How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable
By TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:30
PM PT

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market
meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply
involved in the housing market?


The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the
juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act,
which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority
communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After
entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's
rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms
into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made
loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and
money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to
corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton
unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA
in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton
bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own
homes." He meant it.

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and
other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to
change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than
submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to
reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite
the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a
satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical
quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan
portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted
to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by
neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance,"
wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren't enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to
double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions
between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current
crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were
changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in
a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage,
allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments,
vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit
government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored
enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans
into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that
required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12
trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly
Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a
roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384
politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and
political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions
more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people
into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of
the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and
minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with
securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a
failed legacy of the Clinton era.
_________

http://beltwaysnark.com/2008/09/16/j...-proposal-for-
an-agency-to-oversee-fannie-and-freddiein-2005/

In Sept. 2003 President Bush proposed a new agency to oversee
regulatory
reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here is an excerpt form the
above
linked article from Sept. 11, 2003.

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant
regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings
and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new
agency
would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision
of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that
are
the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with
Congress,
to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies.
It
would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would
determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their
ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5

trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside
investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its
accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does

not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

Then in 2005 John McCain co-sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise
Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.

The Bill was never passed. John McCain addressed the floor on May
26th,
2006. Here is an excerpt:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory
Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage

of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act,
American
taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie

Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial
system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform
legislation.

This bill was shot down by the Democrats and some Republicans in
Congress.

John McCain fought two years ago to shield the American people from
the
crisis some of us are facing.

What was Barack’s vote??












On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:14:44 -0700, Billy
wrote:

In article ,
(Way Back Jack) wrote:

On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:10:33 -0700, Billy
wrote:

In article ,
(Way Back Jack) wrote:

Hey, if you wanna bitch about Obama and the leftists that are flushing
the US down the toilette, you might wanna take it to a politics group.

Just tell me what group you're in, and I'll delete it from my responses.
If the group gets put back in, I won't play no more. Fair enough?

Play with this, weenie:

The President Who Hates His Country

Joan Swirsky

By Joan Swirsky Sunday, May 3, 2009
In the last century, the impassioned words and actions of patriots
like Winston Churchill – along with America’s heroic help and
sacrifice – saved Europe. The eloquence and actions of “I’ve been to
the mountaintop” Martin Luther King Jr. brought America to an
unprecedented level of social justice.

The peerless oratory and tireless diplomacy of the man who would
become Israel’s Foreign Minister, Abba Eban convinced the entire world
that after the wanton murder of six-million Jews in the Holocaust its
straggling survivors deserved their own state of Israel. The inspiring
words and decisive actions of President Ronald Reagan ended the Cold
War, tore down the Berlin Wall, and restored economic prosperity to
America. The efforts of these towering figures resulted in a more
highly-evolved world.

We have also seen the opposite in totalitarian leaders like Hitler,
Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, and Saddam Hussein, among
others, who exploited their masses, destroyed their economies, brought
havoc, turbulence, grief and massive death within and outside of their
countries, and made the world a more dangerous and threatening place.

The one thing all of these virtuous and evil men had in common was
love for their respective countries, in fact a burning passion that
superseded all else. The virtuous believed in freedom and democracy.
The evil believed in subjugation of their peoples and lifetime tenures
for themselves in order to actualize their goals of conquering their
eternal enemies – Americans and Jews.

Today, we have a new crop of inveterate America- and Jew-haters, among
them the Marxist leader of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua’s
president Daniel Ortega, Iran’s “death-to-America-and-Israel”
study-in-abnormal-psychology Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the
ever-sabotage-America and anti-Semitic “leaders” of the 22-Arab states
that surround Israel.

