Ayers mainstream? Only in Chicago

We are now three weeks out from the presidential election, and so far as I am aware Barack Obama has not been asked a single question about the disarmament credo he sets forth in the video above:

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems...

...I will not weaponize space...

...I will slow development of future combat systems...

...and I will institute an independent "Defense Priorities Board" to ensure the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending...

...I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons...

...and to seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons...

...I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material...

...and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert...

...and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals...

Among the more prescient observations:

We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. ...

Today, almost half of the home mortgages in the U.S. are guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would pay this debt if Fannie or Freddy could not? ...

It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail.

Via Human Events. One thing I hadn't realized is that McCain's reform legislation was passed through the Senate Banking Committee, but was not able to gain majority support on the Senate floor. All twenty Senators who signed the letter calling attention to the urgency of reforming Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were Republicans. After May 2006, the Democrats continued to use Fannie and Freddy as their private slush funds until the inevitable collapse, which McCain had warned against so eloquently, occurred.

The quotes that explain the entire financial meltdown

For those who want a smoking gun to show the genesis of the financial collapse, this short sequence from a longer video I posted this week will do it. Clinton HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement of a lending discrimination complaint with Accubanc, a Texas lender whose prerequisites for mortgages came under attack from “community organizers” at the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission and the city of Dallas. I clipped out this sequence to underscore its importance:

CUOMO: To take a greater risk on these mortgages, yes. To give families mortgages that they would not have given otherwise, yes.

Q: [unintellible] … that they would not have given the loans at all?

CUOMO: They would not have qualified but for this affirmative action on the part of the bank, yes.

Q: Are minorities represented in that low and moderate income group?

CUOMO: It is by income, and is it also by minorities? Yes.

CUOMO: With the 2.1 billion, lending that amount in mortgages — which will be a higher risk, and I’m sure there will be a higher default rate on those mortgages than on the rest of the portfolio …

Here, in fact, is the genesis of the problem, the ideology that created the monster.  Cuomo, the Clinton administration, and Congress believed they had the right and the power to determine acceptable risk for the lenders, rather than lenders determining it for themselves in a free market.  Even while imposing risk standards on lenders, Cuomo admits that he expects a higher default rate on the new loans — which is why the lenders didn’t want to write them in the first place.

In other words, the CRA didn’t get used to fight discrimination, but to force lenders to give money to high-risk borrowers for political purposes.  And Cuomo knew it.

That was the political arrogance at the heart of the collapse.  However, the CRA was more a sideshow than the actual problem.  When Congress decided that enforcement alone wouldn’t generate enough mortgages to boost their political fortunes, they had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eliminate the risk entirely for lenders through the purchase of the subprime loans.  Without that risk and with almost-guaranteed short-term profits of subprime loans, lenders went wild while Fannie and Freddie repackaged them as quasi-government bonds for investors.

While Democrats like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi keep blaming “greed” for the collapse, it was Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd building that “greed” into the system in order to drive the subprime lending market.  And it was Democrats like Frank, Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Lacy Clay who suggested that regulators like Armando Falcon were racists for blowing the whistle on the Ponzi scheme they created.

The Democrats decided, as Michelle says, that mortgages were a civil right, and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayers a dime.  How well is that working out, America?  And now, the question you have to ask yourselves is this: Do you want the nation’s economic policies run by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank for the next two years?

So what about that financial meltdown? Wouldn't the carnage we've seen in the financial sector of late have wrecked all of these private Social Security accounts? It isn't likely. The earliest the Bush plan could have been implemented would have been January 2003. The Dow at that time stood at 8607. Last Friday the Dow closed at 10,325, its lowest point in two years. Even if you had invested your entire account in stocks on the day the Bush plan took effect, and then retired on Friday, you'd still likely have come out pretty well.

Of course, no one gets his first paycheck five or six years before retirement. And all of the plans for full or partial Social Security privatization called for bringing in private accounts in phases. People already near retirement would have received the same benefits they were anticipating. But younger people would have had 20 or 30 or 40 years to invest, using the power of compound interest to yield returns exponentially higher than the maximum 1.5 percent you can expect from the government.

There's no period in the history of the stock market — including the crash of 1929, the stagflation of the 1970s, the crash of 1989 and the tech bubble burst of the early 2000s — in which a worker who'd been investing for 30 years or more wouldn't have still received a far better return than what he got from Social Security, even if he retired the day after a historic Wall Street dive.

Social Security faces an unfunded liability of $4 trillion over the next 75 years. USA Today reported in May that the combined federal liability for Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs for everyone currently eligible is more than $57 trillion, or $500,000 for every household in the country. And, of course, Congress can raid the Social Security "trust fund" at will.

You think the stock market is risky? The federal government currently has obligations it will never be able to keep. And none of this accounts for trillion-dollar bank bailouts, inevitable wars or the new entitlements promised by the current candidates for present and future occupants of the White House. At 33, I don't expect to get a dime from Social Security. If you're younger than I am, you shouldn't, either.

Americans have not had a serious philosophical debate about the future of their country since the "Contract with America" in 1994. It is time to have one again.

Europe is flirting with regulating individual "responsibility" for climate change, i.e. heavyset people pay more for their airline tickets because their "carbon footprint" is invariably higher. Is this something we want to consider? Allowing the government to determine how much "energy" we use - light bulbs, lawnmowers, jet skis - and regulate our usage by enforcing laws from Washington?

Do we want to forfeit our territorial sovereignty with porous borders? Government programs are going bankrupt or will go bankrupt. Are we to include non-citizens into the bargain, further decimating the ability of these programs to survive? Will we require and enforce assimilation standards, or allow the decay of our standard definition of "citizenship," allowing ethnic enclaves to prop up across the country? Will our future immigrants come to learn what it means to be American or will Americans come to learn what it means to be an unassimilated immigrant?

How much do we care about sovereignty as a whole? Will we submit to global institutions like the International Criminal Court, allowing foreign judges to sentence our own countrymen to jail for their perceived improprieties?

Will concerns over the climate become its own dogmatic theology, forcing a blind adherence to future climate change "protocols" like Kyoto without requisite scientific inquiry?

We already give $21 billion to the U.N. for "end poverty" programs, the world's most generous donation. The Millennium Project wants $845 billion by 2015. Do we agree with Sen. Obama and support the Global Poverty Act, which would hand over a large chunk of our GDP not directly to emerging economies like the Marshall Plan, but to UN bureaucrats who will in turn pass it off to the African dictators to "diversify" the "humanitarian aid" - ergo, more arms and ammunition for the despots themselves? Is this the best way to handle foreign aid?

What are we to do when a similar Wall Street crisis emerges? Blame the bogeyman "corporate greed," or the political strong-arming and forcing of private institutions to bend to the demands of up-for-election politicians? In the future, will our politicians and leftist lobbyists continue to promise housing to those who could not afford it? Or will they have the backbone to tell these customers their house mortgage loan-taking threatens the entire country, and to rent an apartment until they could afford otherwise?

These and more are some of the questions Americans must ask themselves, not only before the election in November, but after. These are the long-term problems that this country will face within the next 10 to 20 years. How did we get here? Was the problem government or a lack thereof? Will the solution be more government, more regulation, more taxes, and more business adherence to politicians - or less?

McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by The New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.

This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.

Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama's associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.