PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, we’re not done yet. I’ve got five more years of stuff to do. But
not only saving this country from a great depression. Not only saving the auto industry. But
putting in place a system in which we’re gonna start lowering health care costs and you’re
never gonna go bankrupt because you get sick or somebody in your family gets sick. Making
sure that we have reformed the financial system, so we never again have taxpayer-funded
bailouts, and the system is more stable and secure. Making sure that we’ve got millions of
kids out here who are able to go to college because we’ve expanded student loans and
made college more affordable. Ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Decimating al Qaeda, including
Bin Laden being taken off the field. Restoring America’s respect around the world.
The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you
know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years
against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just
in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to
the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.
ACLU Key Issues
From the ACLU 50-State Survey for January of 2012:
- Access to abortion and birth control. [Must keep killing babies.]
- Equal treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. [Must treat those who display sexual preference the same as those who do not.]
- Protection against racial profiling and discrimination by law enforcement. [Must not profile those most likely to commit terrorism.]
- Equal access for eligible residents to vote. [As opposed to citizens.]
- Non-preferential treatment of any one religion by the government. [Except Islam.]
- Preventing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design from interfering with the teaching of evolution in public school science classes. [When government sanctions a theory it must be protected. See global warming.]
Let’s see: infant death and dismemberment, sexual obsession, terrorism, illegal aliens, Sharia, spurious government science. That’s an impressive series of harmful policies to rack up by one organization in one fund-raising mailer. How did I get on this nutjob mailing list? Yeah I’m going to send them a check, where’s my pen?
Thank you American law schools.
China Economy Isn’t The Threat Many Believe
December 20, 2011
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Republicans and Democrats, liberals as well as conservatives, have bought into anti-Chinese trade demagoguery. [Read more…]
planning hubris
Problems with the 07-2011 Draft Oil & Gas Regs proposed for Elbert County Zoning
Page 5: “…unless approval has been granted pursuant to these regulations from the Director of Community & Development Services (C&DS) or the Board of County Commissioners (Board).”
Are we setting up an unelected czar of oil and gas zoning enforcement, unaccountable to the voters?
Page 6: “the County Attorney or where the Board deems it appropriate, the District Attorney……may [act]”
Here again, should enforcement of zoning be allowed without the approval of an elected official?
Page 21: “Safety practices in accordance with state and federal law, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970….”
Elbert County should not be in the business of enforcing federal OSHA law.
Page 23: “The oil and gas facility shall not cause significant degradation of wildlife, including any federal, state or Colorado Natural Heritage Program-identified species of concern, or to their habitat. At a minimum, the operation shall comply with the CDOW’s recommended…..”
The CDOW, Colorado and the federal government can enforce their own wildlife regulations. Elbert County does not need to duplicate those efforts.
Page 23: “When planning facilities, the Applicant shall consult and reference the current wildlife concurrence data, including the CDOW’s Natural Diversity Information Source database…”
Bio-diversity is buzzword science with no greater purpose than stopping development. It has no place in industry zoning regulations.
Page 25: “install wildlife crossovers and escape ramps where the trench crosses well-defined game trails”
Presumably this would be for the really smart or well trained wild game, who know how to use such devices.
Page 26: “The applicant shall identify the proposed source of fresh or potable water required for the oil and gas facility and dust control, along with a letter from the Colorado Division of Water Resources or a copy of the Water Court decree indicating that the water supply source is acceptable for the use at the oil and gas facility.”
Here again, water regulation falls outside of Elbert County’s jurisdiction. It’s a matter for the State Engineer.
Page 37: “the right of the county to determine land uses”
Isn’t it the people’s right to determine land use within allowed limits? I thought government in America was based on limitations, not rights.
Page 39: “No oil and gas facilities shall cause a reduction in solar radiation…”
Isn’t it a reach to blame the existence or absence of solar radiation on an oil well?
Page 39: “Greenhouse Gas Reduction”
Zoning regulations should not incorporate the spurious science of global warming language.
Page 40: “The county finds that the standard industry practice of injecting highly toxic substances under high pressure into the earth for the purpose of fracturing geologic formations poses an unacceptable risk of polluting these invaluable ground water resources.”
