Left-wing architects of subprime mortgages yet to be called

Obama administration’s push to Sovietize the American banking system

The left-wing architects of the subprime mortgage collapse have yet to be called to account

By Matthew Vadum
Monday, April 26, 2010
Comments 30

Much has already been written about the possibly criminal conduct of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who relentlessly gamed the political system to clear the way for their friends at government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make billions at the expense of taxpayers, but very little has been written about the role that their liberal friends and allies in the private and nonprofit sectors played in bringing the U.S. economy to its knees.

Funded by huckster John Paulson and predatory lending kingpins Herb & Marion Sandler (who also gave generously to ACORN through the years), the inappropriately named Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) laid the foundation for the current financial crisis.

The media seems barely to have noticed that CRL’s puppet, Eric Stein, is now leading the Obama administration’s push to Sovietize the American banking system. Stein, who is now the U.S. Treasury’s deputy secretary for consumer protection, was previously a vice president at CRL.

This means that Stein, who helped create the subprime crisis by pushing people to borrow money they couldn’t afford to repay, is now in charge of cleaning up the mess he created.

Posted below with the permission of my employer, Capital Research Center, the following article by journalist Sean Higgins appears in the March 2010 issue of our monthly newsletter, Organization Trends. -MV

Summary: The Center for Responsible Lending presents itself as a tireless advocate of poor and downtrodden borrowers facing a credit industry of greedy banks, payday lenders and other financial predators. Yet a review of CRL’s advocacy paints a different picture of the organization. It is intimately tied to some of the worst actors in the lending business and its advocacy has too often hurt, not helped, the very people it claims to defend.

The California financiers Herbert and Marion Sandler must have had a rude shock when they saw themselves depicted in an October 2008 comedy routine on “Saturday Night Live,â€