Can someone provide me concise talking points to refute the freeper claim

[Misskittycat]

that "it's all Barney Frank's fault" (i.e., the economy, failure to regulate Fannie and Freddie,etc.)

Thanks.

[last1standing]

1. I don't do talking points, only reality, but that's a language freepers can't understand.

n/t

[NNN0LHI]

2. They have to prove it before you need to refute anything

And they can't prove it because it is a lie.

Don

[Misskittycat]

5. With respect, folks, the lie seems to be holding, so a refutation is, unfortunately, necessary.

I've been slowly turning a former freeper neighbor by refuting what he hears on Faux News. He's coming around well, and responds to truth-telling. He was registered Republican until this year when I noticed (as precinct captain, with access to voter lists) that he changed to "Decline to State."

[NNN0LHI]

15. In that case there is nothing you can do because you can't prove a negative

Give up on this Fox news believing dildo and look for someone who is capable of rational thinking.

Don

[Misskittycat]

21. But he does, in fact, think, and is able to discard the Fox talking points when told the truth.n/t

[trotsky]

3. Very useful links in this thread.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=4210849

[dmosh42]

4. Real cpitalist and free traders don't want government interference! n/t

[jayfish]

6. Twelve Years Of Rule In Congress And

eight, six overlapping, in the White House. That should cover it with A.B.C.

Jay

[Amy6627]

7. I found this at FactCheck.org

I beleive this is a conservative website, not completely sure though, it is from Annenburg. I didn't include the begining, but you can read it at the website.-- Amy

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

.....But saying that Democrats killed the 2005 bill "while Mr. Obama was notably silent" oversimplifies things considerably. The bill made it out of committee in the Senate but was never brought up for consideration. At that time, Republicans had a majority in the Senate and controlled the agenda. Democrats never got the chance to vote against it or to mount a filibuster to block it.

By the time McCain signed on to the legislation, it was too late to prevent the crisis anyway. McCain added his name on May 25, 2006, when the housing bubble had already nearly peaked. Standard & Poor's Case-Schiller Home Price Index, which measures residential housing prices in 20 metropolitan regions and then constructs a composite index for the entire United States, shows that housing prices began falling in July 2006, barely two months later.


The Real Deal


So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.


Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.


Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.


Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.


The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.


Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.


Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.


Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.


The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.


An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.


Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

[Why Syzygy]

12. It was a modern day Gold Rush ..

with the greed of the prospectors making the market dive. They got theirs.

[EFerrari]

8. Barney Frank controlled the Republican Congress AND Bush?

Wow! He must be very powerful. :)

[garlicmilkshake]

14. He fired up his gay ray and they all bent over bac....

oh, wait...
:silly:

[EFerrari]

17. LOL! If he could do that, they'd be RECRUITING him, not slandering him.

:)

[jflood1016]

9. Look at the McCain letter about Freddie and Fannie

There are two important things to note. First and most important is to see who the letter was written to:
The Honorable William H. Frist, MD
Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Richard C. Shelby
Chairman, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

This is important because the letter was written to the leaders of the Republican run senate. The letter was dated May 5, 2006 which was a full 6 months prior to the Democratic taken of the House and Senate.

What this means is that yes John McCain did sign this letter. But his Republican leadership refused to do anything about the crisis. Additionally, this letter was a letter from Senate Republicans to the Senate Republican leadership. Not an open letter from all Senators.

[CTyankee]

10. I asked the same question today and got LOTS of information.

Here's the thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=7395636&mesg_id=7395636

good luck.

[Rage for Order]

11. You should read this

From 2003:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

I tend to like Barney Frank, but he seriously F'd this one up. That quote can be found at the bottom of page 2 of the linked article.

Here's a Wall Street Journal editorial about Barney Frank:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB122091796187012529.html

And here's Barney Frank's reply to the editorial:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122162063022546651.html

And here's the WSJ response to Barney Frank's response:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122161010874845645.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Read both sides and decide for yourself. However, I notice that in Barney Frank's rebuttal to the initial WSJ editorial, he makes no mention of the reform proposal that he helped kill in 2003. He starts his timeline in 2005.

[blm]

16. Kerry put credit and mortgage crisis issue into the Dem platform in 2004.

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM; Kerry Sees Credit Card Abuses, And Promises Steps to End Them


By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: August 27, 2004

Senator John Kerry added a plank to his platform yesterday, promising to push for legislation that would curb what his campaign describes as abusive practices in credit card and mortgage lending.

The proposals coincided with the announcement of new Census Bureau data showing that family and household income, adjusted for inflation, had fallen over the first three years of the Bush administration. The decline came as consumer debt rose, and the new plank promised relief for wage earners in straitened circumstances.

''Abusive lending practices can take a huge bite out of the incomes of families who are working and can barely pay their credit card bills,'' Robert Gordon, Mr. Kerry's director of domestic policy, said.

Companies that issue credit cards, mainly banks, often double the interest rates if a cardholder is late with a monthly payment or the holder's creditworthiness is challenged. Mr. Kerry would require notice before each rate increase and limit the increase to a few percentage points.

''There is no proportionality now in these increases,'' Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to Mr. Kerry, said. ''They can go from 8 to 28 percent.''

