Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Linda cooked for our soldiers a long time as a civilian here at Boca Chica base, Key West, but had to give up the job when her back gave out.  Now broken, in severe pain from them moving cross-country looking for a miracle cure for her husband Terry. RegrettablyTerry Bradley, U.S. vet passed away without the needed transplant on May 4, 2014.
Please can you help Linda now? She needs encouragement due to losing the only friend she had to help her daily pain & struggles. She no longer has a vehicle and she needs help financially. I’m writing this with an aching heart. It’s been too much for her. I am just a close friend, striving to get Linda happy again. She would so appreciate any type of help. Merry Christmas BigPineKey.com and a blessed New Year.

Frank led Congress to pass 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.

FTR’S RESPONSE: To paraphrase the poster, the lack of knowledge of some posters is sometimes staggering.

Bush (GW) did sign the original bank bailout bill (TARP). That happened in October of 2008. The House and Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the bill, it passed, GWB signed it. That initial bail out was for a paltry $700 billion. House Democrats voted in favor of bailing out Wall Street banks with TARP by a margin of 172-63. Rank-and-file House Republicans actually opposed the bank bailout 91-108. Had the Democrats not overwhelmingly voted for the bill, it would not have become law.

Then, just a few months later, after Obama became President and with a Democrat controlled Congress, the bailout spending really got serious.

TARP was subsequently dwarfed by other guv-mint guarantees and lending limits. By March 2009, the Democrats had committed $7.77 trillion, that’s trillion with a capital T, to rescuing the foundering financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

The Huffington Post has reported that the actual bailout was $29 trillion.

Even while the bailout was supposedly bailing out our sinking fiscal ship, big bank bonuses were flying, funded with your tax dollars. And with the blessing of the Democrat administration. Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.

Now let’s think about the critic’s statement: “$700 billion to buy bad mortgage-related secure ties.”  We know that it was those “bad mortgages” that caused the meltdown. Ask yourself who was responsible for that.

The answer is simple. Democrats. It was the Democrats who sliced and diced the common sense lending practices that required a prospective borrower from a bank to have the ability to repay the loan. It started in 1977.

The Democrats were the prime movants that began the avalanche of bad mortgages and ultimately the recession. Their first strike was the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Essentially that legislation forced banks to grant mortgages to borrowers who did not have the ability to make the payments. That legislation was passed by a Democrat controlled Congress and was signed by President Jimmy Carter.

Then Barney Frank and Chris Dodd successfully pushed to reduce the mortgage buying standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They managed to pass legislation weakening Fannie and Freddie’s buying standards. Before their legislation, all mortgages purchased off the primary market by these two Government Sponsored Enterprises adhered to Federal Housing Administration standards, i.e. they were “prime” loans. But Frank, Dodd, and their cohorts “rolled the dice” in regards to subprime lending, and, in effect, drowned Fannie and Freddie with junk mortgage paper. This began a series of cataclysmic events that eventually crashed the financial system and led to this chaotic period of chronic unemployment and reduced standard of living.

Did I mention that Dodd and Frank are Democrats, and were very powerful Democrat legislators?

Hopefully you will wonder why we have endured the longest recovery from a recession in history, why our unemployment rate is still higher that it was pre-recession, why all of this when the Democrats have spent somewhere between $7.7 and $29 trillion of your tax dollars to bolster our still screwed up economy. The recession has been over since June of 2009. The Democrats have had functional control of our government since 2007. The bailout spending and Democrat management of our economy was another failed experiment in Keynesian economics.

PART 2) A huge tip of the FTR fedora to the poster who gave us the video of the true story on Viet Nam. For all who failed to view yesterday’s video of what really happened in Viet Nam, I urge you to check it out at: Link
When you’re done viewing it I urge you to contemplate the atrocious record of Democrats for keeping their word.

Please think about out turning our backs on our agreements to defend Poland and Ukraine under Obama. Think about the admins promise to be the most “transparent”, ever. Remember “I promise that if you like your doctor, you can keep him?” Think about the lies told about Benghazi. I suggest that you check out the Obama lies inventory to be found at: Link

PART 3) A journalist heard about a very old Jewish man in Jerusalem who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.  So she went to check it out. She went to the Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.  She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview.
“Pardon me, sir, I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN.  What’s your name?”
Morris Feinberg,” he replied.
“Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?”
“For about 60 years now.”
“60 years!  That’s amazing!  What do you pray for?”
“I pray for peace between the Jews and the Muslims and the Christians.  I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.  I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man.  I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests.”
“How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?”
“Like I’m talking to a f**king wall.”  (Thanks Skipper BB)