The Economy and what Big Media is not telling you...

Also, see Obama's connection with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ignored in Big Media. The Fact that Bush tried to reform Freddie and Fannie ignored in Big Media.

1999 New York Times article.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending-'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. ''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''...In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups."

Boston Globe, Barney Frank and why we are in a financial mess that Big Media is not reporting on

Frank's fingerprints are all over the financial fiasco-"'THE PRIVATE SECTOR got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it."
That's Barney Frank's story, and he's sticking to it. As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector," Frank said; the country is in dire straits today "thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best." And that philosophy goes "back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.' "
In fact, that isn't what Reagan said. His actual words were: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Were he president today, he would be saying much the same thing...Barney Frank's talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn't wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else.
The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.
The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.
As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come...Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror."

Other evidences for this position

Despite Media 'Mythmaking,' Capitalism Didn't Fail-"The networks have also attacked free markets and blamed a lack of regulation for the current Wall Street problems – but haven’t explored regulations that actually created them....Former and current anchors and reporters including Sam Donaldson, Chris Cuomo, Carl Quintanilla and others bashed the free market and deregulation in September. In contrast, the three broadcast networks didn’t talk about the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 during the month, even though economists argue that CRA generated many of today’s financial problems....Economists and other experts argued on Bloomberg.com, Forbes.com and in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) that the economic turmoil facing the U.S. was actually caused by government regulation.

Economist and Business & Media Institute advisor Dr. Walter E. Williams explained in a Sept. 17 column that the “credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy.” ... In the 1990s, Clinton “broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended,” according to IBD Sept. 24. Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, Andrew Cuomo (Chris Cuomo’s brother) made changes that let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into subprime markets “in a big way.”

“That’s how it began. Later, in the Clinton, era, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got involved – buying up bad loans from banks, and securitizing them for sale on world markets. The seeds of the subprime meltdown were planted,” IBD said. All on Frank’s watch...."-Great article from a perspective that is censored in Big Media.

Where was Sen dodd?-"FOX News interviewed Al Hubbard today, who is a former chief economic adviser to Pres. George Bush (senior), on the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac crisis. He reminds viewers that Sen. Dodd killed the Fannie/Freddie reform bill in the Senate Banking Committee when the House managed to pass it. Watch the interview below."

Pinning the Tail on the Donkey-"I believe John McCain won the foreign policy debate hands down, but he was unimpressive on economic issues, which, in fairness, were not supposed to be the subject of the first debate. But he can redeem himself in the next debate. Thankfully, Obama is exceedingly vulnerable here, even more so than on foreign policy, which is a mouthful.

McCain must attack Obama's class-warfare assertion that every economic problem we face, including, preposterously, the financial crisis, is a result of the Bush tax cuts. If McCain's going to be a supply-sider, he must begin talking like one. He must also steer far away from the silly populist line that the free market is somehow to blame for the crisis. Leave such blasphemy to the Obama Democrats.

But McCain's first order of business must be to address the financial crisis head-on -- instead of in generalities, as both he and Obama did in round one....The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight determined in 2004 that Fannie Mae's management engaged in a pervasive misapplication of its accounting rules. In 1998, Fannie deferred $200 million of estimated expenses to create the illusion of profit to justify enormous bonuses to management. The regulators cited Fannie's management for smoothing out swings in its earnings, presumably to deceive investors into believing Fannie was a low-risk company. Regulators also condemned "a culture and environment that made these problems possible." Fannie CEO Franklin Raines, a bosom buddy of Obama's whose dirty hands were all over this scandal, was forced to return millions of dollars for his "alleged" responsibility for the improper accounting practices.

Both Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow called for tougher oversight of Fannie and Freddie as early as 2004 because the magnitude of Fannie's operations coupled with their serious financial difficulties could put the nation's financial system at risk.

Republican members of Congress pushed for remedial action based on those warnings, but the very Democrats pointing their fingers today at President Bush, Republicans and capitalism openly, vehemently and nastily opposed their noble efforts...The always-sanctimonious Barney Frank said: "These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Watch the YouTube video and see Frank, Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Clay and Franklin Raines himself denying there was a problem and bludgeoning Republicans and regulators for trying to solve it. In exchange, the Democrats' corrupt gravy train -- political contributions in exchange for CEO bonuses -- continued unabated.

After highlighting all of this and pinning the financial-crisis tail squarely on the "donkey," McCain must then proceed, unabashedly, to tie Obama to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Obama's socialist community organization of choice. McCain must detail ACORN's complicity in creating this crisis when it forced an epidemic of politically correct, but woefully un-creditworthy loans. And he must show how until the very end, unrepentant and unaccountable Democrats tried to funnel 20 percent of the originally proposed $700 billion of "bailout" money to ACORN and its cousins.

Time for some straight talk, senator. And please, don't hold back."-Lets see what happens!!!

Iraq

‘Most Iraqi People Say President Bush Is a Hero,’ Immigrant Says-"Benny Aldosakee left Iraq five months ago, after getting special immigration status through a federal law that allows some translators who worked with the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan to come to America. Aldosakee said that most Iraqis are grateful to President Bush and the U.S. military for removing dictator Saddam Hussein and that the many in the major media, here and abroad, are misinforming people about Iraq and the Middle East."

Other news of interest

Growing Christian Presence in the Persian Gulf-"Newsweek reports: “Bahrain’s new hospitality shows that attitudes are changing. And the explanation lies in demographics. The kingdom and its neighbors are hosts to booming new Christian populations, thanks to the region’s insatiable hunger for guest workers.”