This statement ascribes a harmful intent to the oil and gas industry as a “standard practice.” The statement is prejudicial, unfounded, and not conducive to sound science or good industry relations.
If the Community and Development Services department needs a toxic blend to regulate, look to the toxic combination of subjects below under which this post is filed.
New planning game!
The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle
“DECEMBER 14, 2011
Congress mandated purchase of 250 million gallons in 2011. Actual production: 6.6 million.
‘We’ll fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.”
—George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union address [Read more…]
defining America down
Obama’s change for America is to lower expectations by providing government enforced fair and balanced outcomes for all Americans. Leave aside the thorny fact that government cannot succeed in producing such an outcome–that it’s completely impossible for government to do that.
Most importantly, the key takeaway from yesterday’s speech is that Obama’s version of the American Dream is an American nightmare where unlimited opportunity becomes “a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”
Sounds all very pleasant, but it’s a far cry from the land of unlimited opportunity where anyone can do or become anything they want if they’re willing to work for it.
People don’t immigrate to America to get by modestly and then quietly die. That is the life they want to immigrate from, not to! The American Dream is about unlimited personal and societal growth and creative opportunity. It’s about a life accessible to anyone that is not limited by heritage, not limited by any other man within a consensual framework, and especially not limited by a government “by and for the people.”
America has the largest middle class of any country because it’s where a lot of people end up after aiming for the top. If Obama succeeds in convincing Americans to aim for the middle, he will have lowered expectations for all Americans, and the ranks of impoverished Americans will grow.
A president should lead the country by expressing high ideals, not low expectations. This has always been a problem with both Michelle and Barack.
Passau
“The fortress was attacked five times between 1250 and 1482. Twice, 1298 and 1367, the citizens of Passau themselves rebelled against the Bishop.”
After a couple hundred years of open government in America and the advent of domestic terrorism, many of our government buildings have been converted to secure fortresses. Public union demonstrators recently took over the Wisconsin state capital. There’s no doubt that given access, today’s “occupants” would be camping in, and shouting down all visitors to, government buildings in cities across the country. Fortress America must now protect itself from its own people. The Founders would conclude that our republic has been forfeited. Reasonable political debate does not occur under the threat of force, at the point of a leftist spear.
disaster redux
Landmark Speeches of National Socialism, Edited by Randall L. Bytwerk
- “National Socialism was the most prolific rhetorical movement of the twentieth century.”
- “…[R]hetoric moved a civilized nation to support Nazism, and to close its eyes to the crimes that were not difficult to see.”
- “Everything that Nazism intended was revealed in its rhetoric.”
- “[Hitler] thought that the average person is uninterested in complex arguments, being ruled more by emotion than intellect. Nazi rhetoric therefore avoided presenting detailed solutions to complex problems.”
- “Propaganda also needed to be one-sided. Since the masses did not understand complex issues, presenting balanced arguments would only shake their confidence in the rightness of a cause.”
- “A speaker, Hitler thought, should stand before an audience with the fervor of an evangelist preaching a religious faith.”
- “Just as a religion or a church can never stop preaching and explaining the faith in a thousand ways from the pulpit, no more can National Socialism surrender the direct and powerful effect of the speech, which ever and against strengthens the faith of the movement and provides new power for the never-ending struggle.”
- “To maintain power required unceasing efforts to persuade Germans that National Socialism deserved their unconditional allegiance.”
- “Germans did not support Hitler because they expected him to lead them into a ruinous war, but rather because he and his party drew upon deeply rooted values and beliefs.”
- “…Nazism presented itself not as a political party, but as a movement that encompassed everything Germans held to be true and just.”
- “What propaganda avoids saying is at least as important as what it does say. The Nazis realized that blatant lying often fails, and that people accept some things in general that they reject if they know the details.”
The number of speeches Obama has given since taking office roughly equals the number of days he has been in office.
The editors and columnists at Investor’s Business Daily [Investors.com] regularly provide sound analysis of the Obama administration, however, they may be missing the real nature of Obama.
He’s not just campaigning. He’s relentlessly propagandizing a dangerous mythology with himself at the center.
