A Brief Departure

With the "bail-out" bill being passed this week, Moveon.org and "The Daily Kos" targeting our own Liddy Dole and backing do-nothing Kay Hagan (despite the near spelling she is not related to now and future felon David Hagen) in a race much closer than it should be, Spammer Jeremy Jayne's conviction being (apparently) over turned (is David Brady going to use this to get out now too?), the David Hagen saga continuing, worthless fucks like Ivan Ivanov, Ed Ovsenik, Curtis Garth, the Hagen spawn Andrea and Derek getting away with all the shit chronicled in this blog, and more.. it just seems like the world is spinning out of control.

First, look where how we got here.

The current liquidity gridlock and extreme volatility washing across all of our debt and equity markets has caused me to do some reflecting on what I think some of the possible causes may have been. Obviously, mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn. This is what I believe has been the major catalyst for our current state of affairs.

In order to understand how this happened, a short history lesson is in order. In a word--regulation. Regulation driven by liberals and progressives, not free-market “deregulators” as the aforementioned would have you believe.

Pushed hard by politicians and community activists, the regulators systematically and deliberately altered financially sound lending practices. The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives, in their traditional style of fixing things that aren't necessarily broken, decided that it needed to be “fixed.” Their complaint: Some ethnic groups got approved for mortgages at lower rates than others.

The shift began in 1989, when Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants. By 1991, critics were using that data to paint lenders as racist by showing that minority applicants were approved at far lower rates. In fact, they found a racial disparity only by ignoring relevant data on applicants’ ability to make mortgage payments - such as their assets and credit history.

But the political pressure was intense - with few in politics or media eager to speak the truth. And then, in 1992, came a study from four researchers at the Boston Fed, which seemed to bear out the critics’ contentions.

That study was, in fact, based on quite flawed data - but the authors’ political, media and academic protectors stifled most serious criticism, smearing the reputation of one whistleblower and allowing the Boston authors to avoid answering serious academic challenges to their work. Other studies with different conclusions were ignored.

The very next year, the Boston Fed announced new requirements for banks - rules that have now turned out to be monumentally catastrophic: Adopt “relaxed lending standards” or risk being labeled as racists, and face serious penalties under the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

And now, Barney Frank apparently has a glaring, public and (so far) unprosecuted conflict of interest. From Fox News...

Lawmaker Accused of Fannie Mae Conflict of Interest

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,432501,00.html

WASHINGTON Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones whobenefited from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's efforts to deregulateFannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank's partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency's push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie's assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was onthe House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.

"It's absolutely a conflict," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. "He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?

"If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have - or at least what's not in the stock market - that this would be considered germane," added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow."But everybody wants to avoid it because he's gay. It's the quintessential double standard."

"C'mon, he writes housing and banking laws and his boyfriend is a top exec at a firm that stands to gain from those laws?" the aide told FOXNews. "No media ever takes note? Imagine what would happen if Frank's political affiliation was R instead of D? Imagine what the media wouldsay if [GOP former] Chairman [Mike] Oxley's wife or [GOP presidentialnominee John] McCain's wife was a top exec at Fannie for a decade while they wrote the nation's housing and banking laws."

Frank's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gaymember of Congress.

"I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus," Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. "On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover."

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at FannieMae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives.According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many ofFannie Mae's affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month's government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector.

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougherregulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hiredby Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, eventhough they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of singlehomes, respectively.

Three years later, President Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting theseeds of today's economic crisis.

"I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more inresisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when Iwas president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on FannieMae and Freddie Mac," Clinton said recently.

Let's hope some sanity and honesty comes to politics soon. And David Hagen gets pled out GUILTY soon so the rest of the Gatelinx/GTX Global/Vision Technology Corp/VSTC co-conspirators can get rung up as well.