I have either read about or observed firsthand all of these people.
Yet in my decades of commenting on the political scene, I cannot
recall a single leader of any country or regime who has ever spoken
negatively of his country or tolerated others speaking ill of the land
or the people he represented

Until now
Bizarre and, yes, repugnant as it is to our essentially centrist
country, America now has a president who has broken that time-honored
tradition. Barack Obama, on the campaign trail and as the leader of
the free world is the first U.S. president to proclaim to anyone
within earshot that he, like his wife, is not proud of his country,
and is all-too-willing to offer serial apologies – for America! – to
Americans and foreigners alike.

As Ed Lasky writes: “We know that during the campaign [Obama] warned
that criticism of his wife was `off-limits’. But criticism of America
– well, that is fine.”

We also know that during his run for the presidency, Obama expressed
sneering condescension towards all those bible-clasping, gun-owning
yahoos who “cling” to those silly things, and that in Europe he
consistently gave voice to America’s supposed “sins.” But all that
pales in comparison to the clear contempt – looks more like hatred to
me – that Obama feels for the United States of America and for its
most revered founding document, the U.S. Constitution.

In just the first 100-days of his tenure, Obama’s words and actions
have demonstrated that he is no friend of the country he leads. This
is only a smattering of what happened on his recent three-continent
trip abroad and to Mexico:


In France, Obama told his audience that America “has shown arrogance
and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe.
In Prague, Obama – in true utopian-kindergarten fashion – pledged
“with conviction” that America will “seek the peace and security of a
world without nuclear weapons.” In other words, destroy big bad
America’s ability to defend itself!
In London, Obama made clear that the world’s financial wealth was no
longer made by those inferior leaders Roosevelt and Churchill,
effectively ceding America’s leading role in creating and sharing
wealth to nations that have never measured up to our country’s
bountiful generosity or spirit of free-market entrepreneurship.
In Venezuela, Obama sat passively while the Marxist Chavez handed him
an American-bashing book and delivered another revile-America speech,
while never once rising to defend our country.
In Nicaragua, Obama again sat passively while the Marxist Ortega
blamed the United States for a century of what he called terroristic
U.S. aggression in Central America, again emitting not a whisper of
defense on our country’s behalf.
In Turkey, Obama said – incredibly and inaccurately – that America was
not a Christian nation.
And in his recent trip to Mexico, Obama said that the escalating
border violence was essentially America’s fault.
Scan you memory. Can you think of any other leader in world history
who so consistently badmouths his own country, or fails to defend it?
I can’t.

Wall St. Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz notes that Obama “had gone
to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a
message of atonement for its errors. No sitting American president had
ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that
matter at home. When [our allies] see Obama’s moral equivalence, they
realize they are on their own and must cut their own deals to survive
– understanding that multicultural trendiness is now a cynical cover
for moral laxity and ‘can’t we all get along?’

Historian Victor Davis Hanson also noticed something odd about Obama’s
apology tour. “Despite this fresh climate of atonement, there was a
complete absence of a single apology from any other foreign leader…not
a word came from Britain about colonialism…nothing from Germany on the
Holocaust…not a peep from France about Algeria or Vietnam. Turkey was
mum on the Armenian killings…Russia said nothing about the 30 million
murdered by Stalin…Nothing came from China about the 70 million who
perished under Mao…Mr. Medvedev said nothing about Putin’s brutish
rule…We saw no concrete evidence of any help — or hope and change —
from any foreign leader. Zilch.”

In addition, Hanson continues, “We hear nothing about our Gettysburg,
or our entry into World War I. Iwo Jima and the Bulge are never
alluded to. Drawing the line in Korea and forcing the end of the
Soviet monstrosity are taboo subjects. That we pledged the life of New
York for Berlin in the Cold War is unknown. Liberating Afghanistan and
Iraq from the diabolical Taliban and Saddam Hussein is left unsaid.
The Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, affirmative action, and
present billion-dollar foreign-aid programs apparently never existed.
Millions of Africans have been saved by George Bush’s efforts at
extending life-saving medicines to AIDS patients — but again, this is
never referenced.”

