RUSH: Mrs. Clinton this morning on the Today Show today, Matt Lauer. ‘So who would qualify to have their mortgage purchased?’
HILLARY: If you look at what the, uh, model is back from the Great Depression, the Treasury ended up making a profit for the country. That’s why I’ve been proposing this model for months now, because I think we’re going to have do it. Uh, there is no doubt in my mind that we have to stabilize the markets. There’s a consensus about that in Washington.
RUSH: This is a woman who couldn’t stabilize her campaign, folks. This is a woman who is still in debt, who was running up bills and spending money that she didn’t have, and it was all given to her. She spent so much, she had to loan herself money from what she and Bill have earned — made, whatever — in their retirement from the White House. But that wasn’t all. The next one is good. This is CNN’s American Morning. John Roberts says to Mrs. Clinton, ‘Now, if you go back to 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that a lot of people said started this whole ball rolling, in the House, 138 Democrats voted for that. One Democrat voted for it in the Senate. Your husband signed it. Are Democrats scot-free here on this housing business?’
HILLARY: The great bulk of the responsibility rests, uh, with this administration and with the ideology that the Republicans have been promoting since they took over the Congress in 1995. You know, they never met a regulation that they thought was worth implementing.
ROBERTS: Many Democrats voted to take those rules away. Your husband could have vetoed the bill, even though it might have been overridden. He could have done it symbolically. Instead he chose to sign it.
HILLARY: But there were reasons, there were positive reasons. What I believe the failure in ’99 was, is that once you removed some of those barriers between banks and investment banks and the kind of business that could be done by banks, that there needed to be a new regulatory framework. But there was no appetite in the Republican Congress or with a Republican president to take the second step.
RUSH: Flat-out lie. This is what it’s to just flat-out lie. I blew this out of the water yesterday. The Republicans… I had this from Gateway Pundit yesterday. I didn’t get around to it. Twelve different times this administration has tried to do something about what everybody knew was coming with Fannie and Freddie and the Democrats — including Mrs. Clinton — stood in the way. Her husband is at the front end of this, along with Jimmy Carter, and they’re trying to slough this off on Bush and supply-side economics. They’re lying through their teeth. They are the culprits here. They’re the ones that need to be testifying. They’re the ones that need to be answering questions today, not asking them.
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RUSH: We’re going to play this sound bite again. I’m not going to get to it right now. I’m going to go back to it. When Mrs. Clinton said that what her husband had nothing to do with this business, on the mortgage business, and declaring that actively. There was an interview Friday. Robert Rubin said that the law that Democrats are now dumping all over, it’s a Phil Gramm law with Jim Leach and Thomas Bliley. I forget the name. It was bank deregulation law, 1999, which allowed investment banks and standards banks to combine operations and so forth. Bob Rubin said it is not true. That had no impact on this at all. Obama is out echoing what Hillary is saying. Obama is dumping on Gramm because Gramm was an economic advisor to McCain, and they’re dumping on this piece of legislation.
This is it, and this is my point about there aren’t any congressional hearings because they can’t find a Republican to dump on. The closest they can get is Phil Gramm and this banking deregulation law 1999. It’s as close as they can get. But the problem is Obama’s campaign is being sabotaged by everybody. It’s being sabotaged by Biden, now being sabotaged — and of course Obama is sabotaging himself just by showing up places — and now being sabotaged by Bob Rubin, who said, ‘Look, that bill that Phil Gramm was part of had no impact, zero, quote, unquote, on the current crisis.’ It was just last week that Obama was down here in Miami, University of Miami Coral Gables, and had Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the Clinton administration standing next to him as well as Bob Rubin.
