RUSH: So what got us here? Well, you can say ‘white guilt’ got us here, political correctness got us here, or a combination of all those things. Democrats’ desire to socialize the country got us here. Efforts to stop it failing — and we’re on the verge of even more of it, ladies and gentlemen. Stanley Kurtz has been researching Obama, and he has a great piece today. Let me just give you a couple excerpts. ‘What exactly does a ‘community organizer’ do?’ and one thing a community organizer does, if he’s Barack Obama, is pressure banks to make bad loans. Obama’s fingerprints are over this, too, because his group ACORN is all involved. The Community Reinvestment Act ‘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), and a group that is constantly engaged in illegal voter registration, among other things.
‘That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN … 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 [these community redevelopment things] — 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.’ Think of ACORN as a thousand Jesse Jacksons, in terms of shaking down companies and 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,’ and by the way, speaking of that, Obama did it again in the debate (which we’re going to get to). He said that our reputation in the world, I think everybody would agree, is not what it once was. He said it in Berlin’, he said it to a seven-year-old kid asking him why he wants to be president. Frankly, I am fed up with it. Because, folks, if you want to know our reputation around the world — to the extent that it is — is in disrepair, you might take a look at the fact that a bunch of foreign banks were lied to by US institutions who said these subprime loans were AAA paper. You can buy ’em up. Do you know we’re bailing out foreign banks that do business on the United States on this basis because they bought up some of these assets?
So all this talk about how our image in the world has been dinged or damaged, let me tell you: to the extent that that’s true, people in financial institutions around the world are saying, ‘What have you done to us? You’ve made us take on this worthless garbage paper. What have you done to us? What are you doing to your financial system?’ It ain’t about Iraq. It ain’t about the war on terror. So there is Obama running around talking about how we’ve lost our esteem. That aggravates me like you cannot believe. We’re going to analyze the debate as things shake out as the program unfolds before your very eyes. Of course Obama is as close to ACORN as anybody can be, closer to ACORN than anybody ever seeking the presidency. And ACORN went out and put their own pressure on these banks and lending institutions, political correctness pressure — take it, you know, whatever it is — to spread this misery far and wide under the terms and definitions of things like affordable housing.
I think there’s something more devious than that going on. We know several things institutionally. We know that the left wants as large a government as possible. We also know the left wants as many citizens in this country depending on government, not just for their needs but for their wants as well, but particularly their needs. We also know that owning a home in this country has been one of the most desirable things people have had. Many people, most people work themselves to the bone to be able to save up for a down payment, to be able to qualify — and all of a sudden, the Democrats and the Clinton administration came along and said, ‘Why make it so hard on people? It’s unfair. Let’s just get ’em into homes. Let’s threaten the lending institutions to loan ’em money they can’t pay back. As long as home prices keep going up, this is not going to be a problem. It will be fine.’ Well, everything goes up goes down eventually. It’s galled gravity. It’s called supply and demand. It’s called economic cycles, and we’re where we are. So now the bailout is about making sure that all these people whose votes have been bought stay bought.