March 6, 2009
It’s Time to B.Frank

Posted at 8:55 am, in: Barney Frank, Economic Crisis, Mortgage Melt-Down

When will Barney Frank (D-Mass.) learn to shut up and take his seat in the back of the room? For someone so intimately involved (no pun intended) in the current financial meltdown, you would think, like any dog that has just made a mess in the House, he would be hiding down the hall with his tail between his legs.

Instead, he’s out bullying “state and federal authorities to seek criminal and civil penalties on financial actors that helped cause the current crisis.” Note to B.Frank, why don’t you be frank with the American public and take the blame for the part you played in causing the current financial crisis, rather than blaming it all on “predatory lenders” and greed on Wall Street. What about greed on Capitol Hill?

“Rules don’t work if people have no fear of them,” B.Frank announced at a press conference, on Thursday. You would know, wouldn’t you B.Frank? Can we hold a hearing to discover plans to prosecute your irresponsible and possibly (at the very least, borderline) criminal behaviors? Does the phrase “conflict of interest” ring any bells?

B.Frank has been a major player in creating the conditions that allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get into the mess they allowed themselves get into, while blocking any attempts at reform. I guess all of those predictions about an impending crisis weren’t just fear mongering by the Republicans, after all, were they, Franky Boy?

I’m sure there are plenty of people who should be held responsible and criminally prosecuted in this mortgage meltdown. As someone who can honestly say she shares in none of the blame, I say let’s go after them all.

Let’s start with the predatory borrowers who lied on loan applications and bought houses they couldn’t afford. Next, we can go after the “predatory lenders.” Finally, let’s go after those predatory legislators that created a moral hazard with the implicit, eventually explicit, guarantee to back all of this bad debt that their “everyone-should-own-a-home-no-matter-how-deserving” legislation created.

Predatory borrowers were rewarded for their fraudulence with McMansions. Predatory lenders were rewarded with their bonuses. And, the predatory legislators were rewarded with your votes (bought and paid for by those same predatory lenders they now like to blame).

In a perfect world, the American public would be fully aware of how deep B.Frank had his pen dipped in this particular well of ink and he would be, at the very least, voted out of office. Unfortunately, he’s a Democrat from Massachusetts. If killing a woman isn’t a career ender there, I doubt helping to lay down the bedrock of the financial collapse of America would be enough.