The Ugly Truth Of America’s Welfare Class

@Aye: Sure, I’ll try again. At last, a challenge I can answer succinctly! Your caveats are reasonable enough, although I can’t see why you couldn’t track this down by yourself. This isn’t my original source, which I couldn’t find again, but it ought to do. It’s from an article on the website, Military.com: “Military members and their families are using more food stamps than in previous years – redeeming them last year at nearly twice the civilian rate, according to Defense Commissary Agency figures.”

@asdf:
But. . . if she’s physic, how could she not know about the regulations?

Sorry , I just couldn’t let it pass.

@AJ Hill:

This is a response to the below assertion, from your post #18. You stated;

(4) Members of the military and their families currently receiving food stamps outnumber civilians 2:1.

That is completely false, and even not knowing the numbers of military on food stamps, one can see that. I followed your postings, and those of Aye, and from your own linked article, at Military.com, it states that the number of Americans, in total, on foodstamps in 2009 is 32 million. Now, knowing that their are currently only in the neighborhood of 1.5 million persons in the US military, in order for your statement to be correct, those military members must each have between 42-43 people in their immediate families. How many families do you know all living together, all receiving benefits from a single person, that number 42-43 people?

In the article you linked, and the one Aye linked, a number of 2100 in the year of 2002 from your article, and 2003 from Aye’s, is used as total military members using food stamps at military commissaries. In the article you linked, foodstamp usage amongst civilians grew from 17 million in 2000 to 26 million in 2005. The number of people, civilians, on foodstamps, in 2002/2003 is likely somewhere in between those numbers. So, it doesn’t seem very likely, for several reasons, that currently the number of military and family on foodstamps is twice the civilian number.

Now, I’m sure that you are just a victim of a poorly written article, as the article itself does a poor job of actually saying what it means. From the article;

Military members and their families are using more food stamps than in previous years – redeeming them last year at nearly twice the civilian rate, according to Defense Commissary Agency figures.

My guess is that the article is implying ONLY usage of foodstamps at military commissaries, which defense dept. personnel and their families are able to use as well. Not sure why you felt it necessary to portray the usage as a number, instead of usage rate like the article did. Aye was correct to challenge your assertion.

For all your blathering about people not understanding what they are reading, one would think that you, yourself, would be extra, extra careful in understanding exactly what you are reading.

@Aye: I can’t argue with you. Since I couldn’t find my initial source, I don’t know how I got that idea. The one I found this morning states that military families are redeeming food stamps as twice the rate of civilian families, a different metric, as you point out. If the number of military families getting food stamps is substantially less than the number of civilian families, one has to wonder how they manage to redeem them at twice the rate.. To my mind that’s all a distraction, since the relevant point is that military personnel are reduced to that extremity in the first place. And my question to Wordsmith still stands: does he still think that his stereotype of welfare recipients is accurate and, if he does, where do military personnel and their families fit into it?

It long ago became tiresome to read ideologically stuck refrains from union washed Socialists – just constant denials that their sacrosanct New Deal agencies had anything to do with the financial meltdown.

The crisis was result of political, public and private greed, well doused with doses of both inept and stupid oversight.

@James Raider:

The crisis was result of political, public and private greed, well doused with doses of both inept and stupid oversight

This is true, as far as it goes; but specific identifiable causes were also involved, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Without these and other crucial deregulatory steps the nation’s commercial lenders would not have been able to gamble our future away on credit default swaps.

I suspect you intended something unflattering by the phrase “union washed Socialist”, but to be honest, I have no idea what you mean.. How does one “wash” anything with a union? Maybe I’m too concrete or maybe you’re just not creative enough; but keep trying. You might learn something and I’ll have fun snickering at your infelicities. Fair enough?.

@MataHarley: Tilting at windmills again, I see, MattersHardly. My entire post was written in response to sick-of-the -lies’ claim, which you echo, that Bush won the 2000 election under any recount scenario. Specifically you said in Post #46:

[ The 2000 election] was vetted post election by the media, and still had the same winner.