Blogger James Lewis says that Obama’s “obsessive need to put down his
own country shows a stunningly ignorant man who has evidently never
spoken to a concentration camp survivor, a Cuban refugee, a boat
person from Vietnam, a Soviet dissident, or a survivor of Mao’s
purges.”

And Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell adds, “Obama `gets’ the
America-haters.”

Abandoning allies, Embracing enemies
“If you are a longtime enemy of the United States, count on a grand
reception from the Obama administration. All is forgiven and, worse,
forgotten,” write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann. “But if you have a
track record as an ally or friend, you won’t get the right time of
day.”

Of course apologists for Obama & Co. point to “progress” in our
foreign policy, ignoring, as Caroline Glick points out, that
“America’s betrayal of its democratic allies makes each of them more
vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies – enemies the
Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease.” Glick
lays out the cold hard facts:

Obama abrogated America’s strategic commitment to the defense of our
ally Japan when his administration reacted to North Korea’s ballistic
missile test by saying the U.S. would only shoot the missile down if
it targeted U.S. territory.
Obama slapped our ally India when he refused to make ending Pakistan’s
support for jihadist terror groups attacking India a central component
of its strategy for contending with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Obama failed to assure our ally Iraq that democracy and freedom will
be secured before U.S. forces are withdrawn next year.
Obama de facto abandoned our allies in Eastern Europe when he
announced his intention to forge a new alliance with Russia. “The
Czech, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian governments,” Glick says, “were
quick to recognize that Obama’s strong desire to curry favor with the
Kremlin and weaken his own country will imperil their ability to
withstand Russian aggression.”
Obama “is sacrificing the U.S.’s alliance with our ally Israel “in a
bid to appease the Arabs and Iran by supporting the immediate
establishment of a Palestinian state,” which, Glick warns, “requires
Israel to commit national suicide in exchange for `peace.’” Obama also
made clear “that from the administration’s perspective, an Israeli
strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less
acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran.” In addition, Obama sent Hamas
$900 million of foreign aid, “channeled through the UNRWA, a United
Nations front filled with Hamas operatives”
Obama slapped our ally England when he returned the bust of Winston
Churchill to Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Obama slapped our ally Colombia and its president Alvaro Uribe when he
refused to submit the free trade deal with Bogota to the Senate.
“What a great time to be our enemy!” Glick exclaims. “What a terrible
time to be our friend!”

And speaking about appeasing Iran, the Obama administration recently
asked a federal judge to throw out a $6.6-billion class-action lawsuit
against Iran filed by 52 American diplomats and military officials
held hostage for more than a year at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 30
years ago. Nothing like selling out Americans to make brownie points
with a bloodthirsty dictator!

Barry Rubin explains: “Friends, especially in Europe, are pleased,
applaud, but then add that they don’t have to give this guy anything
because he is all apologies and no toughness. They like the fact that
he is all carrots and no sticks. If, however, they are states more at
risk…they worry that they cannot rely on the United States to help and
defend them. Enemies or potential rivals…say that this guy is weak and
defeated. He apologizes, offers unconditional engagements, and
promises concessions…they’ll eat the carrots and, if possible, their
neighbors as well.”

NY Post writer Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence officer,
sums up the hate-America core tenets of the “Obama Doctrine” as
follows:
(1) We’re to blame,
(2) Problems can be negotiated away,
(3) Problems that can’t be talked out can be bought off,
(4) Islamist terrorism doesn’t exist,
(5) It’s all our fault,
(6) Israel’s the obstacle to Middle East peace,
(7) Our nukes threaten world peace and we need to get rid of them,
(8) Our military is dangerous,
(9) Our intelligence services are even more dangerous than our
military,
(10) It’s only torture if we do it, and
(11) Blame President George W. Bush.

