Blame Democrats for this mess

By The Daily Progress

Published: September 27, 2008

One critical change we need is entirely within the capacity of government to accomplish — with voters’ assistance, that is. 

Recently, the roots of the subprime loan-based general financial crisis were revealed and its authors were identified. Long-serving congressmen and senators, overwhelmingly Dem-ocrats — working in concert with liberal allies in the bureaucracies and the management of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and supported by liberal special-interest and advocacy groups — hijacked federal housing policies and turned them into political fundraising and patronage programs.

The quasi-governmental Fan-nie and Freddie were at the root of this problem. What they did forced the hand of many genuinely private mortgage companies to conform to the same irresponsible lending practices Fan-nie and Freddie had adopted if they were to survive. The anything-goes environment fostered creation of sleazy mortgage companies whose business model was making lousy loans in the expectation of being able to dump them later through new financial instruments that had been created to do just that.

The policy perversions that led to this mess began with the active connivance of the Clinton administration and were perpetuated by leading Democrats in the House and Senate. Some responsible Republican lawmakers, supported by the Bush administration, attempted to avert the disaster they saw coming, but their reform efforts were defeated in the House and Senate.

The emergency bailout can go either way. It can fix the underlying problem or merely represent an opportunity for another leftist hijacking.

Certainly John McCain and Sarah Palin can claim to recognize the problem and commit themselves to working to fix it. But they cannot deliver the needed change on their own. They need support in the House and Senate to do that. Right now there is no prospect of them getting that help, not with Nancy “Malaprop” Pelosi and the odious and compromised Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Chuck Schumer and Christopher Dodd in the House and Senate leadership.

Replace them with congressmen and senators with a fundamentally different conception of how the federal government can best serve the interests of the American people. That is the change we need.

James V. Capua
Greene County