happy halloween, #7,000,000,000
that's scary!
isn't that scary, boys and girls?
trick or treat!?
••can ye pass the acid test?•• ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it. time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?
During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming "too big to fail." Dingell further argued that this would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government.
Re: McConnell admits... it's about taking hostages for ransom
Are you saying it wasn't?!
I said this years ago and I'll say it now: the Republican idea of "victory" is creating a problem so difficult that no one can fix it.... and then complaining that no one can fix it.
You're damn right, it is really, really, really hard to overcome the damage Bush did to this country.... Harder still with so much oppositon from the Republicans who are still damaging the economy.
This doesn't make me dislike Democrats.... and it sure as heck isn't making me want to vote for a Republican!
This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.i'm pretty sure it was "cripple fight" that earned me my fate, because the guardian's headline and subhead called rupert murdoch a "dictator" and a "tyrant," both of which are at least as strong as "RWNJ", which i'm pretty sure is the only term i used that might have been interpreted as a personal attack.
comment is free, but facts are sacred.the fact that editors oversee the censors also gives no comfort, since those editors let the following explanation find its way into a FAQ:
— c p scott, guardian editor, 1921
All moderators work closely with editors and editorial staff across the the Guardian website site...."the the...website site"?
This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing Web sites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol. He is a founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has been running cable TV ads alleging a virtual hate rally at the Occupy Wall Street site and calling on President Obama and other important Democrats to denounce what is — as it happens — not happening there. The commercial ran on Fox News the very day I was at the site. [more]
THE IMF HAS APPROVED YOUR ATM CARD FOR DELIVERY (FBI)
Re: SCAMMED VICTIM/ US$ 250,00000 BENEFICIARY.REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654
[the "from" line said "Mr. Ban Ki-Moon"]
آموزش 27 زبان زنده دنيا با Rosetta Stone
moghadamat yek rabete jensiiiiii khooooooob
Age: 27, Haricolor: Blonde, Status: Lonely Wife,
CONTACT ME NOW THROUGH (+234-812-813-8783, rev.richardmoore@skymail.mn
[from "Secretary-General Mr.Ban Ki-Moon", no less, this time]
UN (Good News!!!)
[from "UNDP | United Nations Development Programme."]
ShOMa YeKi Az AfraDe Khosh shaNs HasTin Ke In Email Ro DAryaFt MikoniD!!!
behtarin mahsulate ZANASHooYi!! Ba GheyMaTe Bavar Nakardani!! 100% Original
Now you can get a 100% verifiable diploma of any college.
The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate
By Eugene Robinson
For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.
The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.
“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.
Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by skeptics — and found them groundless.
Muller and his fellow researchers examined an enormous data set of observed temperatures from monitoring stations around the world and concluded that the average land temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius — or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — since the mid-1950s.
This agrees with the increase estimated by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place.
The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise — that Muller once snarkily called “the poster child of the global warming community.” Muller’s new graph isn’t just similar, it’s identical.
Muller found that skeptics are wrong when they claim that a “heat island” effect from urbanization is skewing average temperature readings; monitoring instruments in rural areas show rapid warming, too. He found that skeptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact that records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found that skeptics are wrong to accuse climate scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted — because they are judged unreliable — show the same warming trend.
Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers — a total of 1.6 billion records — and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.
Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. [more]
GRAY COURT, S.C.-Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has released an economic plan full of long-held conservative goals, including personal accounts for Social Security, an optional flat tax, major spending cuts and a series of tax cuts.
The plan would dramatically reduce taxes, particularly on wealthy Americans and corporations. It would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, eliminate taxes on dividends and many capital gains and essentially cap individual tax rates at 20 percent.
Perry argues these tax cuts will spur economic growth by creating a more favorable environment for wealthy individuals and corporations to start or expand their businesses. But without significant spending reductions, the tax cuts could drastically increase the federal budget deficit.
“Taxes will be cut across all income groups in America, and the net benefit will be more money in Americans’ pockets with greater investment in the private economy,” Perry said to an audience of more than 200 inside the factory at ISO Poly Films, Inc. in this South Carolina town.