The Beasts of Buchenwald by Flint Whitlock
- “The persecutions did not come all at once; they gradually grew more onerous once the Nazis saw that the open harassment of Jews and the imposition of unreasonable restrictions on them were not being objected to by the great bulk of non-Jewish German society. There was, of course, no way for the Jews to know if the Nazi’s threats were substantive or merely idle. There was no way for the Jews of Germany (and, later, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc., too) to realize that concentration camps, death camps, gas chambers, mass graves, and ovens were in their future.”
- “By the time they comprehended the enormity of the danger, it was too late.”
stop environmental fascists
A clear lesson from our recent visit to Germany and studies spawned from our visit to the Documentation Center is that, while Hitler was the fearless leader who catalyzed their national socialism, it was the millions of citizens and bureaucrats all doing their parts to fulfill his vision that did the damage. You can blame the leadership for initializing the movement and the programs, but then it took broad efforts by everyone to bring those visions into existence
Today in America we watch the President, and presidential contenders for warning signs. Meanwhile, bureaucracies in the federal, state, county, local and various tax districts grind out on a daily basis volumes of legal pronouncements about what we must do to be in compliance with their authorities. This is a pernicious fascism that proceeds pell-mell every day in pursuit of a mythical perfect society, and it can never reach fruition.
We need to stop this madness, unwind these fatuous authorities. This myth of the perfectable society has caused enough damage in America.
the face of useful idiocy
Have the OWS useful idiots been set up, organized and funded through Obama and paid for by George Soros, to provide an expendable target for the national socialists?
We’ll see. National socialism needs an enemy. Conservatives are wise to this gang, they’re not going to play along, and they’re too well armed. Occupants, however, are stupid. It’s not plausible that Obama and Soros would make them the standard bearers for leftist policy. So they must be there for another purpose, and cannon fodder, so to speak, is about all that’s left.
the tax effect
Imagine what businesses and employment opportunities would arise in a free country without business taxation.
what they want to hear
by Flint Whitlock, The Beasts of Buchenwald, pg. 15.
“It mattered not to a great many people that this man, Adolf Hitler, had a funny, postage-stamp moustache and a raspy voice and had failed at his dream of becoming an artist or an architect and had been a homeless beggar on the streets of Vienna before the war and wasn’t even a native-born German. What mattered was the mesmerizing, hypnotic spell his speeches cast on those listening to him. What mattered was the way his talks always began slowly and quietly and haltingly, so that everyone had to strain to hear his words, then built to a thundering crescendo, much like an opera by his favorite composer, Richard Wagner. What mattered was the fire in his messianic eyes as he told his audience what they wanted to hear—that it had been the Jews and the communists working secretly behind the scenes that had undermined the German Army and had brought about the catastrophic defeat. What mattered was his message that he and his Nazi Party were the only ones who could reverse the nation’s descent into certain chaos and irrelevancy. What mattered was that he and he alone could stop the contamination of “impure” races that threatened to weaken the pure, Germanic, “Aryan” race. What mattered was that Hitler and his steadfast vision and his unshakeable will promised to restore Germany to its former greatness. What mattered was that Hitler saw the Germanic people as a species of super humans, destined to rule the world.
Hearing what they were fervently desperate to believe, millions of otherwise sensible Germans decided to join the Nazi Party, slip on the swastika armband or pin on the Nazi Party lapel pin, yell Sieg Heil! (“Hail Victory!”) at the inspirational mass Party rallies, give each other the stiff-armed fascist salute, and blindly follow their Fuhrer, no matter where he led.
So it came to pass that in 1932, through a series of bizarre, almost comic-opera occurrences, and the naive belief by those in power who thought they could control the upstart Austrian radical by bringing him into the government, Hitler proved more cunning than any of his foes. His Nazi Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with in Parliament and Hitler himself was named Chancellor of Germany.
Of course, not all Germans held the fervent belief that Hitler was Germany’s savior. Not every German thought that nazism was good for the country, nor that the Jews should be excluded from German society, nor that government control of almost every aspect of civilian life was a worthy goal.
For these people—these non-believers—Hitler and his minions had a special place.