This is absolutely false, which I demonstrated. I did not intend to debate the voting process or to express an opinion about any of the criteria that were used to assess ballots during any of the recounts. I merely wanted to set the record straight about what the media consortium recount actually showed.

Let’s get to your attempt to reassert that Bush won in the recounts. According to the Associated Press, quoted in my post:

Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide … Gore erased Bush’s advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes.

I also noted that “Rather than report honestly, editors of the newspapers took a politically expedient way out by publishing the results under headlines which implied that Bush had won the recount.” For example, the New York Times article that you cited in some detail appeared under the heading: “EXAMINING THE VOTE: THE OVERVIEW; Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.”

That’s a good example of a misleading headline all right. Does the body of the article support the headline or does it report correctly the actual findings of the consortium’s recounts? Let’s see.

Paragraph 3 – Had the recount followed Mr. Gore’s proposal to recount in four mostly Democratic counties, Bush would still have won.

Paragraph 4 – The weasel word, “might”, appears several times in this paragraph and you pounced on it promptly, inferring that it cast doubt on the AP’s summary of the recounts.

But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium’s independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to ”count all the votes.”

Okay. Let’s keep going and see whether the article clears up this ambiguity.

Paragraph 8 – The study, conducted over the last 10 months by a consortium of eight news organizations assisted by professional statisticians, examined numerous hypothetical ways of recounting the Florida ballots. Under some methods, Mr. Gore would have emerged the winner; in others, Mr. Bush.

This is certainly a more definite statement. Continuing …

Paragraph 15 – In a finding rich with irony, the results show that even if Mr. Gore had succeeded in his effort to force recounts of undervotes in the four Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia, he still would have lost, although by 225 votes rather than 537. An approach Mr. Gore and his lawyers rejected as impractical — a statewide recount — could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent.

Well, there it is at last in the final sentence of the paragraph. Just as the AP reported, in a statewide recount Gore would have won regardless of the standard chosen! But there’s more. In the next paragraph we learn that:

Another complicating factor in the effort to untangle the result is the overseas absentee ballots that arrived after Election Day. … A statistical analysis conducted for The Times determined that if all counties had followed state law in reviewing the absentee ballots, Mr. Gore would have picked up as many as 290 additional votes, enough to tip the election in Mr. Gore’s favor in some of the situations studied.

There’s no equivocation here either. If the absentee ballots had been counted, Gore would have won the election in a number of scenarios.

Finally the article goes into the notorious “dimpled” and “hanging” chad issue. After several paragraphs of analysis, it concludes:

The difficulty of perceiving dimples or detached chads can be measured by the number of coders who saw them, but most of the ballot counts here are based on what a simple majority — two out of three coders — recorded. The different standards mostly involved competing notions of what expresses voter intent on a punch card. … If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive ”dimpled chad” standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin…. counting dimples that three people saw would have given Mr. Gore a net of just 318 additional votes and kept Mr. Bush in the lead by 219. Using the most restrictive standard — the fully punched ballot card — 5,252 new votes would have been added to the Florida total, producing a net gain of 652 votes for Mr. Gore, and a 115-vote victory margin.

All the other combinations likewise produced additional votes for Mr. Gore, giving him a slight margin over Mr. Bush, when at least two of the three coders agreed.

So, the details of the Times article are consistent with the Associated Press summary. One just needs to dig for them. But let’s look at the paragraph which you quote to end your post, because you seem to think it’s significant:

But the consortium’s study shows that Mr. Bush would have won even if the justices had not stepped in (and had further legal challenges not again changed the trajectory of the battle), answering one of the abiding mysteries of the Florida vote.

“Mr. Bush would have won, even if the justices had not stepped in …” In other words, if Gore and his lawyers had continued to pursue their strategy of requesting a four county recount. But we already knew that! It has nothing to do with the consortium’s detailed recount of the other scenarios, where Gore would have won in 6 out of 9 cases.

It’s clear then that, in spite of the misleading headline, the New York Times article correctly reports that in 2/3 of the methods used to conduct the recount – notably those in which all the votes were counted statewide – Al Gore would have won the election. Your reliance on the bogus Times headline and the appearance of the word, “might”, in an early paragraph – plus your fervent desire to prove yourself right and me wrong – have led you seriously astray.