The “Cut, Balance and Grow” plan, which Perry first unveiled Tuesday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, puts Perry firmly to the political right of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in terms of economic policy.
As he releases the tax plan, Perry seems determined to re-energize his campaign and reassert himself as a candidate after weeks of struggles. In an interview with John Harwood, a reporter with CNBC and the New York Times, the Texas governor cast Romney--the GOP frontrunner--as a “fat cat”. He said he likes mentioning conservative falsehoods about President Obama’s birth because “It’s fun to poke him a little bit.”
Perry is clearly looking to woo tea party conservatives who have been reluctant to back Romney. In almost every way, he presents policies that are slightly more conservative than those of the former Massachusetts governor.
Romney has called for capping federal government spending at 20 percent of GDP, for example; the Texas governor proposes capping at 18 percent. (This year, under President Obama, spending is at 24 percent of GDP). Romney has proposed raising the retirement age to reform Social Security; Perry adopts an idea even more beloved by conservatives and hated by liberals: allowing young people to put their money into private savings accounts outside the traditional retirement system.
Romney would cut corporate taxes to 25 percent; Perry, 20. Although Romney has said one of his goals is a “flatter” American tax code, under Perry’s plan, Americans could either choose to pay taxes under the current system, or pay a 20 percent national flat tax. [more]
...Steve Martin said this was a night when Washington, becomes a comedy Mecca. He paused a beat. “And,” Martin continued, “we all know how funny Mecca is.” [more]
followup: i posted a comment referring to the phrase "shareholders have rebelled" in a photo caption accompanying the guardian piece. i compared that rebellion among RWNJs* to south park's "cripple fight" in an episode 10 years ago. my comment got removed for a breach of "community standards." those brits are sooo proper.
He was as combative, up against it and past his prime as 2011's other fallen tyrants. This was likely his last shareholders' meeting [more]
An October 11 poll showed that 54% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the protests, compared to 27% for the Tea Party movement,[23] and up from 38% in a poll conducted October 6–10.[24] An October 12–16 poll found that 67% of New York City voters agreed with the protesters and 87% agreed with their right to protest.[25]
Walking the grounds for the next hour, I did my best to identify the real mission and purpose of the protestors…
Were they here to end the Fed? Bring the banks to justice? Impeach politicians? Demand the end of Capitalism and a move to Communism?
The answer is… All of the above.
I am at a loss for words to describe the variety of goals, opaqueness of mission, and diversity of people…
There were the educated technophiles who are most likely the crew feeding the OWS social media sites…
If there was a message that was seen most often during my visit to OWS, it was that the 99% wanted to bring down the 1%.
The poor are looking to blame the rich. The poor are looking for their Robin Hood.
This is a very dangerous goal when used as a blanket theme because it does not account for the critical distinction of how that money was made, and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding as to how individual prosperity is created in general.
The vast majority of wealthy individuals have become rich by providing over-whelming value to the world through the creation of products and services in a free market. This is capitalism, and this is the primary reason why the United States has enjoyed more prosperity than any other nation in history.
What the protestors need to realize is that they’re not protesting the wealthy. They’re protesting corruption and the accumulation of wealth by the government, banks, and select corporations through out-right fraud and theft.
It is not the 99% against the 1%. It is the people of the world against the corrupt.
Ultimately, bringing these people to justice will only serve as a temporary solution. You can remove the tumor, but if you continue to smoke, the cancer will return.
True, lasting change can only be accomplished when each of us takes responsibility for our decisions and our actions.
We must educate ourselves in the ways of money, or that money will be stolen.
We must educate ourselves in the ways of food and health, or we will find ourselves eating genetically modified fillers covered in poison once again.
And we must educate ourselves in the ways of value creation and a work ethic, or find ourselves and our children slaves to debt and dependent upon food stamps.
Teaching the people of the world how to fish for themselves once again is the mission of The Elevation Group, and if you have not yet joined us, I invite you to learn more by clicking here…
BANKS ARE MADE OF MARBLE
I've traveled round this country
From shore to shining shore.
