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RIP REPUBLICAN PARTY 1854-2008
By Greg L | 3 October 2008 | National Politics | 56 Comments
The House of Representatives passed the bailout bill today with roughly half of House Republicans voting for this outrage.
The Republican Party has committed suicide.
The opinions expressed here are solely the views of the author, and not representative of the position of any organization, political party, doughnut shop, knitting guild, or waste recycling facility, but may be correctly attributed to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. If anything in the above article has offended you, please click here to receive an immediate apology.
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Nah, they’ll be back. If the Democratic Party can make a comeback, anybody can!
Not sure the Republican party made it to 2008 . . .
$700 billion pumped into the economy without being offset by government revenue equals an increase in the money supply. An increase in the money supply equals inflation, a horribly regressive tax.
At least we can rely on the sound fiscal management of government bureaucrats to run entire swaths of our economy. let us all celebrate today’s victory for socialism!
I think I may stay home November 4.
What a disappointment.
Replace everyone of them from both parties.
McCain is done for. He had his chance and completely blew it.
Bush just signed it.
Frank Wolf voted for it again!!! I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut.
Well, thanks for signing this piece of crap “leaders”…. the market is tanking as I type this…..
They are all good for nothing!!!!!!!!
This was inevitable, but 442 pages??
The devil is in the details indeed.
You guys have obviously not read the WHOLE bill, or you would not be so negative about it. There’s something in it for everyone. Consider section 503, for instance:
SEC. 503. EXEMPTION FROM EXCISE TAX FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROWS DESIGNED FOR USE BY CHILDREN
Think of the children, everybody!
And, of course, the Governator is asking for a “loan” for 7 billion dollars now. Seems they’re having trouble with teacher salaries, and government services for their citizens….oh, wait, did I say citizens? I meant illegal aliens.
Wolf is toast… how about a write-in campaign for Ham Sandwich, Greg?
Don’t blame bankers, it’s down to a man called Bill
Evening Standard 10/3/2008 Dennis Sewell
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23563172-details/Don’t+blame+bankers,+it’s+down+to+a+man+called+Bill/article.do
Let us be clear: this is a crisis caused on Wall Street,” insisted Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday, shortly before the House of Representatives voted to reject the President’s $700 billion bail-out plan.
Pinning the blame for the crisis on greedy bankers and incompetent regulators may have seemed plausible enough during the turmoil of the past few days. Following Monday’s rejection of the bail-out, stock markets threw a hissy fit which wiped billions off shares. Meanwhile, the sullen banks remained obdurate in their reluctance to lend, despite a massive injection of liquidity from central bankers. Not much there to inspire confidence in the system.
Consequently, this hardly seems the most appropriate moment to mount a defence of capitalism in general and American bankers in particular. But unless we take advantage of this hiatus between the crashing of financial institutions to take an honest look at the origins of our current predicament, then today’s myth-making will quickly harden into tomorrow’s firm conviction.
Let us be clear: this crisis was not caused on Wall Street — it was caused in the White House. The root problem was not financial — it was political, and those truly responsible for this fiasco were not bankers, nor even Bush Republicans; they were Clinton Democrats.
For generations, America’s bankers have been firmly refusing credit to those they judged unworthy of it. Yet the mountain of toxic subprime debt is proof that bankers radically altered their behaviour and began to shower mortgages on borrowers who had no realistic prospect of keeping up repayments.
What could possibly have induced them to act so recklessly? The facile answer is greed. The correct answer is that banks were bullied into lowering their lending standards by politicians in pursuit of an ideological agenda.
Let’s wind back to 1993 and Roberta Achtenberg’s arrival in Washington. Achtenberg had made her name in San Francisco as a civil rights lawyer and activist. Bill Clinton offered her a job: she duly took up her post as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics. High levels of home ownership correlated with less violent crime, better school performance, a heightened sense of community. But standing in the way were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient things as cash deposits and regular repayments — things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative.