Again!

@AJ Hill:

Another exception to take, from your #43;

Spare me your absurd rodomontade. It’s comical at first, but then merely grotesque. The Wall Street crash was made possible by Phil Gramm and a bunch of crooked, mostly Republican, legislators and brought on by greedy, unprincipled bankers. If you don’t know the history, do some reading yourself or just stay uninformed.

The bolded part is misleading at best. But I’ll get to that in a second. In your post #58, you also stated this;

· 2000: The Commodity Futures Modernization Act (Phil Gramm at work again. Read in particular the shady way he snuck this into law.) The bill opened the way for banks to trade in credit default swaps and other financial “derivatives”, which were unsupervised by the SEC, or by any federal or state insurance regulators.

Well, looking at the voting records of those bills tells a different story than the one you support with your comments. For example, the voting record for the GLB Act is thus;
-First vote;senate;May of 1999-This vote is almost straight on party lines, with only one D breaking ranks to vote in favor.
-Second vote, House, July of 1999 – Vote passed the House without objection, no record kept.
-After passing both the House and the Senate, the conference report was worked on, addressing not only the differences in the House and Senate versions, but also addressing objections from the D-senators on the bill. The result is that several amendments to the 1977 CRA were included.
-The final senate vote, Nov of 1999 – The voting record here details 90 yeas, 8 nays, with 1 GOP and 7 D voting nay.
-The final House vote, Nov of 1999 – The voting record here details 362 yeas, 57 nays, 15 NV, with 50 D, 6 R, and 1 I voting nay.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s106-900

Overall, the final voting on the Act is strongly in favor, by both parties, and signed with positive remarks from Bill Clinton. Indeed, Clinton, in 2008 had these remarks to say about the act;

In BusinessWeek.com, Maria Bartiromo reports that she asked the former President last week whether he regretted signing that legislation. Mr. Clinton’s reply: “No, because it wasn’t a complete deregulation at all. We still have heavy regulations and insurance on bank deposits, requirements on banks for capital and for disclosure. I thought at the time that it might lead to more stable investments and a reduced pressure on Wall Street to produce quarterly profits that were always bigger than the previous quarter.

“But I have really thought about this a lot. I don’t see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis. Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn’t signed that bill.”

“But I can’t blame [the Republicans]. This wasn’t something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [commercial banks] to go into the investment banking business as Continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_40/b4102000409948.htm

On to the CRA amendments included in the Act, two items of particular importance:

CRA Compliance Check

– The Federal Reserve may not permit a company to form a financial holding company if any of its banks or S&Ls did not receive at least a satisfactory rating in its most recent CRA exam.

– No bank or financial holding company may commence new activities authorized under the Gramm-Leach Act if any bank, or bank affiliate of a financial holding company, received less than satasfactory rating at its most recent CRA exam.

http://banking.senate.gov/conf/craamd.htm

What this means is that anyone wishing to form a financial holding company, or commence any new activities authorized under the ACT itself, must have those CRA exam ratings. How does one get those CRA exam ratings?

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) requires the federal financial institution supervisory agencies, in connection with their examinations of certain depository institutions, to assess the institutions’ CRA performance. A financial institution’s performance in helping to meet the credit needs of its community is evaluated in the context of information about the institution (capacity, constraints and business strategies), its community (demographic and economic data, lending, investment, and service opportunities), and its competitors and peers. Upon completion of a CRA examination, an overall CRA Rating is assigned using a four-tiered rating system. These ratings are: Outstanding, Satisfactory, Needs to Improve, and Substantial Noncompliance.

In the case of an interstate bank, the federal bank supervisory agencies are required by law to evaluate an institution’s CRA performance in each state and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in which it has a branch in addition to providing an overall rating for the bank’s performance. The assessment of the bank’s performance in these individual areas are appropriately weighted and considered in determining the overall rating.

http://www.ffiec.gov/craratings/ratings_faq.htm#5

Sounds all well and good, right? Wrong. It was abused, just as many well intentioned laws have been:

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA – and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions .

