Posted on 09/21/2008 6:18:00 PM PDT by markomalley
"...Washington lobbyists do not fund my campaign, they will not run my White House...." So said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Tuesday, speaking about an economy overshadowed by Fannie Mae mortgage problems.
Oh, dear. The record tells us different.
Obama received more campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, between 1989 and 2008, than every other federal lawmaker except committee chairman Democrat Christopher Dodd. And Obama outstripped the others after only having been in the Senate for three years. Based on Federal Election Commission filings, Obama received more contributions than 353 of the 354 lawmakers.
Then there is Obama’s other unsettling tie to the mortgage crisis. Obama’s Chicago sugar mommy is Penny Pritzger. She is finance chairman of Obama’s campaign. Pritzger’s Superior Bank collapsed in 2001, the largest failure in a decade. She was an owner, a president of Superior for five years, and, according to the Chicago Sun Times, active in leadership while on the bank’s holding company.
In February, 2008, Asian Week analyzed Superior’s failure. "The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages," according to Timothy J. Anderson, a whistle-blower on financial and bank fraud, and reported by Asian Week. "The sub-prime mortgages," Anderson said, "were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds."
Other seeds to the mortgage crisis hark back to when then President Bill Clinton super-charged the Community Redevelopment Act, a Carter law to encourage minority home ownership. That social engineering — and greed — helped set up the current train wreck. At Fannie Mae, Clinton cronies Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick lined their pockets with some $175 million and Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for SEC and other violations. To quote the Investor’s Business Daily, "Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government fingerprints all over it."
Obama’s careful parsing of words would have us overlook the evidence — and overlook that Jim Johnson, another Fannie Mae former president during Clinton’s term, was an Obama economic adviser and, for a time, led Obama’s potential vice presidential search team.
Leave it to Obama to lash out at the free market with his silver tongue in an effort to distract.
Too bad. I would trust the lobbyists more than I trust him.
this is a McCain ad in the making....
“UhObama’s chickens ... have come home ... to ROOST! God damn America!”
Other seeds to the mortgage crisis hark back to when then President Bill Clinton super-charged the Community Redevelopment Act, a Carter law to encourage minority home ownership. That social engineering — and greed — helped set up the current train wreck. At Fannie Mae, Clinton cronies Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick lined their pockets with some $175 million and Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for SEC and other violations. To quote the Investor’s Business Daily, “Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government fingerprints all over it.”
Worth repeating.
The mortgagae crisis was caused by granting mortgages to people who could not repay them.
You can thank the Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama.
Biden’s son is a lobbyist who was forced to quit because of the campaign. What does that tell you?
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