Topic category:  Other/General

In "Obama Democrats Caused and Prolonged the Financial Crisis" (October 6, 2008) (http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=gaynorm&date=081006), I explained:

"When a detective wants to find who committed a crime, that detective asks a simple question, 'Who benefited?'

"Polls show that the current financial crisis benefited Obama and most Congressional Democrats and it has been noticed that some Democrats tried to make ACORN a beneficiary of the rescue plan.

"So Obama ('the Senator from ACORN'), ACORN and plenty of Congressional Democrats are suspects to be investigated.

"It is fundamental that the economy depends on confidence.

"Which party has been undermining that confidence?

"The Democrat Party.

"Which presidential candidate has been undermining confidence in the economy?

"Obama.

"At bottom, what is the cause of the financial crisis?

"Many loans not being repaid on time.

"Why aren't they being repaid on time?

"Uncreditworthy borrowers obtained loans that they are unable to repay.

"Fact: many risky loans were made as a result of pressure from ACORN (the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) and their liberal Democrat Congressional allies and most people did not appreciate what was happening and what ultimately would happen as a result.

"National Journal's Stuart Taylor, Jr., in his latest article, "The Sound And Fury Behind The House's Failure,"lamented that "[m]any voters are uninformed about public affairs and deluded by populist simplicities."

"Democrats count on that to keep power in Congress and to capture the White House.

"The nineteenth paragraph of Taylor's article should be explained to those uninformed voters and deluded populists.

"Taylor put it this way: 'Among other things, leading Democrats have in recent years opposed -- while the Bush Treasury Department, the Fed, McCain and other Republicans supported -- tighter restraints on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Meanwhile, the two mortgage giants were catering to (disproportionately) Democratic demands for "affordable housing" while lavishing many millions on campaign contributions, a gigantic lobbying apparatus, and excessive executive compensation. The proposed restraints in a 2005 Senate bill that Democrats deep-sixed, for example, would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from recklessly pouring so many hundreds of billions of (implicitly) government-guaranteed dollars into risky investments, including subprime mortgages for borrowers without the means to carry them.'

"EXACTLY!

"As I previously explained in detail, catering and/or caving to ACORN eventually created the crisis.

"Bush and McCain were right, but Obama and his Congressional allies, particularly Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, blocked the necessary corrective action that Bush and McCain wanted to have taken.

"Taylor duly documented the abysmal (and dangerous) ignorance of many voters:

'Shenkman, in Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter, and the authors of several other recent books cite polls, social-science studies, and other evidence showing that, for example, only two in five Americans can identify the three branches of the federal government; fewer than half know who Karl Marx was, or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was part of; and only four in 10 people between the ages of 18 and 24 can find Iraq on a map.

'"I am convinced... that, over the past several decades, we have become less knowledgeable, more apathetic, more reliant on others to think for us, more susceptible to simple answers, and more easily exploited,' William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, concluded in a Chronicle of Higher Education review of seven books on voter ignorance.'

"That's why Obama is a viable presidential candidate!

"That's why many Democrats demagogue.

"Taylor: 'Small wonder that so many voters are fixated on the mistaken notion that the main beneficiaries of the bipartisan rescue plan would be Wall Street elites. In fact, the main beneficiaries would be the millions of ordinary Americans who will lose their jobs as we plunge into a deep recession -- or worse.'

"That's the result of demagoguery.

"There were better ways to deal with the problem, but the Democrats would not permit them and a rescue had to be undertaken for the sake of the national economy and the citizenry as a whole.

"Taylor: 'Congressional leaders understood.... But many of their members did not, or at least pretended not to understand to avoid casting unpopular votes.'

Pathetically, politics was played with the rescue plan. It had to be voted down first, before it could be modified and passed.

"The Democrats had the power to pass the original bill without a single Republican vote, but they did not want to do it.

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech before the original House bill evidenced her desire NOT to have that bill passed and then blame the Republicans and claim that McCain had been ineffectual in the crisis.

"Taylor: 'Pelosi's partisan rant -- "for eight years, this government has followed a right-wing ideology of anything goes, no supervision, no discipline, no regulation" -- was especially misleading in blaming Republicans alone for a financial crisis that Democrats did much to bring about'."

