A bit late, I know

This was taken from an email sent about a month ago to my extended family regarding the campaign, financing and the bailout. The email began as a plea from my grandmother to her children to clarify why on earth her sister (an Evangelical end is nigher from Tennessee) would tell her Barack Obama is the anti-Christ in a questionable chain mail.

Hello All,

I seem to be jumping in a bit late here, but I really would like to add my two cents to this discussion.

First off, the fact that at this point in the presidential race people in this country still believe that Obama is a muslim or a terrorist is just plain sad. The fact that being called a Muslim is considered and insult or smear is a sorry thing indeed.

This country has always been revered for it's ideals more than it's practices. The fact is that the founders of this country did come over here to practice religions freely; Their religion, that is. The first protestant colonies in the northeast came over to America and practiced the exact sort of persecution and intolerance that they led them to flee Europe in the first place.

However, our forefathers realized the importance in allowing individuals to practice in the manner that they saw fit. They also recognized the benefits of separating the powers of church and sate after a thousand years of unchallenged hegemony of the Catholic church. This nation has been a melting pot of cultures and religions, polyglot in nature since the very first Europeans began trickling over in the 16th and 17th centuries. Anyone who has any doubt of that should study New Amsterdam or Jamestown colonies.

I would just like to emphasize the provisions laid down by the authors of the constitution to guarantee that religious divisions would not threaten the stability of our republic:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, I just find it very tiresome that some people completely misinterpret this nation’s roots and disregard the liberties that guarantee their right to disagree.

I seem to have gotten off track here…I wanted to talk about those op-ed articles and try and throw my two cents in towards this financial crisis.

I was going to write out something lengthy here, but I guess I will just illustrate a number of stray observations and provide some quotations of analyses that I have found useful

I think we can all agree that unrestricted lobbying has done much in the past years to impede upon the democratic process. The end result is a political system where massive sums of money are needed to run for even the most nominal of offices. In a system such as this, the race for the most money to spend on advertising and branding becomes all important while the need to genuinely appeal to voters gets relegated as a secondary objective. Meanwhile government officials and representatives are beholden less to citizens who elected them than the institutions that "invested" in their appointment to office.

This is closely related to the phenomenon known as the “revolving door” in which politicians will jump from private industry to public office and vice versa. Many times these transitions entail obvious conflicts of interest (think department of energy/state department and oil companies, etc. etc.) This practice is definitely not limited to one party or the other and runs rampant in Washington.

The fact is that Obama is the second largest recipient of donations after Senator Dodd and preceding John Kerry according tohttp://www.opensecrets.org (a reliable source).

Why the author of those articles failed to mention that the next three recipients of money from Fannie and Freddie were all republicans and together received $133,000 from Public Action Committees set up by these institutions that allows them do donate more money than any one individual. Yes, the top three were Democrats, but the vast majority of their donations were from individuals. This means that the PAC were set up to ensure that these senators and congressman received proper sums to garner influence basically. In fact if you look at the top ten, there are five democrats and five republics, I haven't bothered to do the math but you get the picture.

The two republicans that received the most money from Fannie and Freddie, were Robert F. Bennet, who is the Senate Deputy Whip for the GOP and serves on the: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs

• Subcommittee on Financial Institutions
• Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment
• Subcommittee on Security and International Trade and Finance

The other Republican in the top 5, Spencer Bachus is a ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services.

The point is that the money was going to both sides and everybody was benefiting and that none of this is good for the public, the government or the economy.

I also find it hard to believe that the Bush administration with majority controls in both the Senate and House for the 6 of the last 8 years would have to pass stricter regulation and oversight on lending institutions if it truly wanted to.

Don’t get me wrong, I see the Clinton administration as being very instrumental in all of this, but because of their efforts at banking de-regulation and repealing the Glass-Stiegel act.

In regards to the article, I’m not sure who “Freddie Raines” is and wasn’t sure whether I should take that as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Either the columnist has a sense of humor or enjoys criticizing people who don't exist.

The Washington Post has repudiated any claims the McCain campaign has made against Barack Obama's would-be advisor former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, stating that they had something like one meeting and a conference call.

“Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)”

This is absolutely preposterous. There is no other word to describe it. I don't really want to go off here, so I will just post a quote from June 17, 2004 from the Washington Post after the 9/11 Commission report was released dismissing the aformentioned claims.

“Along with the contention that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network; earlier this year, Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming."….

As recently as Monday, Cheney said in a speech that Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." Bush, asked on Tuesday to verify or qualify that claim, defended it by pointing to Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has taken credit for a wave of attacks in Iraq.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html

Now, as for the crisis being caused by sub-prime mortgages of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, let's consult Alan Greenspan former Federal Reserve chairman for 20 years. A man who in that article was described as "Alan Greenspan warn[ing] them four years ago”

I would just like to post some excerpts from a NY Times article from last Thursday that includes many direct quotes from Alan Greenspan.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform….

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today’s crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.
But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.
“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” he said. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”…
This crisis,” he told lawmakers, “has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined. It has morphed from one gripped by liquidity restraints to one in which fears of insolvency are now paramount.”
Many Republican lawmakers on the oversight committee tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on the unchecked growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies that were placed in a government conservatorship last month. Republicans have argued that Democratic lawmakers blocked measures to reform the companies.
But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”
“The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower,” he said.
Despite his chagrin over the mortgage mess, the former Fed chairman proposed only one specific regulation: that companies selling mortgage-backed securities be required to hold a significant number themselves.
“Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets,” he said. “Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”

This is Alan Greenspan, herald of free-markets, de-regulation, neo-liberalism and Milton Friedman economics. If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what else possibly could.

Thos two opinion pieces really seem to be just that under a bit of scrutiny, I really do not find either of those arguments credible or convincing.

Please don’t mistake this as trying to justify the actions of Obama or his campaign. He has also received massive amounts of money from Wall Street as well. The fact that he is riding high on the economic crisis really only proves the adoption by the Democratic Party of Rovian politics tactics.

There are just so many aspects to this financial crisis it is really hard to boil it down to a few causes, everything must be taken into account. Fannie and Freddie trying to expand home ownership, Private-sector sub-prime loans, people taking on debt they can't afford coupled with predator lending, CDS’s and all the other extremely complicated aspects of the global financial network.

I would like to state for the record, that I neither actively support Barack Obama nor John Mccain. With regards to the narrow two party system that has been established in our country, I believe that Barack Obama is the proper choice for president for a multitude of reasons. Most of these can be derived from a comparison of the candidate’s positions on basic issues such as the tax system, health care and education.

However there are many areas in which I believe both candidates are completely off the mark. I have chosen Ralph Nader as the candidate which best reflects my political and social outlook and have decided that voting for anybody else would be an unconscionable act. If you would like to learn more about this candidate and what he stands for you can visit http://www.votenader.org/issues/ to learn more.

Wow, I really didn't expect this to grow so large. I enjoy these types of discussions a little too much sometimes. Maybe we can start some sort of family blog where we all contribute?
That’s my two-cents cum pocket full of change. Apologies to anyone who actually read all of that.
See you all soon!