It was called the Konzentrationslager—the concentration camp.”
parallels in propaganda
illegal immigration plan
Curing illegal immigration is a sequence. Here’s my plan:
-
Eliminate incentives. These two laws attract illegals from all over the world.
-
Congress must disallow anchor baby citizenship under the 14th Am.
-
Congress must repeal the unfunded health care mandate of EMTALA which requires all hospitals receiving federal funds to treat and stabilize without regard to ability to pay.
-
-
Improve border security by all means appropriate for each geographical area.
-
Empty prisons of all illegals — who comprise 20% of current populations. Send them back.
-
End all affirmative action and tuition entitlements.
-
Eliminate non-english language official publications from all government functions.
-
After all the above, illegals who remain on a level playing field with Americans should be granted a path to citizenship or the option to leave.
-
After a reasonable time frame when all the above is complete, strictly enforce citizenship credentials in the work place.
Capitol Punishment
In the context of this election season with Republicans engaged in presidential policy debates each week, “Capitol Punishment” should be read right now by every American interested in curing the abuses in Washington.
Jack Abramoff’s prescription for real reform in Washington:
- Entirely eliminate any contribution by those lobbying the government, participating in a federal contract, or otherwise financially benefiting from public funds. If you get money or perks from elected officials—be “you” a company, a union, an association, a law firm, or an individual–you shouldn’t be permitted to give them so much as one dollar
- If you are going to lobby the federal government, take from the treasury, or work as a contractor, you shouldn’t be permitted to give one penny to any elected official or staff, including the executive branch.
- If you choose to serve in Congress or on a congressional staff, you should be barred for life from working for any company, organization, or association which lobbies the federal government.
- Representatives should be allowed to serve for three terms of two years, senators for two terms of six years. Then they should get out of town.
- Representatives should be barred from proposing, lobbying for, and perhaps even voting on projects in their own districts and states.
- Apply every federal law enacted by Congress to Congress itself.
- Repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and restore the election of senators to the state houses.
- Permanently stop the special interests and lobbyists who control much of our federal government and budget—and who exacerbate, if not cause, the crises which threaten to bring down this great Republic—by returning the federal government to its constitutionally limited boundaries.
If a recovered alcoholic told you how to quit drinking, you’d listen.
8 point dinner
The Only Good Occupation…
By James Lewis
-
Is getting a job. So you won’t have to leech off Mom and Dad anymore.
- Is taking responsibility for your own neurotic hangups, and not blaming your gnawing feelings of inferiority on the most miraculous, creative, and popular economic system in the world — including the parts of China, India, and Russia that actually work.
- Is learning about capitalism, before revealing your fathomless ignorance to the world. And no, Das Kapital is not about capitalism. It’s about the personal alienation and greed of an angry kid who grew up in Prussia almost two hundred years ago, and who thirsted to make the whole world like the Prussian Empire, complete with millions of marching robots. (See North Korea today).
- Is not getting manipulated by a sinister cabal of billionaire lefties who want to buy political power for themselves, and thinking that you’re doing something noble, idealistic, and unselfish. You’re not. You’re just flattering your own neurotic egomania, the personality disorder that kept getting you in trouble with your family, your friends, and your impersonal sex partners.
- Is growing up.
- Is respecting other human beings, who know a lot more about living than you, in your arrogance, think you do.
- Is understanding that the Nazi Occupation of Europe, the Chinese Occupation of Tibet, the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe, and the Radical Occupation of American Universities are all the same, evil, and deeply selfish thing. They always lead to tyrannies and dictatorships, and they always, always end in killing people by the hundreds of thousands. Or more.
- Is to get that Communism has been more humanly destructive than Hitler, because Hitler lasted only 13 years before he shot himself in that bunker. Communist regimes lasted 70 years in the Soviet Empire, and killed 100 million people in that time, while making everybody else poor, miserable, and brainwashed.
- Is to realize when you’ve been cultified and suckered, but good, by Crony Capitalists who have convinced you and a million other dead-heads to believe that you are going to bring peace, love, and proper obedience to the whole wide world. They are making out like bandits for themselves, and you’re just the junior storm troopers.
- Is to get that:
- the leftie media are owned by Giant Corporations, you moron.