"The financial crisis was working well for Obama and the Democrats (because most voters were unaware and the mainstream media was not reporting that ACORN and the Democrats had brought about the crisis), so Pelosi let the crisis continue for a week without passing a plan!

"Voter ignorance is the biggest advantage for Obama and the Democrats. much bigger than voter fraud.

"But the truth can set us free and block an Obama presidency!"

The liberal media establishment led by The New York Times kept enough voters ignorant for Obama to win.

Now Obama's trying to rewrite history and force more uncollectible loans to his supporters and demonizing bankers in the process.

See also "Blame Obama’s ACORN for the Financial Crisis" (September 29, 2008) (http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=gaynorm&date=080929), "Beware Obama, 'The Senator from ACORN”'" (October 1, 2008) (http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=gaynorm&date=081001), "ACORN Should Be Obama’s Undoing" (October 2, 2008) (http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=gaynorm&date=081002) and "Michelle Malkin Was Right about ACORN, Of Course" (October 4, 2008) (http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=gaynorm&date=081004).

Steve Baldwin, a former California state legislator and president of Baldwin Research and Consulting:

"This week we saw Obama on all the news shows blaming banks for the credit crisis saying that 'you guys caused the problem' and calling them 'fat cats.'

"This is the height of hypocrisy. Let me remind everyone that banks only operate within the regulatory environment that politicians create for them. All throughout the 80's and 90's, leftist groups led by ACORN harassed banks with protests, boycotts and lawsuits, falsely claiming banks were 'discriminating' against minorities in terms of their lending practices.

"The allegations were bogus. Banks do discriminate, however, against people with shaky finances regardless of race. And they should. Banks are not a welfare program. They're a business. They make lending decisions based on hard numbers such as a person's credit rating. That really don't care what race a person is; if someone's credit history gives a bank reason to believe its loan will be paid back, they'll make the loan. However, this was all before Congress started to meddle in banks' lending decisions.

"Many of the 60's activists ended up getting involved with groups that harassed banks and filing lawsuits against them. Some of these suits were successful in that they often ended in settlements in which the banks agreed to make high risk loans to people who simply were not credit worthy. Eventually, this movement led to Congressional legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act, which applied even more pressure onto banks to make lending decisions based not on fiscal worthiness but on 'diversity.' And that was the beginning of the credit crisis.

"So let[']s be clear here. Banks have been forced to make high risk loans as a result of years of protests, legislation, boycotts, and the CRA act. And who was involved with all of this? Why, our very own anointed one. Barack Obama.

"You can see his name here in the actual docket from one ACORN suit against Citibank: http://www.mediacircus.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/FH-IL-0011-9000.pdf

"Or you can read more about this case here: http://www.mediacircus.com/2008/10/obama-sued-citibank-under-cra-to-force-it-to-make-bad-loans/

"Yet Obama has the audacity to blame banks for acting under regulations that the movement created by ACORN successfully pushed for?

"No[w] that's chutzpah.

"Obama's defenders have tried to play this down, saying that Obama was only one of a group of attorneys involved with the case and was not the lead attorney. That is true, but what they ignore is the fact that Obama was involved in many aspects of ACORN, from speaking at its training schools to encouraging leftist foundations to give it funding. Obama deeply believes in ACORN's anti-corporate, anti-free market philosophy, including the belief that banks engaged in racism even though no one has even proved this reckless allegation.

"It['s] time to face the truth folks: Obama was part of the 'social justice' movement which created the incredibly stupid regulatory climate that caused banks to make loans they otherwise would never have made."

Baldwin's right!

Obama's trying to rewrite history for political purposes.

History teaches that such revisionist history is dangerous and must not be tolerated.

The conventional wisdom is that a Hitler analogy should not be made.

But Hitler was not the first or the last person to gain power via the Big Lie.

Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I.

It was a Big Lie, but it proved to be palatable to enough people to put Hitler in power instead of in prison or a mental asylum.

ACORN man Obama is scapegoating bankers like Hitler scapegoated Jews.

The bankers are not either as innocent or as endangered as the Jews Hitler targeted, but those bankers are being scapegoated while the role of ACORN and its allies in the financial crisis that, ironically, put their man Obama in the White House, has been targeted for being whitewashed out of history.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.