failing have now been put in charge of fixing it, but they don't want to do it by themselves.
They're demanding that Republicans vote with them to give them cover.
Now, another Republican, this is Don Manzullo, Republican of Illinois, calling out the Democrats by name who raked in money.
Mr. Reigns, $1.1 million bonus on a $526,000 salary.
Jamie Gorlick, $779,000 bonus on a salary of $567,000.
This is what you state on page 11 is nothing less than staggering.
The 1998 earnings per shared number turned out to be $3.23 and 9 mils, a result that Fannie Mae met the EPS maximum payout goal right down to the penny.
Fannie Mae understood the rules and simply chose not to follow them.
That if Fannie Mae had followed the practices, there wouldn't have been a bonus that year.
Okay, now what's up next is Unreal Franklin Reigns being questioned by Christopher Shays.
The second voice you hear on this bite is Franklin Reigns, who was discovered to have committed major fraud and sent packing.
And you have about 3% of your portfolio set aside.
If a bank gets below 4%, they are in deep trouble.
So I just want you to explain to me why I shouldn't be satisfied with these.
Because there aren't any banks who only have multifamily and single-family loans.
These assets are so riskless that their capital for holding them should be under 2%.
These assets are so riskless.
Franklin Reigns, who will be in Obama's cabinet.
Franklin Reigns, who gives Obama advice on housing.
Franklin Reigns, who had to give back gazillions of dollars that he stole from Fannie Mae.
A former director of the Office and Management Budget for the Clinton administration, Franklin Delano Reigns.
You just heard him say the assets, subprime mortgages, all of these things that they bundled, riskless.
Franklin Reigns, a Democrat, by the way.
2004 congressional hearing.
And let's close this out, ladies and gentlemen, with Bill Clinton finally.
On ABC's Good Morning America last week, Chris Cuomo says, is it a little surprising to you to hear the Democrats saying that this came out of nowhere?
This was all the Republicans?
Pelosi's saying it's all a Republicans.
She knew what was going on with the SEC.
They're all sophisticated people.
Is that playing politics in this situation?
The responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Okay, forget him inserting himself in there.
He just admits here the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress to tighten up a little bit on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And you've just heard evidence.
There ought be no doubt who caused this.
And given that, why in the world anybody wants to put the same party in charge of all of this under the guise that they're the ones that have the compassion, that they're the ones that care about affordable housing?
They are taking over the country.
They are stealing the country with this legislation.
And our nominee is out talking about earmarks.
We'll be back.
So what got us here?
Well, you could say white guilt got us here.
Political correctness got it here.
A combination of all those things.
Democrats' desire to socialize the country got us here.
Efforts to stop it failing.
And we're on the verge of even more of it, ladies and gentlemen.
Stanley Kurtz, who's been researching Obama, has a great piece today.
Let me just give you a couple excerpts.
And it's entitled, What does a community organizer do?
And one of the things a community organizer does, if he's Barack Obama, is pressure banks to make bad loans.
Obama's fingerprints are over this too because his group ACORN is all involved.
The community redevelopment thing was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods.
That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and a group that is constantly engaged in illegal voter registration, among other things.
That has provided an opening to groups like ACORN to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in subprime loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show that it complied with these community redevelopment things, and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism, threats to use the CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.
Think of ACORN as a thousand Jesse Jacksons in terms of shaking down companies and institutions.
Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up these bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.
And by the way, speaking of that, Obama did it again in the debate, which we're going to get to.
He said that our reputation in the world, I think everybody would agree, is not what it once was.
He said it in Berlin.
He said it to a seven-year-old kid asking him why he wants to be president.
Frankly, I am fed up with it.
Because folks, if you want to know why our reputation around the world, to the extent that it is, is in disrepair, you might take a look at the fact that a bunch of foreign banks were lied to by U.S. institutions who said these subprime loans were AAA paper.
You can buy them up.
Do you know we're bailing out foreign banks that do business in the United States on this basis because they bought up some of these assets?
So all this talk about how our image in the world has been dinged or damaged, let me tell you, to the extent that that's true, people in financial institutions around the world have said, what have you done to us?
You've made us take on this worthless garbage paper.
What have you done to us?
What are you doing to your financial system?
It ain't about Iraq.
It ain't about the war on terror.
And so there's Obama running around talking about how we've lost our esteem.
That aggravates me like you cannot believe.
Now we're going to analyze the debate as things shake out as the program unfolds before your very eyes.
Of course, Obama is as close to Acorn as anybody can be, closer to ACORN than anybody ever seeking the presidency.
And ACORN went out and put their own pressure on these banks and lending institutions, political correctness pressure, take it, you know, whatever it is, to spread this misery far and wide under the terms and definitions of things like affordable housing.
So I think there's something more devious than that going on.
We know that we know several things institutionally.
We know that the left wants as large a government as possible.
We also know the left wants as many citizens in this country depending on government, not just for their needs, but for their wants as well, but particularly their needs.
We also know that owning a home in this country has been one of the most desirable things people have had.
Many people, most people, work themselves to the bone to be able to save up for a down payment, to be able to qualify.
And all of a sudden, the Democrats in the Clinton administration came along and said, why make it so hard on people?
It's unfair.
Let's just get them into homes.
Let's threaten the lending institutions to loan them money they can't pay back.
As long as home prices keep going up, this is not going to be a problem.
It'll be fine.
Well, everything goes up, goes down.
Eventually, it's called gravity.
It's called supply and demand.
It's called economic cycles.
And we're where we are.
And so now the bailout is about making sure that all these people whose votes have been bought stay bought.
Okay, folks, a timeout here and a brief refresher at the top of the busy broadcast hour.
We'll be back.
We'll parse the debate.
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