A Kerry administration ''would ask Congress to legislate standards and to direct the Federal Trade Commission and bank regulators to impose regulations consistent with those standards,'' Mr. Sperling said. Much of this would be achieved through amendments to the Truth in Lending Act, he and Mr. Gordon said.

Credit card lenders would also be required to disclose, in prominent type on bills, how long it would take to pay off a debt, and the cost in interest if the card holder made only minimum monthly payments.

A California law imposed this standard, but credit card issuers challenged it in court in 2002, and the Bush administration's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency sided with the issuers. The comptroller argued that only federal regulators could impose such a restriction on nationally chartered banks and that his office did not plan to do so. The state lost the case.

Mr. Gordon said that some minimum payments were so low that they barely kept up with interest costs or fell behind them, in which case the balance could never be repaid.

Other changes proposed by the Kerry campaign would require lenders to forgo penalty charges when they allowed card holders to go beyond their borrowing caps. A cardholder with a $5,000 credit limit, for example, can face a penalty for reaching $5,200 even if the card company approved the charge that put the total over $5,000.

Mr. Kerry's principal mortgage proposal would prohibit lenders from using balloon mortgages in most subprime loans, which often go to low-income people at higher rates.

[JDPriestly]

13. The call to improve lending statistics on low and middle class

borrowers was not a call for fraud.

What lead to the current crisis was tax policy that put too much money into the pockets of the rich. The conservative economic theory was that if you just let the rich keep as large a portion of what they can "earn' as possible, they will invest it wisely to try to make even more money and that as a result of their increased investments the economy, including jobs, wages, standards of living, the ability to pay mortgages etc. will grow proportionately.

Mind you, conservatives in both parties bought into this theory. Barney Frank was not one of those conservatives.

Of course, the theory has proved wrong.

The current crisis is the result of the fact that wages did not keep up with housing prices. Why did wages not rise when investment capital has been so plentiful? Because of the outsourcing of jobs into low-wage economies. The downward pressure on wages for ordinary jobs has been strong for a long time. Americans did not notice the pinch because prices of manufactured goods also stayed relatively steady thanks to the outsourcing of manufacturing to low-wage economies.

But the increase in capital looking for places to make money didn't just result in outsourcing. It also caused real estate prices in the U.S. to skyrocket as the rich sought to balance their investment portfolios by purchasing real property and investing in the construction of new homes. The goal in making these investments was not long-term stability but turning a profit. So, on the one hand we had a huge construction boom (aided by legislation supported by both sides of the aisle at federal and state levels. Construction is loved by Democrats because of the good jobs and by Republicans because of huge profits.)

Unfortunately, as we now see, wages did not rise in proportion to the cost of housing. The housing market has been way overpriced compared to wages. If housing was priced in proportion to wages, low-income people would be able to qualify for housing and pay their mortgages because the cost of paying rent and the cost of paying a mortgage payment would not be so very different. It was on the assumption that wages and housing prices would rise more or less proportionately that Democrats pushed for fair treatment of all kinds of people in the mortgage market.

Before housing prices began to rise, there was some difference between the rent on house and the monthly payment on a mortgage, but after the housing price inflation, the difference between rent and the real (as opposed to sub-prime mortgage) monthly payment on a house was not all that great. If you bought a house in L.A. in 1988 for $100,000 (there weren't very many at that price) and sold it at the top of the market, you might have made 3 to 4 maybe more times your investment, even more. Compare that price rise to the increase in wages in that time.

So, you see, it is not the program to end discrimination in mortgage lending or even to help low-income people buy their own homes that is at fault. It is the Bush tax policy as well as the trade policies that put too much loose investment cash into the pockets of the rich and too little into the pockets of working people.

The beauty of capitalism is that it is creative. Individuals can do their thing without excessive regulation. The horror of capitalism is that, like a wild animal, it can turn with fury on those who think they are its masters. So, capitalism is great -- as long as you hold it on a strong leash and carry a big whip.

The rich took too big a portion of the pie. Their greed is turning on us all.

Everyone gets blame for our unrealistic trade policy. But most of the blame has to go to the Republican tax policy that allowed the housing and stock markets to get top-heavy by putting too much capital into them.

[VP505]

18. Go to FactCheck.com

they have plenty of information there.

[gravity]

19. It's all Bush's fault nt

[JDPriestly]

20. My husband says it in talking points:

Under the Republicans, enormous tax breaks were given to the rich and very small ones given to the middle and working classes.

The rich used the money for investments to maximize profits. How were profits maximized? By laying off American employees earning living wages and giving their jobs to Chinese Communist slaves.

The mortgage crisis has little to do with anything promoted by Barney Frank, but rather with practices in the mortgage lending industry that wanted to show growth through indiscriminately selling mortgages to put on their books and to create an illusion of profitability.

When a business represents that it is making bigger profits than it really is in order to attract investments, that's fraud.

Democrats wanted fairness in the mortgage business, not fraud.

The other Republican policy at fault was the assumption that if somebody is rich, he can do no wrong. Under this mantle, it was considered entirely OK for CEOs to give themselves ever greater bonuses while running their companies into the ground in spite of the fact that they farmed out American jobs to the Chinese and other low-wage nationals.