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw.
I saw the weary farmer,
Plowing sod and loam;
I heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home.
CHORUS:
But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the farmer sweated for.
I saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore.
I heard the bosses saying,
Got no work for you no more.
But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the seaman sweated for.
I saw the weary miner,
Scrubbing coal dust from his back,
I heard his children cryin',
Got no coal to heat the shack.
But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the miner sweated for.
I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land;
I prayed we'd get together,
And together make a stand.
FINAL CHORUS:
Then we'd own those banks of marble,
With a guard at every door;
And we'd share those vaults of silver,
That we have sweated for.
Words and Music by Les Rice
novadust
ooh! see RWNJs swarm.
swarm, RWNJs, swarm.
ur queen is dead,
ur hive diseased,
so swarm, RWNJs, swarm!
Today 10/17/2011 1:47:03 PM EDT
novadust
@ whoever wrote the lyrics "Because the last time that we had a decent government/Was about 1932":
1932 was hoover's last year. rewrite!
Today 10/17/2011 1:42:36 PM EDT
atc333 wrote:
Make Obama a one term president. Delay and stall a recovery, keep the public suffering, blame Obama. That is the plan. No solutions, no answers, keep the smoke and mirror machine going. Cut taxes for the rich and spending cuts, Balance the budget during a slow recovery. starve the beast, cut the size of government, more layoffs, more job losses, Blame Obama. That pretty much says it all. Politics first, Winning first, Country last.
9/14/2011 7:46:55 AM EDT
#occupywallstreet #occupywallst #owsThousands of protesters fill Times SquareThousands of demonstrators protesting corporate greed filled Times Square on Saturday night, creating a chaotic scene in the heart of New York City. Similar demonstrations took place in other U.S. cities and overseas. (Oct. 15) (The Associated Press)
...
He said his nightly reading in the White House sometimes made him pine for his days as a community organizer back in the 1980s, when he was making $10,000 a year and working on the South Side of Chicago. He had just graduated from college, and he bought a used car for $2,000 and spent his days driving around to the city’s housing projects to speak with residents about their lives. He became familiar with many of the same issues that would flood his mail 25 years later: housing calamities, chronic unemployment and struggling schools.
Obama’s fellow organizers in Chicago considered him a master of hands-on, granular problem-solving. He was skinny and boyish, a good listener, if still a bit naive; and some of the older women in the housing projects made a habit of inviting him into their homes and cooking for him. He looked around their apartments, keeping a log of maintenance issues, and then delivered that list to the landlords. He helped arrange meetings with city housing officials to talk about asbestos problems. He established a tenants rights organization, founded a job-training program and led a tutoring group that prepared students for college.
When he left for Harvard Law School after three years in Chicago, Obama knew he wanted to become a politician, a job that would allow him to listen to people’s problems and enjoy the simple satisfaction of solving them.
Now he was the most powerful politician of all — but fixing problems seemed more difficult and satisfaction more elusive. He had yet to make progress on key campaign promises to reform education and immigration. Just this past week, his jobs bill failed to move forward in the Senate. When we spoke, Obama didn’t blame the gridlock and partisanship of a divided capital.... [more]
Dear ACLU Supporter,
This is unbelievable. The House of Representatives will vote tomorrow on a bill that would deny emergency abortion care to women — even if their lives are in danger.
If it passes, this bill would allow hospitals to refuse to treat a pregnant woman experiencing a life-threatening complication without further regard for her health or well-being.
We need you to act right now to keep this bill from becoming law. Tell your representative to vote NO on H.R. 358.
This dangerous measure was introduced earlier this year by Representative Joe Pitts (R-PA). In addition to permitting hospitals to simply abandon women whose lives are on the line, this extraordinarily harsh legislation would effectively ban insurance coverage of abortion in the new health care system.
Most insurance plans already cover abortion. So, the Pitts bill would have the effect of taking away insurance coverage that millions of women already have.
