Oh Give Me a Home...

After looking around at some of the other blogs, I feel really inadequate. There are people writing these things that discuss current events, their successful careers, detailed home decorating and deep philosophical topics. Some blogs concern puzzles, challenges or maybe very exacting hobbies. Deeper still, some are penned by disabled people who share that perspective on life.

I, in turn, write about trains and the weather.

So in this humble moment, I submit a few observations on the state of our country.

I have to agree, this is not a "run of the mill recession," as the President recently said. The failure of the credit sector distinguishes it from the '70's recession and those before. But the President, unchallenged by a friendly press, continues to mislead an uniformed public that this is all somehow a product of Republican mismanagement and Wall Street greed. He continues to stress that he didn't cause this mess; he is simply the one who has to clean it up.

Wait a minute.

There is, as the pundits say, plenty of blame to go around. Usually the press and Obama administration lackeys spread it around as far as, again, Republicans and Wall Street. Well, Wall Street certainly is culpable. Some of the firms there looked the other way as they bundled up packages of loans so toxic that they glowed in the dark. They were not totally ignorant of the mounting crisis-to-come. And as President Clinton said last fall, Republicans in the last Congress were negligent for failure to protest more loudly and longer what had become obvious blundering of the government's role in private lending through Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

But what about the Democrats? Were they just victims of all this greed and mismanagement, utterly shocked like the rest of us when the housing market crashed? Were they the voices of reason and alarm in 2005, '06, and '07? I don't think so. Although given a free ride by the press--and thus absolved by the great unwashed, who obsequiously swept a load of Democrats into office in November--I think the truth would reveal they shouldn't have been stunned because they and their policies over the last ten years didn't contribute to the crash. They caused it.

Fannie, Freddy and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 are all creatures of the past Democratic administrations. Fannie and Freddy, both government agencies designed to make home loans available to a variety of Americans, are administered largely by President Clinton staffers. Under Clinton sponsorship, the CRA was used to justify forcing individual private banks, through various methods, to make shaky home loans at low interest--often with little or no down payment--to those who could least afford them. Having created this atmosphere of "loan to the little, poor guy or else" Congress congratulated itself for doing good, for getting the hard-working poor man into a home of his own and living the American Dream. But the ball kept rolling and the loans kept going out to people who were buying up beyond their means. As usual, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

As the demand for homes became greater with the government meddling in the home loan industry, home prices escalated far beyond what the market could eventually bear. It was particularly bad in California, Nevada and other rapidly growing parts of the USA.

One of the few voices to warn of the impending disaster was one George W. Bush, who in 2003 and again in 2005, called for Congress to oversee more closely what Fannie and Freddy were doing to the housing industry and credit market. Democrats in Congress (read, "Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.) blocked any action on supervision of what Congress was allowing to occur. The press--by now routinely dismissing the President as a buffoon--granted him no coverage or magnification of his warnings. The stage was set for disaster.

Once the housing and credit sectors failed and the layoffs began last year, banks just froze up. Each bank now had no idea of what the other was worth becasue so many banks had bad loans out--now in the hundreds of thousands across the country. As banks refused to make loans to anyone, business began to contract, layoffs mounted, car sales tanked and here we are in a recession. No one can say we would not have had this recession without the credit failure--it might have happened anyway--but we might not have had one as deep, or perhaps at all.

My point in this very condensed description of our situation is that we can't buy what Obama, Dodd, Frank, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and every two-bit state and local politician are selling. We don't dare. Wall Street is guilty, yes. The Republicans, who rarely raise their voices even to defend themselves, should have loudly protested what they saw happening. But the Democrats are standing by indignantly criticizing everyone else, as if they were just casual observers of what went on in the last few months and years. I believe that they are actually stunned by what happened but I also believe that the truth is they caused much of what happened.

Don't buy into their professed role as the homeowner who returns home to find the house rifled, drawers emptied on the floor and furniture overturned, with all the jewelry stolen. They aren't victims any more than the rest of us. Their fingerprints are all over this recession, this credit crisis and the housing debacle. Democrats are quite guilty. "But," they say, "we had to try to make home ownership available to everyone. It's the American Dream, and everyone has a right to it." We may be all equal in rights, and under the law, but that is all the Congress needs to assure. The American Dream of owning a home isn't for everyone and the government sure doesn't need to try to hand it out. Ask yourself what has the government ever done so efficiently that it has proven itself to qualify now as a mortgage banker?

Everyone has a right to dream, that's true. But The Dream has to come from hard work, and sacrifice, and good citizenship. The opportunity is there for all, and the dream is there for those who go work for it. Just don't get suckered in to thinking that liberal Democrats didn't have a huge role in this, as they manipulated the CRA ultimately to buy votes from the folks they unwittingly installed in homes that were wrong for them at the wrong time.

This information is all out there. Thomas Jefferson knew that only through an informed electorate would this government be successful. So, come on, America. Look beyond the "mainstream press" and get some other perspectives on how you have been deceived. It is not too late. And you have been deceived.