Anybody who thinks it is a good idea for politicians and ignorant political activists to decide, via subsidies, tariffs, taxes, etc. what our next generation energy solutions will be should take a lesson from the Ethanol debacle.
When even the extremely Liberal Time Magazine understands what a disaster Ethanol (both Corn AND Cellulosic) has been (and will be), you have got to know that this was yet ANOTHER colossal example of why politicians should NOT decide which energy solutions will win and lose!
Disclaimer: Time magazine, as this article demonstrates, is (for now) still in the alarmist camp on Climate Change. However, peer reviewed science proves that the alarm over man made CO2 is an even bigger hoax than Ethanol and 32,000 of America’s leading scientists agree.
Quoting Time Magazine (via Reason.com):
“several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.”
Click the image & read the rest: Click here for page 1 of the Time Magazine article.
“the bill [which would have prevented this housing mess] didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.”
“But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.
Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.
Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.”
Click the image & read the rest: Click here to read the primary post on this topic (and all the rest).
Tell me again why the hateful Left hates this lovely lady.
Oh yeah, because she (just to name a few off the top of my head):
1) Loves America. 2) Loves Americans. 3) Is Optimistic. 4) Respects life and walks the walk (even when it’s a challenging walk). 5) Is NOT an out of touch Limo-Liberal Elitist. 6) Does not support the enormously destructive Socialist Agenda of the Hard Left. 7) Knows what is needed to get America back on track. 8) Has actually done the hard work to reform Alaskan politics and get Alaska back on track. 9) Possesses the skills, the insights, the moral compass and the guts to put integrity ahead of party politics.
And, MERELY as icing on the cake, Governor Palin is WAY more attractive than Biden and WAY more charismatic than Obama!
Click the image & watch the speech: Go Sarah! We LOVE YOU even more than they hate you!
7/11/09 Update: Click here and read the report from the U.S. House of Representatives. Or, click here and read the excerpts provided at Carpe Diem.
6/3/09 Update: Click here to debunk Paul Krugman’s false assertion that “Reagan Did It”.
2/16/09 Update: Click here to completely debunk EVERY argument from ALL the CRA deniers.
Click the image to enlarge it: Click here for the source of the image.
As the following videos and text demonstrate, overregulation, malfeasance, massive corruption and fraud on the part of Democrats were the primary causes of the current housing mess. At the root of it all is the Carter era 1977 Community Reinvestment Act.
Under Clinton, CRA related folly became a much bigger time bomb just waiting to explode. Click here to more fully understand how, in 1999, Clinton shifted to the tax payers all moral hazard associated with any subprime loan.
Obama is now at the white hot center of why this housing mess was not stopped. Click here for additional evidence implicating Obama.
The fallacy behind the original alleged intention of the CRA is explained in the text which follows the videos.
Additional regulation might have prevented this mess. Republicans attempted that. But, as the following videos and the text prove, Democrats blocked those efforts.
The best solution, as always, would have been to avoid the original overregulation (along with the inevitable fraud and corruption) in the first place.
Speaking of fraud and corruption, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been described as“a kind of jobs program for out-of-work Democrats”, played a critical role in facilitating the Clinton “enhancements” to the CRA. They also provided lots of money to lots of Democrats (giving lots of Democrats lots of reasons to block reforms).
The following is a very brief introduction to the pertinent facts surrounding our housing mess:
The following is an excellent 10 minute warp speed summary. (Click here if the video is not visible.)
Click here to review sources for almost every assertion made in the above video. Note: The above link will open a new browser instance so you can pause the video and go check that page for substantiations.
Even Bill Clinton knows who is to blame (as he acknowledges in this video):
Why did you have to learn this from a citizen’s blog? This journalist knows why. If you find that outrageous, SPEAK UP! But, for now, dig deeper.
The CRA also gave ACORN the legal authority to conduct what some would call extortion in the name of so-called “affordable housing”.
This dysfunctional “family” consisting of the CRA, ACORN, Fannie, Freddie and key Democrats directly caused the current housing mess. But, this “family” is not merely dysfunctional. Reuters reports that Fannie and Freddie are being investigated by the FBI for fraud. CNN and others report that ACORN is being investigated by the FBI for voter fraud.
McCain and Bush both saw this housing mess coming and tried to stop it. But, lacking 60 Senators, the Republicans were unable to overpower the obstructionist efforts of the Democrats who were taking (and making) piles of cash from Fannie and Freddie. Without 60 votes in the Senate, the Republicans could not even get the Senate to vote on the desperately needed reforms.
Click here to read what the CRA purports to accomplish.
The CRA was bolstered by“a widely publicized 1990 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston finding that blacks and Hispanics suffered higher mortgage-denial rates than whites, even at similar income levels”.
It was preposterous on its face to presume that lenders were more interested in pursuing a racial agenda than in making a buck on a mutually beneficial loan. Never mind common sense, that Boston Fed study has since been repeatedly proven to have been inaccurate on the academic level as well.
“most, if not all, statistical evidence of racial redlining based on aggregate loan data is at best inconclusive, and more likely, misleading.”
What the CRA really does is requires mortgage lenders, through force of law, to meet government mandated quotas for handing out bad loans (aka subprime loans). If lenders fail to meet those quotas, there are penalties. In an era of mergers and acquisitions, the “penalties” often meant going out of business (see page 11 of this document). But, meeting these government mandated quotas ALSO often meant going out of business (both during the S&L Crisis of the late 1980’s and 1990’s as well as the current mess).
Click here to review all the posts which substantiate and expand upon all of my observations above.
Click here for a timeline of government intrusion.
Quoting Investor’s Business Daily (emphasis mine):
“The [Community Reinvestment Act] regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.
The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical ‘housing rights’ groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.”
Click the image & read the rest: So… Is THAT what a “community organizer” does? Rob the tax payers on behalf of Socialist corruption?
Click here to read the primary post on this topic (and all the rest).
“The CRA forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound. Under the CRA, banks must convince a set of bureaucracies that they are not engaging in discrimination, a charge that the act encourages any CRA-recognized community group to bring forward. Otherwise, any merger or expansion the banks attempt will likely be denied. But what counts as discrimination?
According to one enforcement agency, ‘discrimination exists when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.’ Note that these ‘arbitrary or outdated criteria’ include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history--the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.”
Click the image & read the rest: Click here to read the primary post on this topic (and all the rest).