- That the mind set of Occupy is identical to the mind-set of the Hitler Youth, of Mao’s Red Guards who killed 40 million of their fellow Chinese, and of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who killed three million innocent Cambodians — while your kind did nothing but cover up those murders.
- That Islamic mobs are just another version of your kind.
- That the American people are learning from your Rich Kids’ Revolution what you really are.
- That capitalism is the engine of prosperity, technology, real science, and real progress.
- Is to get it straight through your thick skull that we’ve seen your kind before — we fought three major wars against your kind in the last 100 years — and that the West, as decadent as it is, will gather itself together and win.
- That normal people will win in the end, because capitalism, individualism, personal creativity, and electoral democracy are more powerful than a gaggle of power-hungry freaks.
So look, kids. There are all kinds of useful Occupations. But first one is to get a job and stop bothering productive people who are paying to keep your sorry hide in food, clothing, shelter, and police protection.
Lotsa luck, kids.
Don’t forget to grow up.
extremes
We were downtown last night, taking our son to visit with the USC Marching Band who are in town for the CU game this evening. As it turned out we spent an hour in a small v.i.p. setting with Dr. Bartner, his wife, and a dozen or so leaders of the USC program, who gave us a presentation of the amazing history of the USC band and Dr. Bartner’s career, with the experience capped by hearing some warm up routines with a contingent of senior players brought here for the game. All in all, a superlative experience we had not expected – we looked through a window into a truly amazing world that any kid would give his eye teeth to join.
So, it was a rare occasion for us downtown and coincidently the occupation is the subject of probably half of the broadcast TV news and talk radio shows. Michael Moore was in town today to pump up the faithful, and we decided to cruise Broadway in front of the capitol on our way home to see what all the fuss is about.
We saw thirty or forty people huddled around each other on the sidewalk directly across the street from the capitol, and about a half a block of various sized piles of messy human belongings, and a fair amount of trash. It looked like a refugee camp, very sad, even pathetic. The righteous democratic outpouring we’re bombarded with by the media is rooted in a fiction, a delusion of grandeur.
The tea party had significant numbers in the streets across the country and in Washington and the media all but ignored them. This scamming bunch of several dozen pathological malcontents is getting enough media coverage to make it look like the second coming. Go see for yourself. As Gertrude Stein once wrote about Oakland, “there is no there there.”
messing with the market
Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending. Federal Register April 15, 1994.
Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis
By PAUL SPERRY, FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 10/31/2011 08:05 AM ET
President Obama says the Occupy Wall Street protests show a “broad-based frustration” among Americans with the financial sector, which continues to kick against regulatory reforms three years after the financial crisis.
“You’re seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place,” he complained earlier this month.
But what if government encouraged, even invented, those “abusive practices”?
Rewind to 1994. That year, the federal government declared war on an enemy — the racist lender — who officials claimed was to blame for differences in homeownership rate, and launched what would prove the costliest social crusade in U.S. history.
At President Clinton’s direction, no fewer than 10 federal agencies issued a chilling ultimatum to banks and mortgage lenders to ease credit for lower-income minorities or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related adverse publicity. They also were threatened with denial of access to the all-important secondary mortgage market and stiff fines, along with other penalties.
Bubble? Regulators Blew It
The threat was codified in a 20-page “Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending” and entered into the Federal Register on April 15, 1994, by the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending. Clinton set up the little-known body to coordinate an unprecedented crackdown on alleged bank redlining.
The edict — completely overlooked by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the mainstream media — was signed by then-HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, Attorney General Janet Reno, Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, along with the heads of six other financial regulatory agencies.
“The agencies will not tolerate lending discrimination in any form,” the document warned financial institutions.
Ludwig at the time stated the ruling would be used by the agen cies as a fair-lending enforcement “tool,” and would apply to “all lenders” — including banks and thrifts, credit unions, mortgage brokers and finance companies.
The unusual full-court press was predicated on a Boston Fed study showing mortgage lenders rejecting blacks and Hispanics in greater proportion than whites. The author of the 1992 study, hired by the Clinton White House, claimed it was racial “discrimination.” But it was simply good underwriting.
