Like this, for example. Obama in this video, addressing his work with ACORN litigation against the banks and relating to the Community Reinvestment Act and the failure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as they relate to the current real estate and financial crisis, states that, and I quote:
???Subprime lending started out as a good idea, helping Americans buy homes who previously could not afford to. Financial institutions created new financial instruments that could securitize these loans, slice them into finer and finer risk categories, and spread them out among investors and around the country, as well as around the world. In theory, this should have allowed mortgage lending to be less risky, and more diversified.???
??? The original idea was a good one, which was, lets see if we can distribute risk more broadly, and make it easier to provide loans to people who otherwise might not be able to get one.???
Listen for yourself. You cannot dispute the mans on words recorded live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314&feature=related
Obama in this second video is campaigning at a convention of Acorn and I believe two other ???Community Activist??? organizations. Ask if he will be their ally if he becomes President, Obama says, quote:
???Yes, but let me say that before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we are going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We???re going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.
See and hear it for yourself. Obama promised that Acorn and other groups like it will setting his agenda if elected:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJcVgJhNaU
See also: http://www.newsweek.com/id/164972
Stating that Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act wasn't what caused the meltdown, and noting that "economists on both sides of the political spectrum have suggested that the act has probably made the crisis less severe than it might otherwise have been."
See also:
http://boards.msn.com/MSNBCboards/thread.aspx?threadid=808692&boardsparam=Page%3d2
Below is a link to C-SPAN video clips of the Congressional hearings at roughly the time McCains attempt at S.190. to fix Fannie and Freddie. See for yourself who said what.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
See also
http://www.newsweek.com/id/164732 from this web site. (oops!) stating that Freddie Mac was spending tax payer money to target Republicans in 2005 who were trying to regulate Fannie and Freddies fraud. Democrats were not targeted, as the were all in the tank with Fannie and Freddie to kill the regulations. Hear that, the article admits that Republicans were trying to regulate Freddie and Fannie, and Democrats were trying to stop it from happening as a means to facilitate the Community Reinvestment Act.
ON SCIENCE
Sharon Begley
Do as I Say, Not as I Do
Hypocrisy requires high-level thinking. In our heart and gut, we're more moral, honest and fair.
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Finding examples of moral hypocrisy is just too easy, what with Eliot Spitzer (former New York governor, moralizing proponent of laws against sex tourism and prostitution; named in "escort service" sting in March) coming along just when memories of Mark Foley (ex-congressman; crusader against child exploitation; caught in 2006 sending sexually explicit messages to congressional pages) and Sen. Larry (family values; "wide stance") Craig were, mercifully, fading. But while the ubiquity of hypocrisy can sour you on human nature, there's a bright side: scientists have lots of examples to study as they look for ways to make hypocrisy a little less common than breathing.
Scientists have long bickered over whether hypocrisy is driven by emotion or by reason—that is, by our gut instinct to cast a halo over ourselves, or by efforts to rationalize and justify our own transgressions. In other moral judgments, brain imaging shows, regions involved in feeling, not thinking, rule. In "the train dilemma," for instance, people are asked whether they would throw a switch to send an out-of-control train off a track where it would kill 10 people and onto one where it would kill one. Most of us say we would. But would we heave a large man onto the track to derail the train and save the 10? Most of us say no: although the save-10-lose-one calculus is identical, the emotional component—heaving someone to his death rather than throwing an impersonal switch—is repugnant, and the brain's emotion regions scream "Don't!"
The role of emotion in moral judgments has upended the Enlightenment notion that our ethical sense is based on high-minded philosophy and cognition. That brings us to hypocrisy, which is almost ridiculously easy to bring out in people. In a new study that will not exactly restore your faith in human nature, psychologists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo of Northeastern University instructed 94 people to assign themselves and a stranger one of two tasks: an easy one, looking for hidden images in a photo, or a hard one, solving math and logic problems. The participants could make the assignments themselves, or have a computer do it randomly. Then everyone was asked, how fairly did you act?, from "extremely unfairly" (1) to "extremely fairly" (7). Next they watched someone else make the assignments, and judged that person's ethics. Selflessness was a virtual no-show: 87 out of 94 people opted for the easy task and gave the next guy the onerous one. Hypocrisy, however, showed up with bells on: every single person who made the selfish choice judged his own behavior more leniently—on average, 4.5 vs. 3.1—than that of someone else who grabbed the easy task for himself, the scientists will report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The gap might not have been on a par with delivering homophobic sermons while having a gay affair, but it suggests how that kind of hypocrisy is possible. For one thing, people's emotions might have gotten the better of them, just as emotions drive the runaway-train dilemma. When we judge our own transgressions less harshly than we judge the same transgressions in others, DeSteno said, it may be because "we have this automatic, gut-level instinct to preserve our self-image. In our heart, maybe we're just not as sensitive to our own transgressions." Adds Dan Batson of the University of Kansas, a pioneer in hypocrisy studies, "people have learned that it pays to seem moral, since it lets you avoid censure and guilt. But even better is appearing moral without having to pay the cost of actually being moral"—such as assigning yourself the tough job.
To test the role of cognition in hypocrisy, DeSteno had volunteers again assign themselves an easy task and a stranger an onerous one. But before judging the fairness of their actions, they had to memorize seven numbers. This ploy keeps the brain's thinking regions too tied up to think much about anything else, and it worked: hypocrisy vanished. People judged their own (selfish) behavior as harshly as they did others', strong evidence that moral hypocrisy requires a high-order cognitive process. When the thinking part of the brain is otherwise engaged, we're left with gut-level reactions, and we intuitively and equally condemn bad behavior by ourselves as well as others.
If our gut knows when we have erred and judges our transgressions harshly, moral hypocrisy might not be as inevitable as if it were the child of emotions and instincts, which are tougher to change than thinking. "Since it's a cognitive process, we have volitional control over it," argues DeSteno. That matters because of another nasty aspect of hypocrisy: we apply the same moral relativism when judging the actions of people like ourselves. When "people like us" torture, it's justified; when people unlike us do, it's an atrocity. When we make that judgment, the brain's cognitive regions are the hypocrites; emotional regions make honest judgments and see the heinous behavior for what it is. As with other forms of judgment, the way to change hearts and minds is to focus on the former: appeal to our better angels in the brain's emotion areas, and tell circuits that are going through cognitive contortions to excuse in ourselves what we condemn in others to just shut up.
© 2008
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