Rice County Republicans

An interesting video was brought to our attention. Watch it (link below). Today is the day to take action by calling your Congresspeople and Senators, perhaps this video will give you the heart to keep dialing till you get through.

First, some background. From one affordable housing proponent site:

What’s most tragic is that the lending industry has been sued previously for similar practices. We in the fair housing community thought that we had effectively addressed this issue in the 1980s when we sued lenders for redlining practices then. Now, government sponsored entities are engaging in the same unfair practices by making credit harder to access in poor and minority communities.
(Talking Points, NOT a friendly website, but we sometimes need to read what others think like, this site is calling for people to call their reps to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to revert to the old “anything goes” style of loans.)
[emphasis added, who do you think was "the enemy" when they brought those lawsuits?]

At the time even I, a fiscal conservative, applauded efforts to make house ownership a more universal feature of our society.  “Give them homes and they will rise to the challenge and become more invested in a working economy and a responsible lifestyle”, I foolishly thought.  But I had made the classic and naive mistake that many soft-hearted individuals make, which is to assume that people are basically all the same and if given a chance will rise to the challenge. Wrong again, Gunga Din.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bought into this as well, and were forced through lawsuits to make loans that did not correctly account for market values.  In a giant greater fool variation on the Ponzi scheme, everyone was allowed to buy houses on the assumption that “housing values have no where to go but up, they aren’t making any more land!” In this video compilation from CSPAN2 we see the last ditch efforts (2004) of Republicans to stanch the bleeding, and we see them being blocked by the very names we are now hearing as the names of our to-be-worshipped saviors.

In the words of a local folk hero … “Get Yer Guns, Boys! They’re Robbin’ the Bank!“