It took private analysts, as well as at least one FDIC economist, little time to determine the Boston Fed study was terminally flawed. In addition to finding embarrassing mistakes in the data, they concluded that more relevant measures of a borrower’s credit history — such as past delinquencies and whether the borrower met lenders credit standards — explained the gap in lending between whites and blacks, who on average had poorer credit and higher defaults.
The study did not take into account a host of other relevant data factoring into denials, including applicants’ net worth, debt burden and employment record. Other variables, such as the size of down payments and the amount of the loans sought to the value of the property being bought, also were left out of the analysis. It also failed to consider whether the borrower submitted information that could not be verified, the presence of a cosigner and even the loan amount.
When these missing data were factored in, it became clear that the rejection rates were based on legitimate business decisions, not racism.
Still, the study was used to support a wholesale abandonment of traditional underwriting standards — the root cause of the mortgage crisis.
For the first time, Washington’s bank regulators put racial lending at the top of their checklist. Banks that failed to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities were denied expansion plans by the Fed in an era of frenzied financial mergers and acquisitions. HUD threatened to deny them access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which it controlled. And the Justice Department sued them for lending discrimination and branded them as racists in the press.
“HUD is authorized to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to undertake various remedial actions, including suspension, probation, reprimand or settlement, against lenders found to have engaged in discriminatory lending practices,” the official policy statement warned.
The regulatory missive, which had the effect of law, advised lenders to bend “customary” underwriting standards for minority homebuyers with poor credit.
“Applying different lending standards to applicants who are members of a protected class is permissible,” it said. “In addition, providing different treatment to applicants to address past discrimination would be permissible.”
To that end, lenders were directed to “make changes in marketing strategy or loan products to better serve minority segments of the market.” They were also advised to “change commission structures” to encourage brokers and loan officers to “lend in minority and low-income neighborhoods” — a practice Countrywide Financial, the poster boy of the subprime scandal, perfected. The government now condemns the practice it once encouraged as “predatory.”
FDIC warned banks that even unintentional discrimination was against the law, and that they should be proactive in making “multicultural” loans. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” the agency said in a separate advisory.
Confronted with the combined force of 10 federal regulators, lenders naturally toed the line, and were soon aggressively marketing subprime mortgages in urban areas. The marching orders threw such a scare into the industry that the American Bankers Association issued a “fair-lending tool kit” to every member. The Mortgage Bankers Association of America signed a “fair-lending” contract with HUD. So did Countrywide.
HUD also pushed Fannie and Freddie, which in effect set industry underwriting standards, to buy subprime mortgages, freeing lenders to originate even more high-risk loans.
“Lenders should ensure that their loan processors and underwriters are aware of the provisions of the secondary market guidelines that provide various alternative and flexible means by which applicants may demonstrate their ability and willingness to repay their loans,” the policy statement decreed.
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not infrequently purchase mortgages exceeding the suggested ratios” of monthly housing expense to income (28%) and total obligations to income (36%).
It warned lenders who rejected minority applicants with high debt ratios and low credit scores to “be prepared” to prove to federal regulators and prosecutors they weren’t racist. “The Department of Justice is authorized to use the full range of its enforcement authority.”
It took a little more than a decade for the negative effects of the assault on prudent lending to be felt. By 2006, the shaky subprime mortgages began to default. In 2008, the bubble exploded.
Clinton’s task force survived the Bush administration, during which it produced fair-lending brochures in Spanish for immigrant home-loan applicants.
And it’s still alive today. Obama is building on the fair-lending infrastructure Clinton put in place.
As IBD first reported in July, Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a witch hunt vs. “racist” banks.
“It’s a more aggressive fair-lending enforcement approach now,” said Washington lawyer Andrew Sandler of Buckley Sandler LLP in a recent interview. “It is well beyond anything we saw during the Clinton administration.”
Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, recently testified that his division “continues to participate in the federal Interagency Fair Lending Task Force.” And he and the task force are working with the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to “enhance fair-lending enforcement.”
The fair-lending task force’s original policy paper undercuts the notion the financial crisis was all about banker “greed,” though it certainly played a role after the fact. Rather, it offers compelling evidence that the crisis evolved chiefly from government mandates and threats to increase lending to applicants who could not afford them.