Democrat Lawmaker Covers his Corruption, Plays the Race Card
Democrat Congressman Barney Frank, who heads the powerful House Financial Services Committee, and a “friend of Angelo,” has accused Republicans who cite the Community Reinvestment Act as a contributing factor in the nation’s current mortgage finance crisis of racial bias in their criticism. From AP:
The Massachusetts Democrat, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the GOP is appealing to its base by blaming the country’s mortgage foreclosure problem on efforts to expand affordable housing through the Community Reinvestment Act.
He said that blame is misplaced, because those loans are issued by regulated institutions, while far more foreclosures were triggered by high-cost loans made by unregulated entities.
“They get to take things out on poor people,” Frank said at a mortgage foreclosure symposium in Boston. “Let’s be honest: The fact that some of the poor people are black doesn’t hurt them either, from their standpoint. This is an effort, I believe, to appeal to a kind of anger in people.”
Frank also dismissed charges the Democrats failed on their own or blocked Republican efforts to rein in the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The federal government recently took control of both entities.
What was not mentioned, either by Frank or the AP political reporter, Glen Johnson, were Frank’s own favorable mortgage deal arranged at the behest of Angelo Mozilo, former head of the failed Countrywide mortgage giant, Frank’s receipt of substantial campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and its personnel, or Frank’s attempts to stifle efforts at GSE reform as far back as 1991, while his lover, Herb Moses, was a Fannie Mae executive who was “at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions” as the company’s assistant director of political initiatives… in other words, the company’s chief in-house lobbyist.