Obama is clearly not satisfied with threatening the safety of our
tried-and-true allies abroad. He is also determined to undermine the
bedrock foundation of America’s security – our military and
intelligence agencies. By disclosing interrogation memos – and
planning to release photographs associated with military probes into
prisoner abuse – he has betrayed every heroic person who risks his or
her life for our country, and unforgivably given aid-and-comfort to
enemies who seethe with virulent anti-Americanism and lust for our
demise. And in the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous memo, he
has called members of our military, among others, potential domestic
terrorists!

“After September 1th, the general outcry was, ‘Why don’t we have
better overseas capabilities?’” said Porter Goss, director of the CIA
from September 2004 to May 2006. “I fear that in the years to come,
this refrain will be heard again. It is certainly not trust that is
fostered when intelligence officers are told one day ‘I have your
back,’ only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it.”

How horrifying to contemplate that it is the President of the United
States himself who is wielding that back-stabbing knife!

Questioning Obama’s patriotism
Before the November election, legal scholar Henry Mark Holzer wrote –
and scrupulously documented – a stunning indictment of Obama in which
he stated that Obama’s repeatedly professed claim to be a patriot is
“a fraud on the American people – and an insult to the countless true
patriots who, for over two hundred years, have loved and loyally and
zealously supported the United States of America.”

“Patriots,” Holzer concluded, “don’t associate with and derive
sustenance from terrorists, America-haters and anti-Semites; they
don’t countenance fixed elections; they don’t keep secrets from
voters; they don’t intimidate their enemies; they don’t denigrate and
degrade our military; they don’t gratuitously interfere with their
government’s efforts to protect our country; and they don’t disdain
the symbol of this great nation, which for over two centuries men and
women have fought and died: the American flag. Whatever Barack Obama
is, we can be certain that he is no patriot!”

The events that have followed Obama’s election, Holzer says, “have
compounded the proof of the president’s lack of patriotism,” which he
has recently spelled out in a follow-up article. A few of the many
examples he provides of what “a patriotic American president does not
do include:

Bankrupt this country and court massive inflation in order to
implement his vision of a fascist/socialist nation.
Sit on his hands with a straight face while a South American thug
insults his country.
Appoint America-haters to his cabinet.
Cozy up to a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iranian madman.
Impotently watch the probably-already-nuclear-armed North Korean
Stalinists lob a ballistic missile across the Pacific.
Fail to stanch the flow of illegal aliens across the Mexican-United
States border.
Cut the defense budget.
Strangle innovation during a serious recession by raising taxes.
Close Guantanamo Bay without a clue of how to handle the enemy
combatants incarcerated there.
Publicly announce what measures military and CIA interrogators can use
to extract information from terrorists.
Apologize to the world for what has made America great and grovel to
persons, nations. and institutions unfit to shine our shoes!
Cede American sovereignty to the American-hating United Nations.
Defy the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court decision by making an
end run that substantially reduces the supply of certain ammunition.
Repudiate the policy and practice of missile shield installation.”
Some dare call it treason
It is one thing to question a president’s patriotism, but even more
serious to accuse him of treason. In an open letter to Obama on
Treason, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III (U.S. Naval Academy, Class of
1975) minces no words in accusing the president of sending Army forces
to Samson, Alabama, and Boston in violation of the Constitution. Here
are excerpts of his letter:

“I have observed and extensively recorded invidious attacks by
military-political aristocrats against the Constitution for twenty
years. Now you have broken in and entered the White House by force of
contrivance, concealment, conceit, and deceit. Posing as an imposter
president and commander in chief, you have stripped civilian command
and control over the military establishment…
“We come now to the reckoning. I accuse you and your
military-political criminal assistants of TREASON. I name you and your
military criminal associates as traitors. Your criminal ascension
manifests a clear and present danger. You fundamentally changed our
form of government. The Constitution no longer works….

“I identify you as a foreign-born domestic enemy. You are not my
president. You are not my commander in chief.

