REAL NEWS BLAME FOR RECESSION <[email protected]> (Common sense, politically incorrect newsletter to 15,025 subscribers) Our mission is to get our readers thinking about current events. BLAME FOR RECESSION 1. Do-gooders claimed that even poor Americans should own their own homes. 2. But mortgage lenders insisted on sizeable down payments and good credit. 3. Government pressured lenders to make risky mortgages, guaranteed by FDIC. 4. Avalanche of new home sales rapidly sky rocketed property values. 5. Poor people were touted into buying very expensive homes as an investment. 6. Federal administration suspected banking industry on shakey ground, but Senate and House banking chairmen refused to audit clear up to when banks started failing. 7. High gasoline prices harmed economy, which increased unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. 8. Federal government bailed out bankers instead of allowing existing bankruptcy laws to handle in an existing orderly fashion. 9. Government favoritism, as well as restrictions on business and energy make the recession recovery impossible. --REAL NEWS Editor [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------ Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? By Orson Scott Card First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America : This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans. What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay. The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating. They end up worse off than before. This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them. Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending? I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party as the guilty party, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate." Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed. Alan Greenspan warned them years before. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury. These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was . . . the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was . . . the Republican Party. Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame? Now let's follow the money . . . right to Barack Obama, who was the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae, and Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground. Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to. If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate -- because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned. --------------------------------------------------------------------
Pocketbook Constitution available http://www.nccs.net/pocket_constitution.html Send to a friend, give to a co-worker. Contact Your Govt http://www.usa.gov/Contact.shtml Is the Constitution the Supreme Law of the Land or not? I GUESS THE SCOTUS HAS ANSWERED THAT QUESTION Patriot Freedom http://www.patriotfreedom.org/battlefield.php If a link above does not work, cut-and-paste to your browser. Did you ever wonder to what Rev Al Sharpton was referring to when he said, “Barack Obama didn't have any slave blood"? http://aconservativelesbian.com/2009/07/13/obamas-kenyan-ancestors-sold-slaves/ We the People http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVAhr4hZDJE This email is archived at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en I'M MAD, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bprelutsky/2009/07/05/im-mad-as-hell/ . -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en