Meanwhile, Ms Achtenberg was busy setting up a network of enforcement offices, primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practising unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability. Achtenberg believed racism was a big factor in keeping minorities from enjoying the same level of home ownership as whites.
However, when little or no overt or deliberate racial discrimination was discovered among mortgage lenders, HUD’s investigators turned to trying to prove “disparate treatment” of minority groups. If a bank refused loans to proportionally more black applicants than white ones, for instance, the onus would fall on it to prove it had good grounds for doing so or face settlement penalties running into millions of dollars. A series of highly publicised cases were brought on this basis, starting in 1994. Eventually the investigators would turn somewhat desperately to “disparate impact”, a form of discrimination so abstract as to be only discernible at all through the application of multivariate regression analysis to information stored on regulators’ databases.
These mortgage banks, which have been responsible for issuing about three-quarters of the dodgy subprime loans, quickly took the hint. From the mid-1990s they began to abandon their formerly rigorous lending criteria. Mortgages were offered with only three per cent deposit requirements, and eventually with no deposit requirement at all. The mortgage banks fell over one another to provide loans to low-income households and especially to minority customers. In the five years from 1994 to 1999, the number of African-American and Latino homeowners increased by two million.
The national banks, responsible for the remaining quarter of the current subprime loans, were put under a different kind of pressure by the Clinton team. Changes were made to the Community Reinvestment Act to establish a system by which banks were rated according to how much lending they did in low-income neighbourhoods. A good CRA rating was necessary to get regulators to sign off on mergers, expansions, even new branch openings. At the same time, the government pressed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two giants of the secondary mortgage market, to help expand mortgage loans among low and moderate earners, and introduced new rules allowing the organisations to get involved in the securitisation of subprime loans.
By the end of the 20th century most of the ingredients that would combine to cause today’s subprime crisis were already in place. Only a small proportion of the subprime loans made since George W Bush became President have gone to new, first-time buyers. A huge number have been refinancing loans, replacing mortgages originally taken out perhaps eight, 10 or 12 years ago. If you are one of those low-income householders, you will never pay off your loan. It’s not your fault. It’s not the bank’s fault. And it certainly isn’t George W Bush’s fault — every attempt he has made to reform the mortgage market has been blocked by Congressional Democrats. So that’s how we get from there to here, from crude attempts at social engineering during the early, heady days of the first Clinton administration to the turmoil on Wall Street today.
There may be many technical lessons to be learned about selling and buying mortgages, about the best ways to price and manage risk, and about the regulation of financial markets, but I believe the most important lesson of all is an ethical one: it’s about not behaving ruthlessly when trying to change the world for the better. Bill Clinton’s team, like so many progressives here in Britain, were not content to wait and see what fruits equal opportunities might bring.
They felt compelled to secure their equal outcomes by any means necessary, even if that meant debauching institutions, corrupting professions and trying to skew the operation of markets. That only ever leads to chaos.
Why does our government, whether local, state or federal, think that they don’t have to listen to the citizens of this country? Frank Wolf can kiss my vote good-bye!
BTW- My McCain sign is going in the trash!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/02/AR2008100203812.html?hpid=sec-politics
When mortgage giant Freddie Mac feared several years ago that Sen. John McCain was too outspoken on the issue of executive pay, it pinpointed a lobbyist known for his closeness to McCain and hired him to work with the senator.
Mark Buse, a longtime McCain adviser who had been staff director of the Senate commerce committee, signed on as a Freddie Mac lobbyist, and his firm, ML Strategies, earned $460,000 in lobbying fees in late 2003 and 2004, according to lobbying disclosures. Buse is now chief of staff at McCain’s Senate office.
Buse was one of many strategic hires made by Freddie Mac in its efforts to sew up support and manage opponents on Capitol Hill, a push that peaked in 2004 with the retention of 34 outside lobbying firms. Over the past decade, Freddie spent more than $95 million on lobbying, while its sister company, Fannie Mae, spent more than $79 million.
