The lie that George Bush Jr. and the republicans caused the mortgage meltdown of 2008.
Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and other democrats did that.
I call the still surviving George Bush “junior” because I don’t want to mess with the H.W. or W. crap, nor do I want to do the numbering thing either. On the latter point Bush Sr. was just Reagan’s third term anyway, so you could argue he hardly deserves a number as a distinct president. When the people saw Bush Sr. was sure as hell no Reagan and wasn’t even close, Bill Clinton got elected in 1992.
Bush Jr. has beclowned himself multiple times in very big ways since he left office, and for whatever bizarre set of reasons and horrid advice from Karl Rove he committed an epic fail in not telling the American people that the mortgage meltdown was not on republicans while he was still in office, but he was and still is NOT responsible for that meltdown.
Let me digress a minute before continuing with a note to people using Yahoo Mail. It has come to my attention that Substack emails of my posts may not be reaching you. I did a search and found that Yahoo is literally reading users’ emails and censoring content based on left wing “fact checking”, at least on emails its users send out. If it’s happening to my posts on the way into your mailboxes, it could be because of the links I place in my posts.
If it’s not links from well known sites then it’s something far worse that is actually reading my content and deciding whether it’s too damaging to left wing narratives. Do your own search of Yahoo Mail censorship on Duck Duck Go and/or Metager and consider making a change to your mail provider. If you click at the top of the web page for any of my posts, you can see a list of all my posts. If you see recent ones that you never say in your Yahoo mailbox, you should probably figure that Yahoo censored them out, and is censoring other content that they don’t want you to see.
Getting back to the mortgage meltdown and related financial crisis of 2008, all throughout the campaign of 2008 and all the way through the 2016 campaign, democrats of all kinds have pointed the finger at Bush Jr. in particular and at republicans in general to blame them for what happened. This was and still is a huge lie. The mortgage meltdown was all on the democrats. The only blame you can put on the republicans is for failing to stop the democrats. Unfortunately that fact is all too prevalent, republicans failing to stop democrats in so many areas.
First some facts that provide context on what happened prior to the financial crisis. A key thing to know is that the the democrats took over both houses of the federal legislative branch on January 3, 2007. It was NOT January 22nd 2009 when Obama was inaugurated. So democrats were in control of congress for more than a year before the financial crisis started.
The democrats had a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of 1994. (Newt Gingrich and company took over in January 1995 and proceeded to balance the federal budget within a couple years for the first time in forever.) For those who have heard the left propagating the fallacy that everything was "Bush's Fault", think about where things stood back then. On January 3rd, 2007 when the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:
The Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The unemployment rate was 4.6%
Bush and the republicans economic policies had set a record of 52 straight months of job growth
Also note that January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee. The economic meltdown that happened months later was in banking and finance. Bush asked Congress 17 times to stop “Fannie & Freddie” - starting in 2001 - because it was financially risky for the US economy. But the democrats, including Obama later on when he was in the senate, fought against every reform of those agencies.
To get more context we need to go back much further than early 2007. Something called The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed by congressional democrats way back in 1977 and signed into law by the pathetic Jimmy Carter. It coerced lending institutions to make loans “to the entire community,” undermining means testing to qualify applicants for mortgages.
In 1989, Bush Sr. signed into law a bill that increased oversight of the process of granting CRA ratings to banks that helped restore some control, but years later Bill Clinton put the CRA on steroids making it easier for minority voters with bad credit to get mortgages that they could not afford to pay.
In November 1994, Clinton signed something called the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Part of Article V of that treaty claims that all people have a “right” to housing. A year later, to comply with the treaty and much more importantly to curry favor with millions of low income voters, Clinton had his treasury secretary rewrite the lending rules for the CRA. These new rules set up the previously mentioned “Fannie & Freddie” (with Fannie Mae referring to the Federal National Mortgage Association and Freddie Mac referring to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) as the backers of billions in subprime loans. And of course those two agencies were funded by taxpayers dollars, because the government has no income of its own other than that which ultimately comes from taxpayers via one method or another.
So mortgage lenders were suddenly able to make millions of loans to borrowers who did not previously qualify for those loans to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Clinton’s legislation applied “affirmative action” to the lending industry.
So the resulting mortgage meltdown and related financial crisis over a decade later was the result of left wing “socially engineered” financial policy by the central government. Clinton’s “National Partners in Homeownership” created a huge wave of credit for those who weren’t qualified for that credit, and were thus unable to pay the money back. That in turn created a housing price “bubble” and greatly increased the overall consumer debt load.
But you don’t have to take my word for it, here’s Andrew Cuomo 10 years before the crisis hit confirming all this in a press conference. At that time he was at HUD in the federal government, so many years before he became governor of NY. The video is only 50 seconds long so it won’t take you much time to watch it. Cuomo even admits that more people will default on those loans than on others, he admits that skin color (“minority status”) is part of the criteria for getting the loans, and he refers to it as “affirmative action”.
It doesn’t stop there though. Here’s Barney Frank in 2005, insisting that there is no housing bubble, and stressing that he and other democrats will continue to “push for homeownership”.
Do a search for Barney Frank and his boyfriend Herb Moses to get more context on how corrupt the democrats were even decades ago. I’m avoiding linking the story due to my note above on Yahoo email censoring.
I’m gonna risk Yahoo email censoring on this next one though, as I haven’t seen this original version in years. Even hard core left wing Saturday Night Live skewered democrats back in 2008 for the financial crisis. The video could be seen online for only a short while, and then it disappeared for years. Whether because it shattered the democrats’ false narrative that Bush was to blame, or because of legal threats from the Sandlers, or a combination of both, I could not find it online anywhere.
Years later an edited version was released online by NBC, but the original unfiltered version linked below, courtesy of The Internet Archive, is the one you want to watch. As a side note I was a Wachovia bank customer way back when somebody or some group at Wachovia made the horrid decision to spend 24 billion on buying subprime loans. Wachovia ceased to exist not too long after that as Wells Fargo absorbed them as part of the bailout.
The full video is about 7 and a half minutes, but it’s worth every second because it touches on all the key aspects, and even concludes with a George Soros bit. Extremely bold and unusual for left wing SNL to be so factually accurate in a political skit. The Soros bit even shows what an evil POS he is, and how he "owns” the democrat party. It’s a must watch.
The pictures above all also contain links to the video.