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_cvq7rDCHftKwJyLaecfPQK;jsessionid=D1D1AAAA98E3E5E0C342D0CCD2AA1E19

None other than Barack Obama himself was involved in the numerous lawsuits and intimidating tactics aimed at increasing lending to those who shouldn’t have been.

The banks themselves certainly weren’t innocent, though, as later, they welcomed almost with open arms those who shouldn’t have been allowed loans, simply to make a buck or two more. But, that gets into the second legislative piece that you discussed, in your post #58;

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act

This legislation was actually initiated by Clinton himself, who commissioned a panel, the “Presidential Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG)”, whose recommendations were rolled into the House bill H.R. 4577, and Senate bill S.3283, of which the cosponsors included Tom Harkin, who so vehemently denounced the GLB Act of the previous year.

The part that Gramm had to play was two-fold, in that he essentially blocked voting on the bill from the house unless it was included that CDS(Credit Default Swaps) were to be exempted from SEC oversight.
-Credit Default Swaps is basically insurance, issued by such firms as AIG, against investments by banks to ensure the banks didn’t lose their money.

Eventually, Gramm got his way, and both HR 4577 and S.3283 were passed and, were included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2001. The House voted 292-60 in favor, a mixed bag of both yeas and nays. The Senate voted “unanimously”, with two important objections raised, particularly regarding the HR4577, of both Senator Inhofe, a Republican, and the late Senator Wellstone, a Democrat. The PWG expressed strong unanimous consent with the results of the legislative actions regarding their recommendations.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:HR05660:@@@L&summ2=m&
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:HR04577:@@@X
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r106:FLD001:S61856

The biggest point that I’m making is that one cannot “blame” the Republicans, either solely, or majority-wise, for the passage of both of those acts happening. This is a common misconception, or mislead, by liberal/progressives on this front.

The other point brought up by me, about the CRA, is important in that it DID lead to the “perfect storm” of actions necessary to bring about the crash of 2008. Not only did it initially allow loans given to those who shouldn’t have received them, but it was used as justification later on by banks to issue more loans that were “risky” at best, leading to the overextension of both banks(capital) and insurance issuers(like AIG). When the housing price corrections started coming in, many of those banks that held the bundled investment securities full of “risky” mortgages found themselves holding a bunch of paper that wasn’t nearly worth the amounts they bought them for. This put pressure on firms like AIG, who had overextended themselves in issuing those CDS’s, causing bankruptcies and failures.

It was, in essence, an atmosphere of greed, by financial institutions, by “community organizers” like Obama, who gained power from “helping” gain loans, and the people who received the loans themselves, many of whom knew all along they couldn’t pay them. To blame everything on one sector, and intimate it was one party’s doing, is to ignore everything that happened. I’d rate your initial comment that I highlighted misleading, as the part about “Phil Gramm and a bunch of crooked, mostly Republican, legislators” doesn’t tell the whole story, especially the part about Bill Clinton favoring the Act and the “deregulation” liberal/progressives insist happened.

@johngalt:
You are correct that neither party can claim to be innocent when it comes to federal tax dollars going to friends and away from enemies.
My comment was meant to be contrasting corporate (or business) welfare cheats with individual ones.

I included this:

I think it is wrong if a company does it.
BUT I also think it is equally wrong if an individual does it.

I am by no means the most conservative poster on this board.
I buy into and try to live by the old saying (sometimes called the Eleventh Commandment).
“Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”

If someone wants dirt on the Republicans, they won’t find much of it in my posts.
Let them do their own homework.
I know all about the Keating 5 and so on.
But it is not my focus to tear down my own side.
That’s why I still say I will vote for whoever gets the Republican nomination.
(It would have to be a real long shot nominee before I would stay home or go 3rd party.)

@Walt: I have a problem with this kind of anecdotal “evidence”. Child welfare psyments are considerably less than the amount of money required to raise a child; and by that I don’t mean raise in style or even comfort. These are just barely subsistence level payments intended to keep an unforeseen additional child from starving or going naked. So I just don’t see how these hypothetical “welfare queens” make it work. Does anyone here know?

I wonder whether these responses by welfare recipients aren’t just a way to have fun at the expense of some naïve interviewer or liberal acquaintance.