McCain’s own entanglements include his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who earned more than $2 million as president of an advocacy group that defended Fannie and Freddie against stricter regulation. Davis’s lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, also received monthly payments of $15,000 from Freddie Mac as recently as August.
Buse was nicknamed “The Ferret” because he helped his boss, McCain, find pork-barrel provisions buried in legislation. McCain has said he considered Buse to be like a son.
Buse left the commerce committee staff to lobby, signing on clients as diverse as oil giant Exxon Mobil, Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, according to the government records. He also represented telecommunications clients affected by the committee.
Buse returned to McCain’s office this year as chief of staff.
Davis, the McCain campaign manager, last week defended his long association with the Homeownership Alliance, saying he served as “the public face of an organization that promoted homeownership.”
But people who worked for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Homeownership Alliance said the group’s central mission was promoting Fannie and Freddie.
Okay, so the guy who McCain is like a son to him worked for the Homeownership Alliance.
Now, those right-wing idealogues who post here and try to pretend this whole crisis is mostly about the Democratic Party advocating minority home ownership, please pay attention here.
http://www.allbusiness.com/finance/953173-1.html?yahss=114-3470923-953173&siap=1
Interest from the participants suggested that Latino communities would react well to a banking product that included the acceptance of their foreign identification documents, receiving a number of free checks monthly, a flexible minimum deposit requirement, the ability to send money to their families through the bank and direct deposit services, according to the summary report.
The findings of two focus groups were recently published by the Homeownership Alliance.
The report is available at www.homeownershipalliance.com.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that both parties collude against us … and market to your fears.
I should trademark that phrase, maybe run off some T-shirts …
Threats of martial law over bailout bill? WTF?
http://www.infowars.com/?p=5061
Sarah Balin supported the bailout. Everybody loves Sarah Balin. If you do not support the bailout, then you are against Sarah Palin.
Four years of Comrade Obama, and I predict that both major parties might implode. Then it will be time to start looking for another party. It happened in 1854. It can happen again.
Watch out, Greg, you’ll be classified as an insurgent!
Just a tool…get this? How many people live in the US? 300 million? If the govt chose instead to give each and every tax payer 1 million, instead of bailing out the banks to the tune of 700 billion…what would happen? What if the govt gave me the money to pay off my mortgage and student loans, and credit cards. What if I then had the money to invest in a 403b for my children’s education? What if then I had enough money to invest in “penny stocks” in such companies as AIG? If the money spent on the bailout was given to the members of this country, there would no longer be a need for food stamps, or WIC,or medicaid in many cases. Any surplus could be infused into the paychecks of soldiers serving in a war zone, research and coverage for PTSD or TBI situations. Leave the banks, leave wall street, leave it alll. Infuse the money with your peeps, and I garantee the economy will reverse itself. Peeps=”mainstreet”
Haven’t you heard, ateacher, government has not existed to serve the people for a very long time…we are allowed to exist to serve government.
Unfortunately $700 billion divided by 300 million is $2,333 dollars each. Not enough to change everyones lives.
Well, if that’s not going to change your life, feel free to mail me your check for $2,333 as it might change mine.
What a terrible thing to have excess money laying around like this. Meanwhile, I’ve got to eat a few grand in expenses for a three year old to get an audio support system so she can hear her preschool teacher in the classroom. That $2,333 would cover about half of this expense for me. I’d argue that bailing out banks that made risky loans to illegal aliens is not quite as compelling as providing a preschooler the opportunity to participate in a classroom environment and learn.
Will I get your check next week?
Only problem anon is that fishermen and wooden arrow manufacturers are amongst a whole plethora of odd recipients who are getting a whole bunch of cashola. Wonder what they have to do with bank failures and the credit crisis? What a complete piece of folder. No thanks to our worthless dead duck congressman and senator Davis and Warner.
Oh well now that Mr. Timmy has begun reinstating felons voting priviledges today in Virginia I am sure that this will all help me pay my mortgage and get a car loan.
