It was not Republicans pushing the Community Reinvestment Act, it was Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Even W warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in danger of insolvency.

Also no one in gov't has anything to do with the cost of higher education, which has been a sore point for the '99%'. You can blame your multi-million dollar university presidents for that boondoggle.

A tax cheat runs the Treasury.

Barney Frank and Chris Dodd remain unimprisoned for their roles in the housing collapse.

No need to lecture about ethics.

>> ^quantumushroom:

No Barney Frank? No Chris Dodd? Feh.


I agree QM...this government is only their for the rich...they're all culpable.

No Barney Frank? No Chris Dodd? Feh.

>> ^kymbos:

Context?


Excerpt from the Connecticut Senate debate. Richard Blumenthal is the current Attorney General of Connecticut, and is now the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Chris Dodd (who is retiring). His Republican opponent is Linda McMahon, the CEO of the WWE, which is a made-for-tv fake wrestling league.

I'm not sure what specifically they're under investigation for, but in the past there have been scandals about steroid use/distribution, and more recently about some sort of shady refusal to reimburse their wrestlers for injuries they sustain in the course of their relatively dangerous jobs.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
This "Financial Stability Oversight Council" seems be the thorn in the Liberty Party's side.


I think "sponsored by Chris Dodd" was really all it took.

Libertarian political positions are as easily modeled as Republican ones -- if it's something anyone even slightly progressive would like, they're against it.

If that's the choice they're making, then they should own up to it, not pretend like they're negotiating with progressives in good faith to pass some piece of non-partisan legislation.

When Sen. Mitch McConnell said that the Senate financial-regulation bill meant "endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks," he was, knowingly or not, taking aim at a policy that had been jointly developed by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) (pictured above) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). The two lawmakers began collaborating last spring, when they started holding joint briefings on the financial crisis. Eventually, Sen. Chris Dodd tasked them with handling the problem of what happens when too-big-to-fail firms, well, fail. He tasked them, in other words, with handling the problem of endless bailouts.

After months of meetings, the two finalized an agreement in February. That's the "resolution authority" part of the bill, which begins in section 201. And in an interview in his office this morning, Warner was not too happy with McConnell's characterization of their work. "It appears that the Republican leader either doesn't understand or chooses not to understand the basic underlying premise of what this bill puts in place."

"Resolution," Warner continued, "will be so painful for any company. No rational management team would ever choose resolution. It means shareholders wiped out. Management wiped out. Your firm is going away. At least in bankruptcy, there was some chance that some of your equity would've been retained and you could come out in some form on the other side of the process. The resolution that Corker and I have tried to create means the death of the company. The institution is gone."

Another element of the Republican critique concerns the $50 billion "orderly liquidation fund" that the FDIC will raise by taxing the banks. The idea of this fund is to create holdover money so the bank doesn't collapse while regulators are trying to unwind it. Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, called it a "slush fund" and said that “the mere existence of this fund will make it all too easy to choose a bailout over bankruptcy.”

"Again," says Warner, "it's either that they don't understand or they choose not to understand. There's nobody in the financial sector who believes this. They'd laugh at the proposition that $50 billion is enough to get you through the resolution process if a couple of firms go down. What we've heard time and again is that the challenge in a crisis is to buy enough time to keep the lights on for a few days till you get the FDIC in here. You could make it smaller. Corker and I spoke about $25 billion. But this is funded by the industry."

"And here's the hypocrisy of the Republican leader's comments," continues Warner. "I can guarantee you that if there had not been some pre-funding, the critique would've been: 'Look at these guys! They've left the taxpayers exposed! What's going to keep the lights on for these few days? It's going to be Treasury funds or Federal Reserve funds. The taxpayer will be exposed!' ”

"If you haven't spent time with these issues," Warner sighed, "it's easy to pop off with sound-bite solutions that don't work."


http://cl.ly/LQd

Tags for this video have been changed from 'jon stewart, the daily show, financial, regulation, chris dodd, johnco' to 'jon stewart, the daily show, financial, regulation, chris dodd, jonco, jonbucks' - edited by calvados

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?
Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.
If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.
I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.
Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.
They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.


That's good to hear that there are left vs. left debates. However, are these mostly just folks on the far-left of the political bell curve 'pushing harder even if it means we lose'? As long as that's the dominant liberal paradigm, they don't seem to me to be reliable societal partners who can be reasoned with.

That might sound very uninvolved, but I think any intellectuals who go into politics (i.e. not Moore, Olbermann, Huffington etc.) will find that the tail wags the dog: if intellectual figures don't tell the liberal masses what they want to hear, the masses will just find figures who will. Olbermann saying "I'm not a liberal; I'm an American" seems to be a good example of that kind of permanent intellectual simplicity.