The Pitts bill would also let states give exceptions to insurance companies that do not want to cover certain care that the Department of Health and Human Services has determined must be covered. This means states could pick and choose which coverage you'll receive, including coverage for contraception or screening and counseling for HIV.
We have to oppose the Pitts bill at every turn. Tell your member of Congress to protect life-saving health care for women.
Extreme measures such as the Pitts bill should be rejected out of hand. Congress has no business taking away the abortion insurance coverage that millions of women now have — and no place telling hospitals they are free to endanger the life of a woman in need of emergency care.
The vote is happening tomorrow, so please act now.
Sincerely,
Laura W. Murphy
Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office
© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004
There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc. [more]
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
...it seems to me that there is something different about the current state of economic discussion. Political parties have often coalesced around dubious economic ideas — remember the Laffer curve? — but I can’t think of a time when a party’s economic doctrine has been so completely divorced from reality. And I’m also struck by the extent to which Republican-leaning economists — who have to know better — have been willing to lend their credibility to the party’s official delusions.
Partly, no doubt, this reflects the party’s broader slide into its own insular intellectual universe. Large segments of the G.O.P. reject climate science and even the theory of evolution, so why expect evidence to matter for the party’s economic views?
And it also, of course, reflects the political need of the right to make everything bad in America President Obama’s fault. Never mind the fact that the housing bubble, the debt explosion and the financial crisis took place on the watch of a conservative, free-market-praising president; it’s that Democrat in the White House now who gets the blame.
But good politics can be very bad policy. The truth is that we’re in this mess because we had too little regulation, not too much. And now one of our two major parties is determined to double down on the mistakes that caused the disaster. [more]
ONE hundred years ago today, California voters added the ballot initiative to the State Constitution, allowing citizens to use petitions to bring proposed statutes and constitutional amendments for a public vote.
But as California, the nation’s most populous state, marks this anniversary, the accumulated impact of direct democracy has made it virtually ungovernable. [more]
No. 284 of 365
Conservative history: Never let liberals forget that the sub-prime mortgage disaster was Bill Clinton's fault. In 1995 President Clinton's changes to the Community Reinvestment Act enabled ACORN to run a politically correct extortion campaign against mortgage lenders, compelling them by force of law to make unsound (sub-prime) loans to poor minorities who never stood a hope of repaying them.
Housing advocacy groups
CRA regulations give community groups the right to comment on or protest about banks' non-compliance with CRA.[7] Such comments could help or hinder banks' planned expansions. Groups at first only slowly took advantage of these rights.[45] Regulatory changes during President Bill Clinton's administration allowed these community groups better access to CRA information and enabled them to increase their activities.[4][40][99]In an article for the New York Post, economist Stan Liebowitz wrote that community activists intervention at yearly bank reviews resulted in their obtaining large amounts of money from banks, since poor reviews could lead to frustrated merger plans and even legal challenges by the Justice Department.[100] Michelle Minton noted that Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN at about the same time they were to apply for permission to merge and needed to comply with CRA regulations.[85]According to the New York Times, some of these housing advocacy groups provided early warnings about the potential impact of lowered credit standards and the resulting unsupportable increase in real estate values they were causing in low to moderate income communities. Ballooning mortgages on rental properties threatened to require large rent increases from low and moderate income tenants that could ill afford them.[101]Housing advocacy groups were also leaders in the fight against subprime lending in low- and moderate-income communities, "In fact, community advocates had been telling the Federal Reserve about the dangers of subprime lending since the 1990s", according to Inner City Press. "For example, Bronx-based Fair Finance Watch commented to the Federal Reserve about the practices of now-defunct non-bank subprime lender New Century, when U.S. Bancorp bought warrants for 24% of New Century's stock. The Fed, rather than take any action on New Century, merely waited until U.S. Bancorp sold off some of the warrants, and then said the issue was moot." However, subprime loans were so profitable, that they were aggressively marketed in low-and moderate-income communities, even over the objections and warnings of housing advocacy groups like ACORN.[102]
