THE PASSWORD IS: COMMUNITY REINVESTMENT ACT. “Foreclosure crisis snarls Clinton, Sanders’ efforts to reach Nevada voters,” Reuters claims:
Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are flooding Nevada with volunteers ahead of this week’s key nominating contest but they face a problem – the addresses, phone numbers and other personal data they need to reach many voters are out of date.
Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one of the states worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with hundreds of thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and forced to move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice as hard as whites.
Well, it hit people of all races whom banks shouldn’t have given mortgages to in the first place, and their myriad defaults set-up a chain reaction that did indeed lead to the 2008 financial meltdown. But since Reuters wants to play the “name that party” game who initially lit the fuse? The would-be future “first gentleman,” aka William Jefferson Clinton:
Or as Howard Husock of City Journal presciently warned at the start of Bill’s last year in office:
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.
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Looking into the future gives further cause for concern: “The bulk of these loans,” notes a Federal Reserve economist, “have been made during a period in which we have not experienced an economic downturn.” The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America’s own success stories make you wonder how much CRA-related carnage will result when the economy cools.
And we all remember how that turned out in the fall of 2008. So if the foreclosure crisis is indeed snarling potential voters for Hillary, well, karma can really be a Hillary sometimes, can’t it?
Related: “This election is beginning to look a lot like 2008,” Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute writes in the New York Post. “But this time, it’s the leading Democrat who’s getting tripped up by it, not the leading Republican,” adding “The leading Republican is a guy who forces banks to their knees when his casinos go bankrupt. People like this.”
Read the whole thing.