AJ Hill,
your argument is good but if the MULTIPLE AGENCIES where all doing their job strictly getting involved in problems solving, on rich or poor abused of the gimmy system,
I can easy would see at least one billion save, plus reducing those agencies to minimum ,
because they have too many on one issue that take away the responsibility of one who would be dedicated to stop those abuses

@AJ Hill:

You assume that they use the money to take care of the kids properly. I have personally witnessed mothers neglecting their children on a daily basis. I couldn’t tell you if they were on welfare, tho.

@Nan G: I think a very good case can be made for the proposition that corruption exists in virtually every aspect of human society and at virtually every level. My primary objection to the conservatives’ approach to corruption is their tendency to concentrate on the neediest and most helpless groups (e.g.: welfare recipients and others who receive government assistance that doesn’t properly qualify as “welfare”), while the wealthy and influential get away with corruption on a much grander (more “refined”?) scale. One of the most significant problems with this latter form of corruption is that it often goes on under cover of law. When individuals (or groups) have the power to influence legislation in their favor, then they can rewrite the laws to channel benefits into their own pockets in ways that the poor cannot. Is it any more honest in a fundamental sense to do so. I don’t think it is. The Founders didn’t either, which is why so many of them disparaged the unlimited accumulation of wealth (by any means!) as a social evil.,

@Aqua: I have no doubt that you and your wife see a lot of corruption. My wife worked for two years as an inspector for the welfare system in Miami, going daily into parts of the city where the police only went in pairs to identify addresses where no one lived and where there were often not even any buildings! So I have no illusions about the endemic dishonesty that infects this (and every other) part of our society. I certainly don’t entertain the belief that the “poor are noble” and I’m curious where you get that impression. I just don’t think that the poor are any less noble than anyone else! If their poverty and misery drive them to commit dishonest acts more frequently than “we” do, well, lucky us! If you think that you’re somehow innately more honest, more noble, less vulnerable to temptation than the average ghetto dweller, I congratulate you. You’re either a truly unusual human being or a naive, self flatterer. I have no such illusions. I live and have always lived a relatively sheltered and comfortable life for which I am heartily grateful, but I don’t for one instant believe that I’m a better person than those less fortunate. If anything, I believe that my privileged circumstance imposes a moral obligation on me to minimize the inequity.

@johngalt: Post #71 was written with your characteristic polish and attention to detail, but it contains a number of assertions that are contrary to or unsupported by the facts.

To maintain logical continuity, I’ll refer to the same Posts (#43 and #58) you did, but I won’t quote from them extensively. Anyone who’s interested can read them conveniently enough.

I subscribe to the thesis endorsed by most economists that the 2008 financial meltdown was made possible by deregulatory actions promoted by (then Senator) Phil Gramm and the Republicans. However, I do not say in my posts (as you correctly point out) that Democrats, including many legislators and President Clinton, were at least partly to blame. You and I agree on that.

Congressional Democrats have a long tradition of failing to stand up for principle. Bill Clinton remains one of the most brilliant and well informed Presidents America has ever had, so I’d like to think he recognized the risks of the legislation he signed and the agreements he endorsed; but he was also a consumate politician, so I’m sure I’ll never know. His enthusiasm for NAFTA and the other “free trade” agreements makes me wish I had voted for Ross Perot!

Getting back to the issue at hand, after the Savings & Loan disaster thirty years ago, both parties should have supported more stringent regulation in the finance industry; but, in fact, nothing changed: Republicans retained their role as the traditional party of deregulation, while Democrats supported more stringent supervision.So it would be no surprise, that Gramm-Leach-Bliley was a Republican bill. It was written by Republicans and passed by Republican majorities.You say, however, that it was not and that the voting on it was evenly balanced. Well, let’s see. You cite numbers for the final vote count correctly: In the Senate 1 R and 7D voted nay. In the House, it was 6R and 50D. But these are the unnormalized values, as you surely realize. In the Senate the nay votes represented 2% of Reps and 16% of Dems. In the House the nays were 2% of Reps again, but 25% of Dems. That puts a different complexion on it. In each chamber significant factions (1/6 and 1/4) among the Democrats opposed the bill, while Republican support was virtually unanimous. I wouldn’t call that balanced support.

