HOW I SEE IT: Current financial mess has many fathers

Isn’t it about time people understood who really started this financial fiasco?

People are not understanding where this socialistic way of doing business actually started. It began with a Carter administration mandate that the Clinton administration implemented, knowing its dangers.

This is an excerpt from a New York Times article dated Sept. 30, 1999: “In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — and will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgage, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans among low- and moderate-income people.”

The article goes on to predict that such a strategy might not cause problems during times of economic prosperity but that Fannie Mae could run into serious financial difficulty during an economic downturn.

JudicialWatch.org states that “while the Clinton administration is certainly culpable for getting the ball rolling on these high-risk loans, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Fannie Mae, led by Clinton’s former budget director Franklin Raines and Obama campaign adviser Jim Johnson, took Clinton’s risky gamble and doubled down. These two men cooked the books at Fannie Mae, issued countless mortgages and then took huge bonuses before leaving the company.

“Despite the accounting problems and dire warnings of crisis, these ‘government sponsored enterprises,’ with the full support of the liberals in Congress and their special-interest community organizing friends such as ACORN (a liberal political group for which the new bailout had earmarked $100 million) pushed for more prime lending for their politically correct constituencies.”

Now the entire country is facing financial disaster because the Bush administration did nothing to stop the dangerous practice.

The Clinton administration pushed these financial organizations to implement these loans; many took huge amounts of cash from the financial groups (including Obama) and some moderate Republicans, who allowed the practice to continue.

The current bailout is merely a sham and simply adds a worthless 20 percent tax on the millions to be handed out to the exiting CEOs.

There’s no telling how many earmarks are included with this new bailout leaving taxpayers footing the $700 billion with no tangible benefit.

Now taxpayers have a di-lemma. Which party will benefit taxpayers more? The party that caused the problem or the party that allowed the socialist program to continue?

J. Dori Callahan is a resident of Culpeper.