RUSH: Here’s Bill in Arroyo Grande, California. Great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Greetings from a conservative in California. There are a few of us out here.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It’s not many but you’re at least proud to admit it.
CALLER: Yeah, I’m calling regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’ve been watching the slanted coverage on television, and paying particular attention to the signs that they have. It seems they’re blaming the financial institutions, Wall Street, the banks for the financial meltdown.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: But I feel that the real blame lies with “we, the people.” Wall Street simply supplied the gun in the way of easy credit, subprime loans, loans easy to qualify. But it was “we, the people” that took their gun and shot ourselves in the foot.
RUSH: Well, I understand theoretically what you mean, and that is we get what we want in a democracy and we get what we pay for, and all of that. In this case, let me ask you a question.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: In this case the whole subprime mortgage thing can and has been without doubt traced to government policy, which was rooted in the theory that the financial institutions were discriminating against minorities by not giving them loans. So Bill Clinton came along with Janet Reno, and the short version of the story is they threatened the lending institutions. We did a two-page spread on this in the Limbaugh Letter and explained how all of this happened with Janet Reno and Barney Frank and Clinton threatening these financial institutions that if they didn’t make these loans, that the federal government was gonna bring everything it had to bear on this business — fining them, CEOs running the company and so forth and so on.
So the lending institutions created these loans that nobody could ever pay back, and then they invented the financial products that they sold to other dupes, hoping to make the worthless loans that they had been forced to make worth something to themselves. Now, my question to you. Your theory is that this all happened because we wanted it, society wanted homes. So are you saying…? And I’m not challenging you. Don’t misunderstand my tone in my voice. Are you saying that Clinton and the government only instituted this program because a number of citizens wanted to buy homes that couldn’t?
CALLER: Well, it was like when the banks first offered credit cards. I think they knew that the people would run up huge balances and have to pay high interest rates, and a certain amount of people wanted nicer houses. They offered them the subprime loans, which allowed ’em to purchase these houses, and now they’re underwater.
RUSH: Well, but not all the homes underwater are subprime.
CALLER: No, no.
RUSH: Subprime is basically a mortgage that should never have existed because the person who was lent the money was never, ever going to be able to pay it back. But that didn’t matter to Bill Clinton or Janet Reno.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: What mattered was this whole notion of home ownership and spreading that around, being seen as responsible for making it possible for all these poor people to own homes and then thus always vote for Bill Clinton and Democrats. Which was the theory. So I understand the theoretical thing that you’re saying here, like, “We like to blame the banks, but they were only giving us what we want. You might want to get on the banks for these interest rates. Just unconscionable. But we’re the ones who wanted the money. We’re the ones who wanted to be able to borrow. We’re the ones that wanted to be able to charge stuff.” I think it’s admirable to want to take on blame, but at some point here, even just because we want it doesn’t mean we have to have it given — and this was a debacle orchestrated by politicians.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let us not forget, Barack Obama, back in the old days, sued Citibank for redlining. It was one of his two lawsuits as a lawyer. Obama, back in Chicago, sued Citibank for redlining. Now, Barack Obama as president has said that the banks snookered people into these mortgages. And our previous caller, “Hey, this only happened ’cause we wanted it. Government, the banks, I mean they really can’t be held accountable. We wanted it, they gave it to us.” It would be interesting to know, was there an association of poor people who made it be known to the Democrat Party, “It’s unfair we can’t have houses. We want houses.” Jesse Jackson running around. Where did this start? How did this all get started?
Well, it was ACORN’s primary function, but these shakedowns are a classic of the Reverend Jackson. And this was a shakedown of the banking industry, is what this was. The subprime mortgage thing was a shakedown. ACORN and others upset, it’s not fair poor people couldn’t have houses, too. Barney Frank, (imitating Frank) “What we need more of in this country is affordable housing. It’s just not right, so we will set it up so if you cannot afford a house, you still live in one,” and they did it. And they went to the banks, “You’re gonna make loans to these people and if you don’t, we’re gonna put you in jail, or we’re gonna investigate you, we’re gonna do something, we’re gonna make your life hell.” And it’s exactly what happened.
If Wall Street had had their way, there wouldn’t have been a subprime mortgage collapse in the first place because they wouldn’t have made these loans. If pure capitalism had actually been at work here, been allowed to run its course, the banks would not have been making loans that they didn’t want to make, but that wasn’t a factor. You got Clinton, Reno, Cuomo — don’t forget, Andrew Cuomo as Clinton’s HUD secretary was big on this Community Redevelopment Act, which was a subprime mortgage instigator. Franklin Raines over at Fannie Mae and Chris Dodd, I mean this den of thieves. They’re the ones that got this all started.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we’re still bailing them out. There’s a story today about the executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the huge bonuses that they are being paid this year. Execs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are earning huge bonuses. Somebody needs to tell Occupy Wall Street about this. But nobody will, and they won’t protest Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because they are asking government to do something. ACORN, you’re right, Snerdley, ACORN was the organization that got all of this started, it was about putting people into houses. Cuomo doubled the number of houses that were made available under the Community Redevelopment Act. It was a huge, huge scam and nowhere did anybody ever ask who was really gonna end up paying for this.
I’ve said it over and over, okay, so the banks were the first ones to have to make the money available. They had to figure out a way to earn it back so they figured out creative ways to package or pool these subprime mortgages. Yes, they pooled them into — I forget what they called them, momentary mental block. I forget the name of it, but they pooled these mortgages and they sold them as securities to people as an investment. They said, “Oh, yeah, you’ll be able to live on the income stream from people repaying the mortgages.” Well, those buyers found out they’d been had so they came up with a product, trumped up, phony product to sell to the next group of idiots on a phony scam. And finally it all caved in on itself like Madoff did when there were no dupes left to sell this stuff to, and that’s when it collapsed, essentially.
It’s a scam from the get-go just like Madoff was a scam.