Open Secrets

I was reading this article entitled Predatory Scapegoating and learned a few things I'm surprised I had not yet heard. Nine months ago, before Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign as governor of New York, he published this op-ed about the marked increase in predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders and how the Bush administration stopped the states from helping consumers:

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Bush and his friends really know how to break a government, but unfortunately it was our government. And unfortunately the MSM is too easily distracted by a SEX SCANDAL!

But here is another interesting fact from the Predatory Scapegoating article. George Herbert Walker IV is a second cousin to George W. Bush and is also a managing director at now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers. Obviously that family has a certain gift for finance.