Fitzpatrick is not alone. John Smith – a blogger on Townhall.com,
titled a recent article “Obama Is a Traitor.” Commenting on the
president’s release of the “torture” memos, Smith says:



“Given the actions of Barack Obama in recent days, one has to wonder
how many soon-to-be released State secrets have been gathered by
radical left-wing traitors and hidden in the dark recesses of
Washington, awaiting the Manchurian Candidate’s command to publish
them…

“The motivation for Obama’s recent intentional disclosure of Top
Secret CIA memoranda…was an act committed solely to increase his own
political power through appeasement of the radical left…or was it
…guided by the twisted moral imperative uniquely embraced by the Left,
which dictates that only those actions that serve to limit individual
liberty, punish patriotism, and destroy the traditions and culture of
the United States of America are good?…

“Were Obama’s actions motivated by a deeply rooted desire to harm this
Nation?…

“Article III of the Constitution defines Treason against the United
States as “… levying War against them or in adhering to their Enemies,
giving them Aid and Comfort…”.

“Top Secret information is the highest level of classification that we
have on a national level. By definition, such material, if made
public, will cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security…

“The willful disclosure of Top Secret information is an act of Treason
against the United States….A sitting President of The United States of
America has committed Treason.”

Fitzpatrick and Smith are among a rising tide of voices – in and
outside of the military – who have observed with growing horror
Obama’s proclivity to destroy our capitalist economic system, subvert
the U.S. Constitution, endanger our military and intelligence
services, and obsequiously embrace America’s sworn enemies.

Dr. Jack Wheeler, a consummate Washington insider, goes one step
further. “The evidence that the President of the United States is a
traitor is mounting. The evidence that the President of the United
states is a mortal danger to America’s national security is mounting.
The evidence that the President of the United States will not defend
America from threats and insults from every two-bit fascist dictator
in the world …is not only mounting, it is overwhelming.”

Writer Amy L. Geiger-Hammer states: “I do wonder if Obama should be
called a traitor or just incompetent…does he ever talk about what a
great country America is?”
And UK journalist Gerald Warner echoes that rising tide: “If al-Qaeda,
the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick
America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of
the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the
history of the United States has a president worked so actively
against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.
Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the
enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic
weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead,
it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US
Constitution. “

Is America Lost?
Multiple lawsuits to find proof that Obama is Constitutionally
ineligible to be president are ongoing and will ultimately determine
if he is an American or Kenyan or Indonesian or UK “natural-born”
citizen. To this date, he has spent over a million dollars blocking
the suits about his still-missing birth certificate, and there is
increasing evidence that the birth certificate attested to by
FactCheck.org, FightTheSmears.org, and DailyKos.com are forgeries. And
of course we still have not seen Obama’s Selective Service record,
medical records, multiple visas, college transcripts, et al.

If Obama is proven to be the fraud and interloper many suspect, every
one of his edicts, bills, laws, dictates, Supreme Court selections, et
al, will be overturned , leaving America to cope with serious problems
– under the leadership of the incomprehensible Joe Biden – but nothing
approaching this hate-America president’s far-left socialist domestic
programs and appease-our-enemies foreign policy.

The huge national turnouts at the Tea Parties of April 15 were only
the beginning of a movement that was spurred by ordinary Americans
waking up to Obama’s destruction of our economy, his attempts to
reshape America into a banana republic, the grave damage he’s
inflicted on our military and intelligence services, and his unsavory
predilection for embracing our enemies and apologizing non-stop for
the most magnificent nation on earth.

In short, they are waking up to the president who hates his country.

Editor Charlotte Baker predicts that “the Tea Parties and other, more
aggressive, protests will grow exponentially, and that the Obama
juggernaut can and will be stopped.” It’s crucial, she says, “for all
Americans to recall the history they learned in school – at least
before the Left hijacked what used to be known as `education.’ The
Europeans, Japanese and Russians were all taken over by one form or
another of totalitarianism because their combined history was one of
absolute rulers – kings, czars and `divine’ emperors. They were
totally conditioned to tyranny.

