Who’s Driving The Foreclosure Rescue Plan?
When you look at how the congressional efforts to help homeowners avoid foreclosure have evolved, you begin to wonder, “Who’s in control here?”
Whether you’re trying to pass a law to help stop foreclosure, or anything else for that matter, the unfortunate truth is that you have to do a fair amount of horse trading. What’s worse is some of the people whom you have to horse trade with.
Frank had agreed to remove the FOUR BILLION DOLLAR dole-out to municipalities to buy and fix foreclosed homes, in order to avoid a White House veto. He changed his mind when Maxine Waters threatened to withhold support for Fannie and Freddie support.
I wish he’d have called her bluff.
Fannie and Freddie have been operating at the behest of congressional leaders for some time, working on “expanding homeownership” and “ensuring the American Dream.” This feverish focus on working the margins of the credit risk scale has gone a long way towards creating the foreclosure crisis we’re now in. The odds that Ms. Waters would pull the rug out from under these two agencies who have served her purposes for so long, would have been unlikely.
I don’t know much about Ms. Waters, but the few times I’ve seen her speak, my reaction has always been the same, “Is she CRAZY? Or is she that ignorant?”
She was recently threatening U.S. oil executives that she would nationalize the oil industry. Anyone who’s spent more than a minute investigating high oil prices realizes that high energy prices do not stem from American oil companies. In fact, our own government is to blame, to a very large degree. If you’re on a congressional panel interviewing industry experts, it would seem that you’d want to bone-up on the subject matter.
We’ve all been on a “team,” whether in school, on a project, or at work where we’ve silently screamed, “I wish she wasn’t on my team.” I have to believe that Mr. Frank was thinking the same thing.
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