Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:56:32 PM
I covered this yesterday
from Stanley Kurtz’ column in the New York Post, but the video makes
the point a little more clear. Kurtz tells Steve Doocy and Gretchen
Carlson that the financial collapse started with ACORN and other
“community organizers” pressuring banks to make bad loans. Barack Obama
has longstanding ties to ACORN, which Kurtz wants to bring to light:
It’s important not to get too carried away with the ACORN connection
in the collapse. The real trigger came when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
began buying up all of these loans and converting them into securities.
Without that impetus, which began in 1999 and ran wild under the
management of Franklin Raines at Fannie, lenders would have responded
to the nuisance complaints by extending lending just enough to comply
with the CRA.
Fannie Mae was the real culprit. By creating a market for
questionable loans, they encouraged lenders to loan money to anyone
willing to accept it, because the lenders could make short-term profits
by selling the paper back to Fannie Mae. Instead of holding the paper
themselves, though, Fannie (and Freddie) converted them into
mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) at greatly inflated value, thanks to
the artificial demand Raines created. Had Fannie and Freddie held the
paper themselves instead of looking for a short-term profit of their
own, then their collapse would have had a much smaller effect on the
worldwide financial markets.
Instead, Congress mandated the sale of MBSs, and we are where we are now.
The ACORN connection is an interesting political story more than a
financial issue now. It reveals the tactics of Obama and his allies,
in a way that makes the recent story of Obama’s Truth Squad thuggery
more understandable. Obama doesn’t represent a post-partisan brand of
New Politics, but instead the Saul Alinsky tactics of the New Left
radicalism that erupted in the 1960s.