Monday, 6 October 2008
0957 - Truth is stranger than fiction
Tom Clancy has said that he couldn't write stuff in his novels that has happened in real life, because nobody would believe it was plausible. Power Line points out we may well be in the middle of another such moment:
If it turns out to be the financial crisis that puts Barack Obama over the top in his quest for the White House, the irony will be difficult to overstate. First, the biggest driver of the financial crisis was not any conservative policy such as the kind of deregulation John McCain supports. Rather, as Diana West argues, the biggest driver was the “race-based social engineering” that “virtually created the sub-prime mortgage industry.” The implosion of that industry, in turn, triggered the present crisis.
The operative vision, then, was leftist and racialist, not free-market. As West puts it, the social engineers decided that not “enough” minorities had homes because not “enough” minorities were eligible for mortgages. The solution was to junk the bottom-line, non-racial markers of mortgage eligibility traditionally used by banks to distinguish between good and bad credit risks -- steady employment, clean credit, and a down payment. Obama, then, is the beneficiary of the terrible failure of affirmative action style policies in the mortgage banking sector.
But the irony extends further. For it turns out that intimidating banks into making bad loans to minorities was a major activity of “community organizations” during the 1990s. And, according to Stanley Kurtz, Obama himself trained and funded ACORN activists who engaged in such intimidation.
Using a combination of intimidation and white guilt to plunge the banking industry into the crisis that brings a radical activist to power – even Saul Alinsky couldn’t have drawn it up this well.
I don't know who Saul Alinsky is, but the plot would be too convoluted for Clancy to get away with.
location: 21236 current mood: pissed off
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Comments:
Isn't this what alot of us have been saying for some time?
I think the problem is that the people in this country don't want to hear things like "affirmative action doesn't work", and "the racially motivated granting of economic benefits are detrimental to society".
The media and our flawed educational system have ensured that noone will see the facts for what they are. If you don't know who Saul Alinsky is, you are well advised to find out. Though he was a labor and civil rights activist, his ideas for activism are indispensable, whether you are on the left or the right. Well, on the right it would be good to know what they are so you can combat them. Using them is just unethical.
Protesting outside people's homes and threatening their families? Flooding into the offices of bankers to intimidate them? Flooding into the lobbies of banks and protesting inside? Given that they're using these and attributing them to Saul Alinsky, they're not the sort of thing that I would want to be associated with.
Protesting a person home and threatening families is most certain NOT an Alinsky tactic. Anyone who claims it is is lying. It may or may not be an Alinsky tactic, but it's definitely an ACORN - and Obama - tactic. (See the Kurtz article.)
From what I've read of Alinsky, it does seem to be a tactic he'd approve of. So, all those other forms of intimidation and extortion are Alinsky tactics then? Read some of his books. Find out what he's about directly. To reply to the as-yet still screened comment... Read some of his books. Find out what he's about directly. Telling your opponent to do your debate prep work for you is a poor way to win a debate. Yeah, overturning the Glass-Steagall Act in '99 had nothing to do with it. Neither did forcing the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to nullify dozens of statewide investigations into predatory lending practices in '03.
Don't blame deregulation! It's all the lib'ruls and poor people's fault!
Just keep telling yourself that when you cluelessly vote Republican again in November. You know, it's strange that leftists complain about deregulation, when the Democrats were responsible for shooting down regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would have prevented this crisis... Well, we know what they got for their hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions to Obama, don't we? (He got the second most of any candidate from them.) ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/32254216/7716593) | | | yet the McCain campaign has gotten more from the biggies... | (Link) |
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You know...the ones that're really guilty? Look it up...
But the list requires a few notes of explanation.
Corporations cannot give to candidates, so the center's list adds up contributions from Fannie and Freddie employees and their families. Obama has received a lot of money during his presidential campaign, though, and Fannie and Freddie don't make his list of top 20 companies. (The top three companies with employees donating to Obama are Goldman Sachs, University of California, and Citigroup, according to the center.)
The New York Times looked at contributions from Fannie and Freddie's boards of directors and lobbyists, who are technically not employees. That analysis found Fannie and Freddie-related contributors gave $169,000 to John McCain and his related committees, compared with $16,000 to Obama and his related committees. Lots of people like to make this about one party or the other's actions.
"ZOMG, a Republican slipped total CDS deregulation into a massive spending bill, on the very last day of a lame duck congress, just before christmas"
"ZOMG, a Democrat voted against a bill that would've regulated FNM and FRE slightly differently."
But basically it's all nonsense. The leveraging came not because of anything the Dems did, but because institutions started adopting the risk-weighted capital requirements that were laid out in Basel II.
FNM/FRE were getting new oversight because of a scandal related to earnings smoothing, not because anybody thought there were fundamental problems with their risk model.
And the CDS non-regulation did get added by a republican... and then passed 95-0. If anybody had seen this problem coming, they surely would've voted against it, even though that would've been inconvenient.
It's not a partisan screwup. People who think it is aren't sufficiently well informed to understand what it is that is really going wrong right now. I mean... the big problem of the day doesn't have anything to do with mortgages at all.
Idiotic mortgages were just a stumbling block that kicked up some other much larger problems. Oh, and my vote for McCain will be anything but clueless: Obama terrifies me. This is based on what he's said about his policies - in what few specifics he's offered. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/32254216/7716593) | | | They're easily available on his website... | (Link) |
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as I'm sure you know. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/2769171/714268) | | | Re: They're easily available on his website... | (Link) |
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Nothing I've read on his website has made me any less terrified. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/25962288/1898253) | | | Re: They're easily available on his website... | (Link) |
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You're almost as good as Governor Palin at evading the point, which is that there are plenty of details on his website, if you chose to read them, which either you haven't, or conveniently lied about. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/2769171/714268) | | | Re: They're easily available on his website... | (Link) |
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Details that don't turn out to have any meat to them once you actually read them (which I have), and those that do are the standard hard-left stuff we should expect given Obama's ultra-liberal voting record. The more I read, the more scared I get. |