“If the govt chose instead to give each and every tax payer 1 million, instead of bailing out the banks to the tune of 700 billion…what would happen?”
A cheeseburger would end up costing about $2000.
Anonymous, are we a little mathematically challenged there? Forgot a few zeros, perhaps…like maybe 6 of them?
You wouldn’t by any chance work for the government, Anonymous…like in preparing budgets?
Im just waiting for everyone to get on here and tell me how I have to vote for John McCain because he wont be quite as bad…
Not Voting for McCain or Obama…
You won’t hear it from me, Max.
What can we do to ensure Wolf’s reign ends? I suggested earlier to start a write-in campaign for Ham Sandwich. Or should we all just vote for ourselves?
Any ideas?
Then you’ll simply get what you deserve, Max, the decision of real voters.
We conservatives need to make a choice. Either we unite and commit ourselves to a complete reform and overhaul of the Republican Party … or … we unite and commit ourselves to establishing a viable third part alternate.
The disarray is killing us. And I have no clue where to even begin.
It won’t matter who’s in Congress, freedom…they’re already powerless, doing only what their handlers demand of them.
Then, of course, there’s the matter of that martial law that they’ll be imposing after the food riots start because the dollar has sunk to a value less than the Peso of 40 years ago and food has become not only impossible to buy but unavailable. Of course the Congress will be suspended, the Patriot Act fully activated against the American people, and Fascism will be the flavor of the day, so what difference will it make?
Well MJFreeman, I agree with you, we need a complete reform of the Republican party, to include Reagan Democrats. However, right now, the timing couldn’t be worse. That needs to happen after 5 November 2008 and carry on from there.
AWCheney said, “It won’t matter who’s in Congress, freedom…” OK then AWC, you elect BO and we’ll see what you say after four years of the triumvirate — BO, HR and NP. Then, I dare say, you’ll feel far, far different about the Congress AND the Presidency.
I wrote Wolf a number of letters, saying in no uncertain terms that I was completely against this bailout. Wolf voted for it… and then voted for it again.
I phone is office a number of times. Once I asked the gal what the percentage of callers wanted. She said 80% were against the bill! And this is in “liberal” Fairfax County where many people own many stocks. Still Wolf voted for this. He does not represent the people of his district.
“Unfortunately $700 billion divided by 300 million is $2,333 dollars each. Not enough to change everyones’ lives.” - Anon
Remember, Anon, this is only the “down payment”. They will be back for more (in spite of what they say). Our country has overspent. Eventually we will need continuous bailouts just to pay the interest on our bailouts.
Karla….do you know one that does?
Seriously, is it possible that on this occasion, the economy being what it is and as complex as it is, that we, those who lack deep insight, just simply “don’t know what’s best for us”?
That’s a question, not an assertion.
Let’s consider common sense, for a moment. Consider that a great part of our current economic difficulties is the sinking value of the dollar, and consider that we have a Chairman of the Fed who has had the presses already running day and night printing those dollars with great abandon…what is the logical outcome of adding an additional $850 Billion (don’t forget the “pork” payoffs added to the bill to buy off the remaining votes necessary) to the $630 Billion that Bernanke had already ordered under his executive powers to be placed in the World Bank to bolster Wall Street credit? This is all IN ADDITION to the already burgeoning National Debt. There is only ONE outcome to this continued, and continuing, financial serendipity, and you’ll find it by researching the last years of the Weimar Republic and hyperinflation.
Also, are you aware that a portion of this money is supposed to be coming out of the Social Security Trust Fund…what there is of it? Our retirement dollars at work! I’m sorry, any way you look at this, it’s a travesty. The same people that got us into this situation will also be determining how that money gets distributed. Incompetence and greed once more rewarded. There was absolutely NOTHING sensible about this bailout. Other, more sensible plans, were offered and/or suggested but they were never considered. Let me ask you freedom…if you were in, over your head, in debt would YOU try to spend your way out of it? This has become a nation of sheep.
