Senator Jim DeMint

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has an informative interview with Senator Jim DeMint on the bailout.

So, this is a house of cards that the government has created and my biggest frustration with this whole mess is that it is being blamed on free enterprise, capitalism, and corporate greed -- when in fact, this is a good example of what happens when the government gets involved in the private sector. It created a huge mess.

Also, DeMint has the Drudge-linked YouTube below up at his site, as well.

Comments

[Steve]

Great site!

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http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com

[Mr DeBakey]

"it is being blamed on free enterprise, capitalism, and corporate greed"

Senator Jim DeMint is getting frustrated with Candidate McCane.

[PatD]

So Jimmy Carter was the one who did us all in close to thirty years ago. Man, that is some slow acting poison. Hmmm ... I wonder if he managed to slip all those fancy financial doohickeys like CDO's, SIV's, credit default swaps etc etc into this witches brew as well? All those years go by and no bright, insightful conservative spots Carter's gambit and can come up with a counter strategy to the ruin contained in the Community Reinvestment Act either ? What about that six(6), yes SIX, year span when the GOP controlled the White House, Senate and the House of Reps. Why did they not take the time to correct such an obvious disaster-in-the-making ?

Sorry folks, no soap. Lifting references to three decade old legislation will not remove the Republican fingerprints from this mess.

[Iron Hat McCarty, the Pride of His Party]

Paddy, welcome to the U.S. How was the trip over from the ould sod? Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer will do their level best to keep the socialist gravy train rolling down the line, don't you fear. This current mild difficulty will be solved by the government who created it. Just walk out of that five-room manse you bought with no money down. "What me worry?" is the motto of the Democraticic party.

[IslamoLlama]

"-- Just walk out of that five-room manse you bought with no money down. "What me worry?" is the motto of the Democraticic party. --"

Lols.
Silly elitist liberals. When will you ever learn that if someone offers you a loan for zero down at 3% interest for the first two years, and you're stupid enough to take it, and that loan is repackaged as a security with dozens of derivatives and insurance assets tied to it that is then leveraged 40 times over, and you miss a payment causing the whole ponzi scheme to collapse, that this comes down entirely on your head.

Wall Street Banking didn't get us into this mess. It was those devilishly sneaky poor people currently living in tents by the river after they got foreclosed upon who caused this. And the only thing that can protect us from sneaky poor people is to cut the capital gains tax and abolish the SEC. Because poor people have been using the SEC to rig the market in their favor for years. Them, and all the Mexicans at WaMu.

[North Dallas Thirty]

Funny, IslamoLlama, I don't recall subprime mortgages being a problem when Penny Pritzker -- you know, the national finance chair for Barack Obama -- was pushing them.

And I seem to recall that, when Bush and McCain both wanted to crack down on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac precisely because they were buying and encouraging these bad loans, it was -- guess who -- Barney Frank who said there was no crisis, and Barack Obama who voted against more regulation that would have prevented such heavy exposure to subprimes.

[IslamoLlama]

NDT, got any legislation and links to back that up?

I've got no problem listing all the Democrats who bent over for the Wall Street tycoons. John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden have been at the top of my shit list for a while in how they handled the Bankruptcy Bill and various capitulations to GOP deregulation measures.

That said, it's been public policy from the start for the GOP to deregulate as much as possible. To shrink down government till you could drown it in the bath tube. I suppose the Glass-Steagall Act just repealed itself? It certainly wasn't repealed by McCain's economic advisor Phil Graham's legislation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act I suppose the OCC didn't have a hand in knee-capping states attempting to crack down on predatory lending? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783_pf.html

And how was President Bush - the unitary executive with powers far greater than any President before him - so thwarted by a minority band of Democrats in prosecuting fraud and corruption on Wall Street? Where was the regulation at the executive level? Where was the Fed? If I recall, it wasn't just Pritzker lauding subprimes, it was Greenspan and Paulson and Bernanke who couldn't get enough of them. And with no oversight of the $45 trillion derivative market, it was the banks themselves that got out of control.

So while its very cute to play the "Oh the other party did it!" game, the truth is that Wall Street paid a bunch of Senators and administration officials to let their foxes into the hen house.

Now that the hen house has been half-gutted, we've got Republicans saying we should cut the capital gains tax (that's the piddly 15% tax that hedge fund managers and stock brokers use instead of the standard income tax rates) and sell Wall Street a bunch of insurance on securities we already know is worthless - doing precisely NOTHING to solve the liquidity crisis - because they just can't help themselves to indulge in ideology while Rome burns.

You can't simply blame the GOP for the mess we're in. But you can swear up a storm at them for refusing to do a damn thing to help.

[seekeronos]

Watching the debate now... this is going to be interesting.

Although I honestly wish it were Dr. Ron Paul up there taking the battle to Obama... let's hope that Sen. McCain will bring out some solid facts from what he has seen going down in Congress, as to how Democratic Party collusion with socialists who wanted to force the market to do something that it wasn't able to offer to bad credit risk, low income people.

Sen. McCain clearly warned of this problem, and nobody really listened.

Really: if you can't afford to buy, you rent. If you can't afford to buy something and can't manage your credit, you wait until you can and do without it.

The Democrats have beguiled our Republic with falsehood and corruption, and the deceit of forcing the market to accommodate people who were unable to enter that market yet.

[WileECoyote]

Michelle Obama:
She cant help it. Her mamma has a big ass; her grandmomma has a big ass; big asses just run in her family.............

[WileECoyote]

Chris Matthews just got another jolt down his leg; Obama made him cum tonight, MSNBC is sickening

[The Cryptkeeper]

"She cant help it. Her mamma has a big ass; her grandmomma has a big ass; big asses just run in her family... "

Doin' the Duty by that Booty:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/bf-steatopygia/

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Wiley, there's a reason I can't stand MSNBC -and it has mostly to do with their unbridled fetishistic worship of The Big Zero.

[daveinboca]

Here's the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: 'The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'

'These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. 'The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'

Barney is the chief culprit and kept blocking reform all along when other proposals were made to stop a Ponzi pile of rubbish paper from toppling----Barney should be frog-marched in shackles except he'd enjoy it too much! No one else would enjoy hard time in a penitentiary as much as Mr. Frank. Oh, the things he'd do!

Seriously, Chris Dodd's father was a crook & was censured by the Senate; Chris is a crook & is given broad authority to create a RICO government oversight program. Can you imagine how much will be skimmed off the top by these serial legalized felons?

[Lala]

Anyone who would have dared to speak out about this would have been called a racist. The banks had been accused of racism for so-called red-lining; refusing to loan money to people who couldn't pay it back. These loose standards were supposed to be the cure.

http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-acorn-helped-housing-crisis-harm.html

exerpt

In February 2008, economics professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas suggested:

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards—no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment … From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards—at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.14

Liebowitz further pointed to ACORN’s role in the current housing “crisis” and to current advertisements highlighting its role in procuring loans without using credit scores, 100-percent financed loans, and acceptance of undocumented income.15

In the prescient 1992 New York Times article, ACORN’s longtime housing leader, Michael Shea, admitted that banks would not have adopted ultimately harmful policies “if there was no community pressure and the law,” but that those factors made “a lot of bankers see it’s in their self-interest.”16

That selfinterest— ACORN’s and modern banks’—made possible the extension of cheap credit to risky borrowers and has led directly to the modern subprime mess.