Predatory lendingIn a 2002 study exploring the relationship between the CRA and lending looked at as predatory, Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy noted that banks could receive CRA credit by lending or brokering loans in lower-income areas that would be considered a risk for ordinary lending practices. CRA regulated banks may also inadvertently facilitate these lending practices by financing lenders. They also noted that CRA regulations, as then administered and carried out by Fannie Mae and Freddie MAC, did not penalize banks that engaged in these lending practices. They recommended that the federal agencies use the CRA to sanction behavior that either directly or indirectly increased predatory lending practices by lowering the CRA rating of any bank that facilitated in these lending practices.[103]The FDIC has tried to address this issue by "stopping abusive practices through the examination process and supervisory actions; encouraging banks to serve all members and areas of their communities fairly; and providing information and financial education to help consumers make informed choices". FDIC policy currently states that "predatory lending can have a negative effect on a bank's CRA performance."[104]
Relation to 2008 financial crisisSee also: Subprime mortgage crisis and Global financial crisis of 2008–2009Some economists, politicians and other commentators[105][106] have charged that the CRA contributed in part to the 2008 financial crisis by encouraging banks to make unsafe loans. However, every empirical study that has looked at CRA loans has concluded that they were safer than subprime mortgages that were purely profit driven, and CRA loans accounted for a tiny fraction of total subprime mortgages. [107]
Up to 2007 FDIC has been criticising banks for having "a substantially deficient record of helping to meet the credit and community development needs (...) including low-and moderate-income neighborhoods" and "not making use of innovative and/or flexible lending practices"[108]Economists, including those from the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, dispute this contention. The Federal Reserve, having examined the evidence, holds that empirical research has not validated any relationship between the CRA and the 2008 financial crisis.[109] At the FDIC, Chair Sheila Bair delivered remarks noting that the majority of subprime loans originated from lenders not regulated by the CRA, calling it a "scapegoat" and declaring it "NOT guilty."[110]Economist Stan Liebowitz wrote in the New York Post that a strengthening of the CRA in the 1990s encouraged a loosening of lending standards throughout the banking industry. He also charges the Federal Reserve with ignoring the negative impact of the CRA.[100] In a commentary for CNN, Congressman Ron Paul, who serves on the United States House Committee on Financial Services, charged the CRA with "forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks."[111] In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece,Austrian school economist Russell Roberts wrote that the CRA subsidized low-income housing by pressuring banks to serve poor borrowers and poor regions of the country.[112]However, many others dispute that the CRA was a significant cause of the subprime crisis. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman[113] noted in November 2009 that 55% of commercial real estate loans were currently underwater, despite being completely unaffected by the CRA.[114] According to Federal Reserve Governor Randall Kroszner, the claim that "the law pushed banking institutions to undertake high-risk mortgage lending" was contrary to their experience, and that no empirical evidence had been presented to support the claim.[109] In a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper, economist Luci Ellis concluded that "there is no evidence that the Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for encouraging the subprime lending boom and subsequent housing bust", relying partly on evidence that the housing bust has been a largely exurban event.[115] Others have also concluded that the CRA did not contribute to the financial crisis, for example, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair,[110] Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan,[116] Tim Westrich of the Center for American Progress,[117] Robert Gordon of the American Prospect,[118] Ellen Seidman of the New America Foundation,[119] Daniel Gross of Slate,[120] and Aaron Pressman from BusinessWeek.[121]Legal and financial experts have noted that CRA regulated loans tend to be safe and profitable, and that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. In the February 2008 House hearing, law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Clinton,[63][122] stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. Barr noted that institutions fully regulated by CRA made "perhaps one in four" sub-prime loans, and that "the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight".[123] According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made risky "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.[124] A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans.[125] Emre Ergungor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that there was no statistical difference in foreclosure rates between regulated and less-regulated banks, although a local bank presence resulted in fewer foreclosures.[126]During a 2008 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the financial crisis, including in relation to the Community Reinvestment Act, asked if the CRA provided the "fuel" for increasing subprime loans, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines said it might have been a catalyst encouraging bad behavior, but it was difficult to know. Raines also cited information that only a small percentage of risky loans originated as a result of the CRA.
You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.
Take the quiz at
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