I suppose this is an inevitable macrohistorical problem... perhaps any intelligent species on any planet would face it... the necessary legacy of human evolution is that the kind of interest in cognitive complexity that's advantageous in a complex modern society wasn't sufficiently advantageous during the last 10,000 or 100,000 years to be widespread today. In other words, any collection of social norms that must appeal to 50% of the population can only achieve a limited level of intellectual accuracy.

The take-home lesson for me is: that means an individual with a greater level of intellectual accuracy can out-predict them, and thus position themselves in the right place at the right time (for whatever opportunity is targeted).

>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?

Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.

If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.

I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.

Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.

They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.

http://www.videosift.com/video/AIG-Political-Donations-Chris-Dodd-Winner-Obama-Second

I think I can fill out most of the list:

#1. The House Sergeant at Arms (left), and I think he's accompanied by the Senate Sergeant at Arms.
#2. Special guests
#3. From left to right, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senator Chuck Shumer (D-NY), and in front of them looks like Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito.
#4. From left to right, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner, and HRC herself (Secretary of State).
#5. In the middle is Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY), I'm guessing he's with other House Representatives from NY.
#6. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) currently also Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee (kinda important atm)
#7. From left to right, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). These two are the current Republican House leadership.
#8. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
#9. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), who had a brief flirtation with being Obama's Commerce Secretary.
#10. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). He's the current Republican Senate leadership.
#11. Earl Devaney, the new Inspector General Obama was talking about seconds before (who helped bust Jack Abramaoff)
#12. Not sure who the guy picking at his ear is, but the other two are Housing and Urban Development Secretary (HUD) Shaun Donovan, and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
#13. Juggs magazine. Or the text of the speech he's listening to. Oh, and it's Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), who's the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee (and former chair).
#14. The infamous Joe Lieberman (I-CT), former Democrat who campaigned for John McCain.
#15. Senator Arlen Spector (R-PA), one of the 3 Republicans to vote for the Stimulus bill.
#16. Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Roland Burris (D-IL) the latter of Blagojevich fame.
#17. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) in the middle, not sure of anyone else. He's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
#18. I'm forgetting his name, but he's a House Republican, and most likely so is the woman next to him.
#19. Peter Orszag, new Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), formerly Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel is to his left.
#20. Chuck Shumer again.
#21. Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Eric Shinseki
#22. Not sure, I think he's a House Republican.
#23. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
#24. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
#25. Don't know.
#26. Don't know. I'll wager a guess it's a House Democrat though.
#27. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)
#28. Don't know.
#29. Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN)
#30. Don't recognize him, but he must be an Obama cabinet member, since that's who he's sitting amongst.
#31. Evan Bayh (D-IN) again.
#32. On the left is Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), not sure who's next to him.
#33. Don't know.
#34. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), buddy of John McCain.
#35. From left to right, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner, and Hillary something or other.
#36. I only know the one on the left, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but those are the *cough* Joint Chiefs of Staff; the heads of the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines (in that order unless I've misidentified the uniforms).
#37. No clue, but it's likely they're part of the JCS organization.
#38. Dunno, but he's sure to be on this list somewhere. To his left is Ted Strickland, Governor of Ohio (D).
#39. Don't know. I think that's the Republican House section, though.
#40. Don't know.
#41. Captain Sully Sullenberger. Pilot of this plane.
#42. Mayor Bob Dixon, from Greensburg, Kansas; the city Obama's talking about.

Phew.

DEMOCROOKS

$34,000: the amount of federal taxes that Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner (D) failed to pay during his employment at the International Monetary Fund despite receiving extra compensation and explanatory brochures that described his tax liabilities.

$75,000: the amount of money that the head of the powerful tax-writing committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), was forced to report on his taxes after the discovery that he had not reported income from a Costa Rican rental property. His excuses for the failure started with blaming his wife, then his accountant and finally the fact that he didn't speak Spanish.

$93,000: the amount of petty cash each Congressional representative voted to give themselves in January 2009 during the height of an economic meltdown.

$133,900: the amount Fannie Mae "invested" in Chris Dodd (D-CT), head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, presumably to repel oversight of the GSE prior to its meltdown. Said meltdown helped touch off the current economic crisis. In only a few years time, Fannie also "invested" over $105,000 in then-Senator Barack Obama.

$140,000: the amount of back taxes and interest that Cabinet nominee Tom Daschle (D) was forced to cough up after the vetting process revealed significant, unexplained tax liabilities.

$356,000: the approximate amount of income and deductions that Daschle (D) was forced to report on his amended 2005 and 2007 tax returns after being caught cheating on his taxes. This includes $255,256 for the use of a car service, $83,333 in unreported income, and $14,963 in charitable contributions.

