The Republican Party is making the Sicilian Mafia and the Camorra Mafia of Naples’ “lending institutions” look like nice guys.

Let’s see McCain admits that the mortgage lenders were engaged in defrauding homeowners. McCain says that it is the victim’s fault that he or she was deceived by criminal activity. I guess that ordinary homeowners should obtain a high priced (Republican) attorney to decipher the opaque 50 page lending documents.

Then McCain says that it is good government policy to reward those criminal mortgage lenders with a bailout and not impose any regulations. No regulation means that the Republican Party’s brand of legalized loan sharking and Ponzi bond schemes can restart itself.

It looks like the Republican Party is actively rewarding organized criminal businesses. Is that because those mortgage lenders who engaged in defrauding homeowners are major campaign contributors?

The Republican Party is making the Sicilian Mafia and the Camorra Mafia of Naples’ “lending institutions” look like nice guys.
Jim Pitcherella


March 28, 2008
News Analysis
Parties Differ on Whom Economic Aid Should Help
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — When an election campaign coincides with both a crisis on Wall Street and soaring home foreclosures across the country, the traditional ideological battles over “more government” or “less government” become blurred.
Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic candidates for president, claim to have proposed a more activist role for government than either President Bush or the likely Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democratic rhetoric makes the contrast appear even sharper.
But while their philosophies might seem starkly different, in reality both parties have come to the conclusion that major government involvement is needed to rescue the financial and housing markets.
The ideological clashes are less about whether the government should intervene in the economy, and more about whom it should try to rescue.
“Democrats are more likely to propose protecting individuals, and Republicans are more likely to propose protecting markets,” said William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington that champions smaller government.
Despite differing approaches, Democrats and Republicans may end up in a similar place because it will be difficult to protect individuals without protecting the markets, and the markets will remain fragile if individuals suffer huge declines in their personal wealth.
For now, the parties seem to be worlds apart. This week, the two Democratic presidential contenders seized on the deepening economic crisis and proposed broad government rescue plans for homeowners that would each cost about $30 billion.
The Bush administration dismissed such ideas as bailouts and vowed to veto even modest Democratic bills to help homeowners. Mr. McCain asserted this week that “it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.”
In practice, the Democrats have not really had to confront the full fury and magnitude of the crisis. Measured in dollars, their biggest proposals are small compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has decided to lend to struggling institutions, and compared with the magnitude of losses in home values and defaulted mortgages.
Mr. McCain and the Bush administration, meanwhile, have staunchly supported one of the biggest government interventions in the last century: the Federal Reserve’s decision to lend as much as $400 billion at rock-bottom rates to banks and Wall Street firms.
The Fed’s rescue operation involves a sum many times more than Democrats proposed spending on homeowners, and it comes on top of a host of other injections of government money into the economy. First came the bipartisan economic stimulus package, which this year alone will provide about $152 billion in tax rebates and temporary tax cuts to help spur consumption.
Then came a series of moves to greatly expand the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage finance companies.
And this week, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board decided to lend an extra $100 billion to member banks for mortgage financing.
In a speech this week, Mrs. Clinton compared Mr. McCain’s approach to that of Herbert Hoover, and said, “I don’t think we can afford four more years of that kind of inaction.” Mr. Obama, laying down his own marker on Thursday, declared that “the free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get.”
But the two Democrats have also proposed a number of changes — such as the expanded role for Fannie and Freddie — that President Bush has recently adopted as well.
An area where the parties do seem to have sharp disagreements is regulation, particularly of investment banks.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail are pushing for tougher restrictions on deceptive or risky mortgage lending, stricter rules for credit-card issuers and new rules that would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the size of mortgages. Democrats have also called for tighter supervision of Wall Street firms.
Read the rest of the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/business/28regulate.html?th&emc=th