“But the monstrous anti-American gang that rigged the voting system on
November 4, 2008– as they do routinely in Obama’s Chicago Machine
politics – to push Obama into We-the-People’s White House, have shown
– even before his inauguration – the kind of overreaching that
arrogant tyrants always demonstrate. Hitler, Mao, Tojo and Stalin all
got away with overreaching, but they weren’t brutalizing Americans.

“Tolerating totalitarianism is simply not in the genetic code – the
DNA – of Americans!” Baker adds. “Freedom and Liberty run in our
blood!”
Who sent our manufacturing jobs over seas?

Who wrote insurance contracts, but didn't set aside money to cover them,
and then demanded to be bailed-out? Think AIG, who is preparing another
round of bonuses for themselves.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/...ap6640351.html

Who flooded our food chain with GMO food without doing feeding trials on
them, thereby turning us into guinea pigs?

Why can't we get the compound, bisphenol A or BPA out of our food supply
even after several dozen scientists issued a strongly worded consensus
statement warning that an estrogen-like compound in plastic is likely to
be causing an array of serious reproductive disorders in people.
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/articl...82/1033/NEWS01

Who is responsible for American tax payer subsidized grains, that are
sold below cost in Third World countries, which leaves farm laborers and
farmers without an income with which to fed their families?

Who supplied the $, rifles, tanks, and jets to attack the civilian
population of Gaza?

Who gave refuge to Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles, a former CIA
operative, Posada has been convicted in absentia of involvement in
various terrorist attacks and plots in the Western hemisphere, including
involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed
seventy-three people[3][4] and has admitted to his involvement in other
terrorist plots including a string of bombings in 1997 targeting
fashionable Cuban hotels and nightspots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles

Who took sub-prime loans and turned them into worthless financial
derivatives which are responsible for for the worst depression since
1929?

Who overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq, the legally elected Prime Minister of
Iran, in 1954 and installed the Shah, a dictator, in order to have
access to Iran's oil?

Who made Anastasio Somoza García dictator of Nicaragua?

Who backed Pinochet in overthrowing the legally elected government of
Chile?

Why did two-thirds of U.S. corporations pay no federal income taxes
between 1998 and 2005?

Why did Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
Department in the Reagan administration and a former associate editor of
the Wall Street Journal, say Bush's "bailout is either incompetence or
fraud, because the problem, according to the government, is the
defaulting mortgages, so the money should be directed at refinancing the
mortgages and paying off the foreclosed ones"?

Why did income inequality grow significantly in 2005, with the top 1
percent of Americans ‹ those with incomes that year of more than
$348,000 ‹ receiving their largest share of national income since 1928?

Who is responsible for "Operation Northwoods", a false flag conspiracy
plan, proposed within the United States government in 1962? The plan
called for CIA or other operatives to kill innocent people and commit
acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war
against Castro-led Cuba.

Why did the C.I.A. facilitate the smuggling and distribution of cocaine
into the United States?
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Alliance-...on/dp/18883639
32/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247248995&sr=1-8

Why are radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production sites
being dumped into regular landfills, and made available for recycling
and resale?
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-s...streaming-nucl
ear-waste/

Who started two American wars based on lies?

Who allowed prisoners to be tortured, tried on confessions obtained
under duress, and denied habeas corpus?

Why can't we defeat a couple thousand guys with AK-47s and grenade
launchers, when we spend half the world military budget?

Why do more than a third of the American public suspects that federal
officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to
stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East?
http://www.scrippsnews.com/911poll

Why do two-thirds of Americans say they want investigations into the
role of Bush administration officials in torture, warrantless
wiretapping and the politicization of the Justice Department. 40 percent
of respondents said they want to see prosecutions.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/13/headlines#3

If you can answer these questions, Jack, you'll know who the real enemy
is.
--

- Billy

There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who
learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and
find out for themselves.
Will Rogers

http://countercurrents.org/roberts020709.htm
http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/zinn