$800,000: the amount of "sweetheart" mortgages Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) received from Countrywide Financial, the details for which he has refused to release details despite months of promises to do so. Countrywide was once the nation's largest mortgage lender and linked to Government-Sponsored Entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their meltdown precipitated the current financial crisis. Just days ago in Pennsylvania, Countrywide was forced to pay $150,000,000 in mortgage assistance following "a state investigation that concluded that Countrywide relaxed its underwriting standards to sell risky loans to consumers who did not understand them and could not afford them."

$1,000,000: the estimated amount of donations by Denise Rich, wife of fugitive Marc Rich, to Democrat interests and the William J. Clinton Foundation in an apparent quid pro quo deal that resulted in a pardon for Mr. Rich. The pardon was reviewed and blessed by Obama Attorney General and then Deputy AG Eric Holder, despite numerous requests by government officials to turn it down.

$12,000,000: the amount of TARP money provided to community bank OneUnited despite the fact that it did not qualify for funds, and was "under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses." It turns out that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a key contributor to the Fannie Mae meltdown, just happens to be married to one of the bank's ex-directors.

$23,500,000: The upper range of net worth Rep. Allan Mollohan (D-WV) accumulated in four years time according to The Washington Post through earmarks of "tens of millions of dollars to groups associated with his own business partners."

$2,000,000,000: ($2 billion) the approximate amount of money that House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) is earmarking related to his son's lobbying efforts. Craig Obey is "a top lobbyist for the nonprofit group" that would receive a roughly $2 billion component of the "Stimulus" package.

$3,700,000,000: ($3.7 billion) not to be outdone, this is the estimated value of various defense contracts awarded to a company controlled by the husband of Rep. Diane Feinstein (D-CA). Despite an obvious conflict-of-interest as "a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions to her husband's firms ."

$4,190,000,000: ($4.19 billion) the amount of money in the so-called "Stimulus" package devoted to fraudulent voter registration ACORN group under the auspices of "Community Stabilization Activities". ACORN is currently the subject of a RICO suit in Ohio.

$1,646,000,000,000: ($1.646 trillion): the approximate amount of annual United States exports endangered by the "Stimulus" package, which provides a "Buy American" stricture. According to international trade experts, a "US-EU trade war looms", which could result in a worldwide economic depression reminiscent of that touched off by the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Act.

How DO Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac figure into this crisis? And ACORN? And the CRA?

Unmentioned at the "Turning Point" in the video.

"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started buying sub prime loans. Previously there was a much smaller market for sub prime mortgages, but with Fannie and Freddie buying the paper the availability of sub prime loans skyrocketed. With time-tested lending practices out the window, these two institutions ended up controlling 90% of the secondary market for mortgages. Those within the organizations who raised objections to the irresponsible lending being encouraged by Fannie and Freddie were overruled and eased out.

"Fannie and Freddy began hiring Democratic operatives as CEO’s and upper management. At the same time, Fannie and Freddie began making huge contributors to Congress, spending millions to influence votes. While some Republicans also received financial contributions from the two institutions, most of the money went to Democrats. Top recipients of those campaign contributions were Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the Chairmen of the Committees that should have been providing over site of the two financial giants. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were also among the top receipts of Fannie and Freddy campaign contributions.

"Wall Street investors liked the new arrangement and the easy money. Democrats liked the votes they could garner by being the party that advanced homeownership and they liked the dependable source of campaign contributions. This was the “crony capitalism” that led to the crisis."

The "Community Reinvestment Act" was another Jimmeh Carter abortion, strengthened in the 1990s by Clinton. Poor people deserve to live in the same houses as their more well-off neighbors. It's only fair.

ACORN and the Clinton "Justice" Department did threaten banks to keep making bad loans. In a 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.”

The irony is that liberals claim to hate greed, yet their one-size-fits-all socialism created artificial market conditions that encouraged greed.

The press is swearing on a stack of bibles that Obama will pick either Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, or Tim Kaine. They also swore on a stack of bibles that there was no reason to doubt that there were WMD in Iraq.

Snarkiness aside, I'm thinking they're right, it'll be one of those three, with a smidge of possibility for Katherine Sebellius.

Nobody has an inside line, but I think the smartest pick for Obama out of that group is Biden, and I think the press is right to consider him the front runner.

I'm with Fjnbk, I'd probably be most excited about Al Gore, but that's not happening.

There's quite a few people I liked more than the names that are left, Jim Webb, Chris Dodd, John Edwards (before I knew about the affair), and even Bill Richardson, but Webb & Edwards are out of consideration, and Dodd & Richardson's names never made it on any of the short lists, even when the short list was 15+ people.

I'm trying to figure out who McCain will pick. I've got zero read on where he's at, but I don't see anyone who'd be a good choice for him. Who'd be able to energize independents without pissing off the base, or who'd energize the base without pissing off independents? Why wouldn't such a person have become the nominee in the first place, if they existed?

If I had to guess, I'll say Romney, which will mean I get to promote old videos of McCain and Romney attacking each other from the Republican debates.