Category Archives: Affirmative Action

Freddie & Fannie Come Calling … Ad Infinitum

Affirmative Action, America, Bush, China, Debt, Fascism, Sarah Palin, Socialism

“Spare some change, please? Forget that. Hand over another $8.4 billion to “Fannie Mae and sister company Freddie Mac.” “The Obama administration,” reports “My Way,” had “pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie, lifting an earlier cap of $400 billion.”

This via Jeff Tucker, in case you forgot who and what contributed to this affirmative-action driven downturn, here’s a New York Times’ story from 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans….
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

Back in 2008, some analysts had quipped that only North Korea and Cuba were more socialist than the US in the wake of the Fannie and Freddie bailouts. This space has regularly excoriated Republican hacks for referring deceptively to our cherished “American freedoms.” (Also see BAB’s “Fascism Rising” series of posts.)

As Jim Rogers pointed out, you have a free market in housing in China. If you watch this clip, be reminded not only of Bush socialism, but of the socialism of Palin, “Bush In A Bra.” Rather than shutting F&F down, a solution to which Repbulicans are now paying lip service, Palin wanted to fine tune the mortgage miasma; make it smaller and smarter.

I would add that, as a prelude to the discussion of our economic woes, it has become fashionable for commentators to condemn socialism for the rich; this makes one look benevolent. As execrable as corporatism is, it is no reason to ignore the massive wealth transfer from taxpayers to the poor in the context of F & F, a commitment that has contributed immeasurably to the economic meltdown.

Freddie & Fannie Come Calling … Ad Infinitum

Affirmative Action, America, Bush, China, Debt, Economy, Fascism, Sarah Palin, Socialism

This via Jeff Tucker, in case you forgot who and what contributed to this affirmative-action driven downturn, here’s a New York Times’ story from 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans….
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

Updated: Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Liberty, Private Property, Race, Racism, Regulation, Republicans

The excerpt is from my WND.COM column, “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act”:

“The Obama administration, like the gang it replaced, has intervened on the side of a mutant strain of affirmative action – a ‘race conscious’ admissions process practiced at the University of Texas at Austin, now being contested by two white plaintiffs. In case the conservative base reverts to its default position – a belief in the superiority of Republican tyranny – I’ll remind it that Bush had helped to legitimize this proxy-for-race admissions process at the University of Michigan Law School.

In what was surely a triumph of Clintonian triangulation tactics, Bush, in a 2003 legal brief, ostensibly challenged racial preferences at Michigan Law, while simultaneously encouraging, instead, the use of racial cue cards in the admissions process. For example, an applicant could hint heavily at having overcome hardship (‘such as having been shot,’ quipped commentator Steve Sailer at the time).

Housebroken conservatives will reach for the smelling salts at what I am about to say next – they do so each time an attempt is made to explore the effects on liberty of one overarching and overreaching bit of legislation. The culprit in these crippling codes for university admissions – and in hiring, firing, renting, and money lending – is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ‘most radical law affecting civil rights ever passed by any nation’ …

The complete column is “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act.”

Do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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Update (April 4): I hope I have misunderstood Myron’s anti-South stereotypes. Myron seems to have great faith in the power of legislation to renew communities. Alas, the Civil Rights Act most certainly did not “transform” the South for the better. Someone has swallowed whole “HOLLYWOOD’S HATEFUL HOOEY ABOUT THE SOUTH.” The South of John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun was aristocratic, if anything. The War Between the States destroyed a patrician way of life.

I recommend Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by historian David Hackett Fischer.

Updated: ‘Conservatives’ Pine For Post Office

Affirmative Action, Debt, Free Markets, Labor, Multiculturalism, Republicans, The State

Chuckie Krauthammer hasn’t visited a United States Postal Service office lately. As a regular on Bret Baier’s Special Report, he was asked to prognosticate about the future of the USPS monopoly I described thus:

Having used the Canadian, South African and European equivalent services, I can safely say that there is no viler or more inhospitable dump than the United States Postal Service. The latter is far and away inferior to the aforementioned rival monopolies. Enviously I eye the items my mother posts from the Netherlands. Whereas mine are festooned with at least two labels per package; hers are form-free, care free, shipped with ease.

The Postal Service is in the red, for a change, “could lose a staggering $7 billion this year,” and “posted $3.8 billion in losses last year.”

The fattened Postmaster General John Potter is seeking some kind of mandate (and funding presumably … from China) to “move the Service forward.” He wants to “reinvest, redefine and reinvigorate the value of mail to business and households.”

Fighting for the USPS, its “$70 billion in unfunded liabilities, and the parasitical existence of 800,000 postal workers who live off the Federal Financing Bank (read: the taxpayer),” is Republican Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

“If you cut back services, you’re going to lose customers,” she stammered, as if the USPS has “customers”; it has captives, pinned down like butterflies by grotesque “service providers.”

In the name of tradition, Chuckie Krauthammer expressed nostalgic sentiments for the postman who came no matter the weather, and recommended rehabilitating this institution.

As I said, he clearly has not frequented a post office in a while. It’s a monument to the multicultural Managerial State and is packed with sour, affirmative action hires who speak in tongues. Grandma in a remote hamlet is unlikely to get her mail delivered by a friendly old timer. Oh no, those government jobs are reserved for “minorities.”

Update (March 3): A reminder: this post is about conservatives supporting the continued nationalization of a service delivered magnificently and morally by the free market. I’m sorry liberty lovers feel it is unworthy of their attention.