Clinton Legacy NOT a “Tangled web,” but a Gordian Knot
As we hear President Elect Trump saying, “I don’t want to hurt the Clinton’s” – implying that his administration will have little or no interest in prosecuting the former Secretary of State for her mass perjuries before the House Oversight Committee and lies before the American Public; her part in the play-for-pay Clinton slush fund/Foundation; and 23 violations of the nation’s Secrets Act . . . with up to 2,100 counts involved – it’s hard not to marvel at the level of corruption this one semi-dynastic family exhibited on the stage of the American body politic.
Let us, however, like Alexander the Great when facing the challenge of the Gordian Knot (legend said that the person who could undo the taut and complex knot tied by Gordius would rule Asia), let’s us stick to basics. Alexander quickly slipped his sword from its scabbard and slashed the infamous philosopher’s challenge into thirty limp pieces of 140-year old rope.
Here is the one great crime that President Bill Clinton committed that no one recognizes. From the bottom of p.517 and top of p. 518 this short paragraph in WJC’s autobiography My Life, tells America everything we citizens need to know about progressivism (confidence in big ever-expanding government funded by ever-growing taxes to be the be-all and end-all of all potential problems forever, AMEN! However, since we the citizens are coming to realize that government is the agency with the stick, whip and gun and not the carrot, most of us worship at the church of “Government is NOT the solution, government is the problem” (Ronald Reagan). Here’s what Slick-Willy Clinton had to say in his book published in 2004:
“One of the most effective things we did was to reform the regulations governing financial institutions under the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA’77). The law required federally insured lenders to make an extra effort to give loans to low- and modest-income borrowers, but before 1993 it had never had much impact. After the changes we made, between 1993 and 2000 (sic: January 2001 = 8 years in office), banks would offer more than $800 billion in home mortgage, small-business, and community development loans to borrowers covered by the law, a staggering figure that amounted to well over 90 percent of all the loans made in the 23- (sic: 24-) year history of the Community Reinvestment Act.”
It’s truly a shocking thing that virtually no one in America understands what you just read. Bill Clinton is not just confessing about creating the Great Fiscal Meltdown of 2007 – present; oh no, he is actually bragging about it. He assumes that the reader of his autobiography will be too stupid to check out the full impact of the facts he’s given and will instead merely assume that Bill Clinton’s intentions were good and that’s all that matters. There’s probably a 100-page expose on progressivism that could help explain it all, but let’s keep things simple, let’s slash our way through the Gordian Knot.
These are the facts:
1) The American mortgage-loan industry was not broken in January, 1977, when progressive President Jimmy Carter assumed office with a great majority of progressive Democrats and a few progressive Republicans joining him. America had the highest private home ownership rate in the world by far (62-65%) depending upon the economy; and most telling of all the Suspect Loan Rate was a miniscule 0.24%. The progressives who had just seen a great success in using the Cloward-Piven strategy to more than double the nation’s welfare rolls between 1969 and 1973 and send the economy and the stock market into a monster tailspin using something they called the NWRO (National Welfare Rights Organization) to create a crisis that bankrupted New York City and almost bankrupted New York State and every big city and big-city state in the country.
2) They quickly realized that CRA’77 was a bit more challenging and set up Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s state as a test case with the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now (A.C.O.R.N.) under NWRO veteran Wade Rathke at the helm. Arkansas was chosen because Hillary Clinton was a well-known Saul Alinsky disciple who’d written her college thesis praising the self-described “neo-Marxist” and his radical work in the inner cities. Alinsky, author of 1946’s Reveille for Radicals and 1971’s Rules for Radicals had tried to turn his Chicago organization over to her before he died in 1971. Hillary was also the wife of an up-and-coming young attractive Arkansas Lieutenant Governor William Jefferson Clinton. With A.C.O.R.N.’s help he would become governor of Arkansas and stay in that role for 12 of the 14 years following the elections of 1978.
3) By 1987 with A.C.O.R.N. only active in one state, Arkansas, the American Suspect Loan Rate had more than doubled to 0.51%. CRA’77 loans could be had for as little as 3% down! A.C.O.R.N. now changed its name to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and went active in all 50 states. The push to get totally unqualified loan applicants into expensive new homes was fully underway . . . .
4) Bill Clinton made three expansions of CRA’77 in the first four year term: by presidential executive order in 1993; and twice by passing legislation both times in 1995. By 1997, A.C.O.R.N.’s hard work (Community Organizer Barack Obama, by the way, was an A.C.O.R.N. attorney shaking down banks in Chicago) was starting to pay off . . . the nation’s Suspect Loan Rate now stood at 14.1% (almost one in every seven home loans was so unsound it was virtually guaranteed to go into foreclosure). CRA’77 loans were available to virtually any unqualified applicant who wanted one, who was able to fork over 2% as a down payment.
5) During the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Bill Clinton took time off to pass his fourth expansion of CRA’77. This steroid-version expansion of CRA’77 forced loan companies to grant home loans to people without jobs; people with the most horrific credit ratings; people whose only “income” was food stamps; felons; tourists; and even illegal immigrants to receive loans for $225,000 – $480,000 homes. And it seemed that everyone buying a home was seeing its appraised value jumping skyward. The Construction Industry Bubble and Sub-Prime Lending Bubble were dominating the news. All these loans were being offered at 3% and lower down payments and many were executed with 0% down payment.
6) Meanwhile in Texas, new Governor George W. Bush was passing a state law requiring a minimum down payment of 20%. Later when he became president he struggled for over five years to pass a law repealing all of CRA’77. Texas and Utah were the only states during the following dozen years that kept producing jobs and balanced budgets. Everyone else was in the red.
7) In mid-July 2005, G.W. Bush passed a too-little, too-late watered-down version of his effort to repeal CRA’77. Much of the law is still on the books today . . . but that’s all he could get done.
8) In 2007, the nation and the world (mortgage entities with perhaps 22,000 loans “bundled” together had been popular investments for some 29+ years now . . . after all, who doesn’t pay their mortgage?) this time, however, the investors were buying dog-crap paper wrapped in cat-crap paper. There was no value in any of them. Why? Because the nation’s Suspect Loan Rates had reached 34.2%. More than 1 in every three home loans was logically-doomed to end in foreclosure making virtually all the bonds worthless. Iceland went bankrupt; Italy, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Hungary were teetering on the brink. In America, $5 million was lost during the stock market drop; 39.6% of all home value was lost putting even most long-term owners “upside-down” on their mortgages. In a 2010 speech Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who served under both President G.W. Bush and President Obama credited Bush’s passage of an anti-CRA’77 Act back in 2005 as “saving the nation” from even worse consequences. Nevertheless 8.4 million jobs were lost and immense misery was endured around the globe.
So logically, for his part in Arkansas’s A.C.O.R.N. corruption; and in the nation’s A.C.O.R.N. collapse; and especially for his 1998 Steroid-Version Expansion of CRA’77: Bill Clinton deserves even more “credit” than the 90% he claims in his autobiography, a full 99.5% of the credit/blame for creating the 2007 Great Fiscal Meltdown of the world’s economies.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