There’s more to these votes than the bare numbers. In either party principled behavior occurs primarily on the margins. Who were the Dems in opposition? In the Senate they were Boxer, Bryan, Dorgan, Feingold, Harkin, Mikulski, and Wellstone. There’s no doubt where these Senators were coming from. So, yes, I still say, Gramm-Leach-Bliley was a Republican bill.

For the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, I agree with you: voting was similar in both parties, but what about the bill’s content? We can thank Phil Gramm for that. As you say, “he essentially blocked voting on the bill from the house unless it was included that CDS (Credit Default Swaps) were to be exempted from SEC oversight.” If any single provision brought about the ultimate meltdown of the banking system , that was it. The SEC could have halted the disaster in its tracks by clamping down on the derivatives market. Gramm was also responsible, in a notoriously sneaky way for the so-called “Enron loophole”, which allowed companies like Enron (on whose board Gramm’s wife served) to speculate in energy futures with catastrophic results for the state of California. That’s a different story, but it illustrates the same principle. In addition, as Democratic Rep. Ed Markey (MA) pointed out, during a three week period in September, when a House version of the bill (HR 4541) was under consideration by the Republican majority, Gramm was a conspicuous (and inappropriate according to Markey) participant. To put it colloquially the CFMA had Gramm’s fingerprints all over it.

I’m not going to debate the convoluted legislative history of the CFMA any further. Just looking at a couple of webpages devoted to it makes my eyes cross. To my mind the most salient facts identify it as a Republican bill, which Democrats eventually supported. I also believe that the prominent role played by Phil Gramm throughout the process can’t be denied. Thus my characterization of the crash as “made possible by Phil Gramm and a bunch of crooked, mostly Republican legislators.” If you want to question my use of the term “crooked”, I’ll give you that point, but I don’t think it’s excessive to say that many of them (in both parties!) were improperly influenced by the banking industry to reduce oversight in a way that ultimately led to disaster. There’s nothing new there. That’s the way our system “works”.
Getting back to the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) it has become an article of unquestioned faith among conservatives that this act eventually led to the financial meltdown. You obviously subscribe to this belief, but you adduce no evidence to support the claim.

The CRA was passed essentially to curb the practice of “redlining”, which was common until its passage. Banks routinely wrote off residents of low income neighborhoods as poor credit risks regardless of their true financial status, effectively preventing the inhabitants of those areas from “bootstrapping” their way out of poverty. It’s worth emphasizing in this regard that no provision of the bill encourages banks to make subprime loans. In fact the writing of such loans is specifically prohibited; banks cannot obtain a high rating under the CRA unless they maintain “safe and sound banking practices.”

That’s indeed “all well and good” as you put it. The question then becomes, were the provisions of the CRA misapplied in order to force banks to issue subprime loans? And here’s where you start to shade the facts. Your evidence consists of a single oped piece from the conservative New York Post, written by conservative writer, Stanley Kurtz. Titled “O’s Dangerous Pals: Barack’s ‘Organizer’ Buds Pushed for Bad Mortgages” it contains statements like these:

Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

Community organizers force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

Community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods.

Public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

Anything missing here? Evidence! Kurtz makes a bunch of accusations, all confirming right wing ideological orthodoxy, without giving a shred of proof for any of them. He’s written an opinion piece and nothing more. As proof of anything, it’s a bunch of crap!

Yes, the CRA was meant to force banks to make loans to people who had previously been excluded from credit. Were any of these loans inappropriate? Undoubtedly, but did the CRA encourage that? No! The law specifically enjoins “safe and sound” banking practices.

Did groups like ACORN use the law to gain concessions from banks and other lenders? Of course they did. That’s exactly what pressure groups (including those representing the interests of major corporations and the wealthy) do to achieve their goals. Is it illegal? No! Immoral? That obviously depends on the details and perhaps on the bias of the observer.

