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“It’s WHOSE fault?!”
This weekend, John McCain suggested that last week’s Wall Street meltdown was in some way Barack Obama’s fault. Such an assertion is outrageous! John McCain has spent his time trying to convince voters that Obama has not been in Washington long enough to serve as president, and now he wants to blame Obama for Washington’s problems. Seriously?!
John McCain’s record places him as a longstanding supporter of deregulation. Now that he has suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a national crisis, he is trying to tell the American people that he is indeed for more regulation. Apparently we can all just disregard his 26 year record. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been an advocate for better regulatory oversight of the financial markets for over a year.
Barack Obama had the foresight, common sense, and economic aptitude to see long ago where Wall Street was headed. Obama also has the right idea about how to solve this problem: run the lobbyists who manage John McCain’s campaign right out of Washington. We need to replace them with intelligent, public-oriented experts who will finally put the American people first.
NATASHA KRASNOW
Grand Junction
4 Responses to “Obama has the right idea on how to solve economic problem”
Posted September 26th, 2008 at 8:48 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
You would prefer the type of people mentioned in this piece from Michael Reagan?
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Pinning The Tail On The Donkey
By Michael Reagan
September 19, 2008
When I was a little boy we used to play a game where we wore a blindfold and tried to put a slip of paper on a drawing of a donkey we couldn’t see.
I thought of that as I watched the chattering class, blindfolded and frantically trying to pin the blame for the Wall Street debacle on everything but the real donkey, the Democrats, whose symbol is… guess what?
Right, a donkey, and that’s where the blame lies, on Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.
To find the donkey you need to go back to the Clinton administration, which decided that everybody and his kid brother was entitled to a mortgage even when they didn’t begin to qualify for a home loan.
In saner days, banks designated certain areas as no-loan zones — depressed neighborhoods where lending money to potential home buyers was not just a risky investment, but a certain future foreclosure.
Critics of the practice called it “redlining” and President Clinton and his chums on Capitol Hill decided that banks should no longer act like banks and lend money only to home buyers who could afford to handle the monthly payments.
Now all bets would be off and people not the least bit creditworthy — and speculators — would be entitled by law to obtain mortgages even when it was obvious they couldn’t afford to handle them.
Enter those now infamous quasi-government banking instruments known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which poured fresh money into the banking system by buying mortgages from banks.
Over the long haul they managed to load up their portfolios with billions upon billions of dollars of risky mortgage paper that banks had been forced to offer and then dumped on them.
The scandal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dwarfs the Enron debacle.
In Enron, people went to jail.
With the Fannies, some just walked away with millions.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers can be blamed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that the Feds recently bailed out with big bucks.
As Fox News has pointed out, they used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats, and No. 2 was Sen. Barack Obama, who as Fox noted had only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab that No. 2 spot ahead of longtime colleagues John Kerry and Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
According to Fox, Fannie and Freddie were where big-time Washington Democrats went to work and pocketed millions.
Franklin Raines, Clinton’s White House Budget Director, ran Fannie and collected $50 million.
Jamie Gorelick, an official in Clinton’s Justice Department — the woman who built the “wall” that prevented the FBI from targeting terrorists before 9/11 — worked for Fannie Mae and took home $26 million.
Big-time Democrat Jim Johnson, who headed Obama’s VP search committee, also hauled in millions from running Fannie Mae.
Obama brazenly blames John McCain and the GOP for the current Wall Street mess when it’s clear none of it was due to Republican policies.
The truth of the matter is that it was McCain and three GOP colleagues who sought to reform the government’s lending policies three long years ago after the Bush administration had failed two years earlier.
On May 25, 2006, McCain spoke on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, and warned against the debacle we are now facing if it failed to pass.
He told the Senate that a report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight charged that “Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives.”
McCain warned, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”
McCain predicted the entire collapse we now are suffering through.
He stressed the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Obama advisers Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson.
Now Obama has the nerve to try to pin the blame on McCain and the GOP when the facts show that the blame must be pinned on the Democratic donkey.”
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Yeah, good plan, replace the corrupt crooks with corrupt crooks.
Posted October 10th, 2008 at 11:15 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Hi,
I’m likely not going to change anyones mind on who to vote for. Partly because what I’m talking about as being the problem, and what might be a solution, are not being talked about by either candidate.
Several factor, in my view are the foundational problems that caused this mess. 1) The trade imbalance mainly precipitated by NAFTA. 2) The cultural imbalance being supported thereby. 3) The money management practices that have been allow to exist; which is a broad range of activities, that mainly are unrealistic in there approach. Though many of the healthy civilized goals may be attainable by somewhat saner steps.
One of the worst and most recent ones to note is the behavior of brokers that acted as intermediaries between borrowers and lending banks, mainly for purchases of houses. The brokers where encouraging the borrower to take on too large a loan for the income they had. The broker was paid according to the amount of the loan, and were so independent of the lender that they didn’t really care if the loan was a sustainably valid one. I tend to thing such brokers need to see a valid reward for the results of such actions. One might think that they are losing it all the the sinking market. Yet that is not a valid conclusion of any certainty.
Another factor from what I’ve read, is that the law that separated lending institutions that worked with home owners and those working business and stocks; were allowed to combine in the late 1990’s. That insures that the housing and the stock market are sure to effect each other; especially should they get in trouble. The ideal instinct, I believe, is to allow the masses the room to think independent of the influence of business. Humanities more long term perspective is a healthy influence on the whole of things. It just may not be the most profittable one for business at a given point in time.
As for dealing with NAFTA. Perhaps we need to have a ‘charity’ generating tariff on goods made by those who are being paid less than us; in an indeavor to help get them decent housing, schooling, legal support, etc. The ones likley to really pay for it, is those now raking in the difference between the actual cost of manufacturing and what we get ‘charged’ for that.
Sincerely,
Gregory D. MELLOTT
Posted October 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Has not anyone ever heard of the business cycle?
Posted October 11th, 2008 at 2:30 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
The vast majority dollars that were “made” in the recent boom b4 the bust were made by people who have sold their homes in the last 2 years. Maybe we should go after them?
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