AWCheney,
I’m not one to speak badly about others, but it is you that needs a math lesson. 700 billion is
700,000,000,000 and 300 million is 300,000,000. Dividing 700 billion by 300 million does indeed equal 2333 without any extra zeros. Look up the definition and you’ll see that a billion is 1000 million. So before you start making comments about others you best check your facts, and math skills.
AWCheney said on 4 Oct 2008 at 5:47 pm:
AMEN, AWCheney! AMEN!
Yes “‘Teach’ AWC”…:)
Greg,
Relax, I was pointing out the math error. The person was saying that everyone would get a million dollars, and that would certainly be life changing. However, $2333 would help, but it’s not going to change the average person’s life as in paying off a home or college expenses as the person indicated in the post. I even got excited and thought that was a great idea…….. until I did the math!
I’m probably voting for Chuck Baldwin, Consitution Party, now.
The republican party has been taken over by neo-cons…almost.
We have to win it back or give up and start another.
The Neo-Cons are using us.
vote for Baldwin, Nader, stay home or vote for Obama = same thing, no difference.
Anonymous said on 4 Oct 2008 at 10:50 pm:
The Neo-Cons are using us.
‘Cuz you’re easy!
Freedom-
I just can’t vote for McCain. If we have to take a loss now to put our party on the right track then that is what we have to do
Good summary of the situation. I’d add a couple of points:
1. Insurance - the companies who climed to insure the mortgage backed securities lacked the capitalization needed to provide an effective level of insurance. The executives at the banks looked the other way and pretended that this insurance was legitimate. Otherwisw, they would have had to impar their mortgage packages over time instead of all at once. When the insurance companies went down, the banking executives all had to declare crisis simultaneously. Kind of like that scene in Casablanca where the cop says that he’s shocked to find gambling occurring here. Seems to me that Sarbanes-Oxaley requires not just reporting what you know but also reporting what your should have known. It’s time to blow the cobwebs off the Bernie Ebbers memorial handcuffs and start duck walking the bank executives out of their houses in the Hamptons. Ditto for the insurance companies, hedge funds and others who offered faux insuarance knowing they lacked the capitalization to make good on that insurance.
2. Freddie and Fannie were supposed to package risky mortgaes with less risky morgages and sell these packages in order to provide liquidity for the morgage market. Instead, they srarted buying the mortgages and holding them on their own balance sheet. This made them temporarily much more profitable and their share prices went up. But they were now in a different business that they were ever meant to be in. And it was a vastly more risky business. Meanwhile, the federal government’s implied guarantee (and it was always only implied) remained in place. The government did not share in the windfall that Freddie and Fannie’s decision to hold mortgage packages provided. Normally, a company which decides to engage in riskier business would have to pay more to its business insurer. But, the governemnt is inept, and they never charged Fannie and Freddie any more to insure this riskier business profile. In fact, in an act of incomprehensible incompetence, they never charged Fannie and Freddie anything.
Once this series of unfortunate events played out the government had to reestablish the operation of the credit market. Basically, they had to buy the bad loans back from those who held those loans. Little else would work. And Bush submitted a four page bill to do just that. Now time is the great crippler of bills. If the Republicans would have passed the bill quickly it would have been focused on restarting the credit markets. But they voted no (temporarily of course) and allowed time for the pork to be added. $25B for the auto industry, wooden arrows, etc. The real crime was letting Congress have even an hour more to add the pork.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs&feature=related
Freedom:
Great video. I see they key as the point made at 7:25 into the clip where the reserve levels of Fannie Mae were called into question. Fannie Mae’s decision to move from a mortgage packager to a mortgage package owner / investor should have subjected them to much more stringent regulation.
Franklin Raines should be indicted.
Absolutely….along with those who protected him.
AWC: You could write in my name instead of voting for Frank (spit) Wolf, if it makes you feel better.
Adolph would be proud: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=77052
Obama Youth Group demonstrating mind control.