As for the connection to Barack Obama, it’s just more right wing conventional wisdom that community organizers are somehow disreputable or dishonest. They do what they can to advance the interests of their “clients”, in this case mostly the poor and underprivileged. The blanket implication that they break the law is flat out wrong. Some do, some don’t. I can say this. If a single shred of evidence existed that Obama had broken the law in his capacity as community organizer, it would have emerged long ago and been used against him. But nothing has!
The last bit of misinformation about Fannie and Freddie is just more right wing propaganda, which I debunked in my post. Yes, F/F bought up subprimes and repackaged them for sale on the derivatives market. Were they the sole or even primary offender in this. Absolutely not! As I point out, their share of the subprime market fell from a hair thin majority of 50.1% in 2002 to 34.8% in 2006, as the meltdown was gathering steam. I’m curious in this connection, what makes you disagree with the assessments of Greenspan, Cox, and Snow, that I quoted in my post?

Finally, there’s your assertion, made obliquely to be sure, that the meltdown wasn’t a result of deregulation. In the last paragraph of my post I list five factors that were key in the development of the credit disaster. At least four of these, including GLB and DFMA, were clear examples of deregulation. If you can argue otherwise, I’ll be interested.

Conclusion:
Was the meltdown a product of greed and irresponsible lending? No question. We agree on that much.
Was it brought about by the CRA? I say, prove it. You don’t. The only thing you offer is unsubstantiated opinon and conservative conventional wisdom.
Was it a result primarily of deregulation? I don’t see how you can deny this. Virtually everything that led to the meltdown, including the proliferation of subprime loans and their recrudescence in the derivatives market, was made possible by dimished oversight – by the SEC, bank regulators, etc.
And who pushed for deregulation? I can’t (and won’t!) contest that Democrats had a hand in it; but, if you want to claim that Republicans haven’t consistently and vocally led that charge, you’re going to have an uphill battle proving it.

Nice debate, by the way. This is why I came here and why I’ve stuck around. I hope it’ll continue.

@AJ Hill: You packed a lot into your last comment.

You said:

If their poverty and misery drive them to commit dishonest acts more frequently than “we” do, well, lucky us! If you think that you’re somehow innately more honest, more noble, less vulnerable to temptation than the average ghetto dweller, I congratulate you. You’re either a truly unusual human being or a naive, self flatterer. I have no such illusions.

Really? So the circumstances of one’s financial status bears more on how honest someone is than their own personal integrity?

I live and have always lived a relatively sheltered and comfortable life for which I am heartily grateful, but I don’t for one instant believe that I’m a better person than those less fortunate.

It isn’t whether you are better than someone else, it is whether you conduct yourself with honesty, integrity and moral certitude. I have known many poor persons, hell I am one myself; and I can tell you that honesty and integrity bears little on one’s stance in life and more on how one was raised.

If anything, I believe that my privileged circumstance imposes a moral obligation on me to minimize the inequity.

This statement really reveals so much about you, AJ Hill. And I agree with you to an extent. I believe that everyone – not only well to do, and the wealthy – have an obligation to help their fellow man. But to do it out of a sense of guilt, that is not really the best motivator.

My job is of a delivery nature and this past week as I was driving I saw a couple carrying some plastic grocery sacks in the near 100 degree heat. I pulled over and offered them a ride home as they were going in a direction that my route takes me anyway.

Their “home” turned out to be an old, broken down motor home parked on an empty lot. The woman had a band on her wrist and they told me they were walking home from the ER because she had passed out from heat exhaustion. On their way home, they stopped and got some water and basic food items.

Myself, I am on the UNOS list awaiting a heart transplant, and cannot work. However I have to work a part time job to supplement my meager disability payment so I am by no means affluent; yet I wanted to reach out to these folks. When I got home that night, my wife and I raided our cupboard and we also took one of our water bottles off of our water dispenser and I took these items to the people. They were very grateful and I felt good that I was able to help someone else.

There is always someone worse off than you, AJ; but do yourself a favor and stop breaking things down into classes. People can help, no matter their “station” in life.

From what I have observed of your behavior on this thread, you seem to be fairly intelligent and cogent. However, you have a bitterness or anger that drips off of some of your comments like water off of an ice cube in 100 degree heat.

Relax and understand that there are more viewpoints out there than your own. Let other folks bring something to the table and you will find that is how true debate and discussions begin. From those discussions, solutions to problems spring forth.

@Nan G: I missed this the first time around. What’s the fallacy in logic here? The Founders felt that large (and certainly unlimited) accumulations of wealth were incompatible with democracy, because eventually they conferred so much power that government and law alike became subservient to them. And it didn’t matter how that wealth was acquired. Seems logically sound to me.
Or is it the Founders you think are stupid?

@anticsrocks:

So the circumstances of one’s financial status bears more on how honest someone is than their own personal integrity?

To tell you the truth I have no idea which factor is more important in general. I suspect their relative importance varies unpredictably from individual to individual and from one circumstance to another. I will say that anyone who claims to know absent direct experience how he or she would behave in any situation is simply fooling him- or herself!

I believe that everyone – not only well to do, and the wealthy – have an obligation to help their fellow man. But to do it out of a sense of guilt, that is not really the best motivator.

“Guilt”? Did I mention “guilt”? If you thihk that moral obligation is tantamount to guilt, then I’d say you’ve spent too much time imbibing the wrong kind of religion!
I admired your story of the hitchhikers and commend you and your wife for sharing what you could. You ought to have felt good about that! We should all do the same, when we can.. In addition, as a liberal, I believe that all of us, acting together, should share our bounty with those who don’t benefit from personal kindness or traditional community action, people whom we would never know about, who would slip through the cracks, if we didn’t use the power and scope of government to find them.

Why to I “break things down into classes”, as you put it? It’s just a convenient way to distinguish between diffeerent economic and social groups. How else would you (for example) discuss the issues that confront our country. We’re not all the same. We differ along a great many dimensions, In order to discuss anything in our society sensibly, there must be a common terminology to distinguish one group from another. We can’t deal with 300 million people exclusively as individuals. Do you have a better idea for it?

“Fairly intelligent and cogent”? Well, thanks! I’ll take anything I can get. As to the anger, I won’t deny it. Sometimes it’s harder to control than others. Why am I angry? I’ll tell you. I grew up reading science and science fiction, moved into history and philosophy, and thought all along about what it means to be human, what our species could become, most of all about the kind of world I hoped to see, before I died, the kind of world I wanted to leave my children.
And this isn’t it!

@AJ Hill: When I referred to guilt, I said nothing about religion. I was merely extrapolating your comment when you said:

If anything, I believe that my privileged circumstance imposes a moral obligation on me to minimize the inequity.

Helping someone because you are in a position to do so is admirable. But the part of your statement that lends itself to the idea of guilt is the word you used to end the sentence – inequity.

I know many people, some have more than I do, some have less. I would never want those who have more than me to feel bad and worry about my inequality to their financial status in life. Also, I do not feel that those who have less than I do suffer from inequity.

As my Mother told me over and over as I was growing up when I would say that something wasn’t fair: “God didn’t put you on this earth so that everything could be fair. Your life is what you make it.”

Class warfare does nothing to heal the divides and rifts in our society; if it did then Communism would have been successful. I refer to a statement Ronald Reagan made about this very subject:

We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer—and they’ve had almost 30 years of it—shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing? – Ronald Reagan, A Time For Choosing, October 27, 1964

We aren’t black Americans, and white Americans. Latino Americans, Asian Americans. We aren’t rich Americans and poor Americans my friend, we are just all Americans.

Are there differences between us? Of course there are, that is what makes this grand experiment in democracy so successful. We all bring something to the table. But do not get hung up on who has and who doesn’t. Instead focus on who can and who cannot. There are plenty of folks who can, but do not have. They are able to go out and “have” on their own. Our attention needs to focus on those among us who cannot, for those are the folks who deserve to get a hand up, not a hand out.

@AJ Hill:
People need to be thanked more when involved in that part.
Thank you and yours.

Hubby owns a print shop.
A 22-year employee got a call today.
His 19 year old son had been killed in a motorcycle accident.
He left immediately.
We heard from him later that his son’s organs could help a lot of other people.
They are taking great consolation in this fact.