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RUSH: I want to revisit this Hillary Clinton bite from this morning on CNN. John Roberts is talking to her about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Now, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 1999, this is what the Democrats, Lanny Davis, the Wall Street Journal, they’re trying to find a Republican to pin this on, they’re trying to find anything. It’s like I tell you, there would have been hearings blaming Republicans for this financial crisis starting two weeks ago if there were any Republicans the Democrats could have found. This is as close as they can get to it but we’re going to nuke this out of the water, a little Iranian lingo there. We’re going to nuke ’em on this. This is all they’ve got pointing at Phil Gramm because he was a McCain advisor. So John Roberts says to Mrs. Clinton, ‘If you go back to 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that a lot of people said started this whole ball rolling, the House, 138 Democrats voted for it, one Democrat voted for it in the Senate. Your husband signed it. Are Democrats scot-free here with all this?’
HILLARY: The great bulk of the responsibility rests with this administration and with the ideology that the Republicans have been promoting since they took over the Congress in 1995. You know, they never met a regulation that they thought was worth implementing.
ROBERTS: Many Democrats voted to take those rules away. Your husband could have vetoed the bill even though it might have been overridden, he could have done it symbolically, instead he chose to sign it.
HILLARY: But there were reasons. There were positive reasons. What I believe the failure in ’99 was is that once you remove some of those barriers between banks and investment banks and the kind of business that could be done by banks, that there needed to be a new regulatory framework, but there was no appetite in the Republican Congress or with a Republican president to take the second step.
RUSH: All right, now, two things on this, because Mrs. Clinton, like all the Democrats, is trying to make something out of nothing here. There is nothing here and as a result she is lying through her teeth again. The New York Times, November 13th, 1999, had a story: ‘Clinton signs legislation overhauling banking laws,’ and there is a picture of Clinton with the biggest grin on his face surrounded by senators that supported this thing. Clinton’s financial services modernization act is what they referred to this. ‘President Clinton signed into law a sweeping overhaul of Depression era banking laws. ‘This legislation is truly historic. We have done right by the American people.” So Clinton was all excited about this, New York Times, November 13th, 1999. Now, there is another story, and you may have seen this. This is the Chicago Sun-Times, the headline of the story: ‘Uncharacteristically Low Turnout for Obama Rally in Green Bay. McCain-Palin drew 4,000 more supporters at the same venue a week ago. … The numbers in Wisconsin and Minnesota are getting close enough that the Obama campaign closed its 11 campaign offices in North Dakota and moved the 50 staffers there to these two states.’
His 50-state strategery is out the window and he’s already blown a lot of money in some of these states that are no longer competitive for him. But if you dig further here, Obama said this at his Green Bay rally: ”When it comes to regulatory reform, Sen. McCain has fought time and time again against the commonsense rules of the road that could’ve prevented this crisis. His economic plan was written by Phil Gramm, the architect in the US Senate of the deregulatory steps that helped cause this mess.’ The audience booed Gramm’s name, as they did McCain’s and Palin’s.’ However, Robert Rubin in the Washington Post directly undercut it because Rubin basically said that this bill had zero effect. The bill that Hillary said Republicans are responsible for, the bill that Bill Clinton signed, that everybody is so happy about that Clinton thought it was the great getting rid of Depression-era laws, Obama was undercut by Rubin, who said that the effect of the 1999 law that Phil Gramm authored that Bill Clinton signed had nothing to do with the present crisis. Now, why? Why would Rubin say it? Rubin is going to circle the wagons and protect Clinton.
Now, this is a fascinating thing to consider. You’ve got a Democrat running for president, Barack Obama. Obama is out trashing the only Republican they can find to come anywhere close to this financial mess, and that’s Phil Gramm back in 1999, nine years ago. What’s happening is that Clinton and Jimmy Carter, the Democrats in Congress, are getting all the heat on this, not yet in the Drive-Bys, but everywhere else, in every other media, they’re taking the hit on this. The Clinton people — Rubin, Gorelick, I don’t care who — circle the wagons around themselves and the Clinton administration. Robert Rubin had a choice: ‘Do I support the contention of the current Democrat presidential candidate, or do I save Bill Clinton’s legacy and mine? I was Treasury secretary.’ And Rubin threw Obama under the bus by saying Obama and his criticism of Phil Gramm had nothing to do, this bill had nothing to do with the current crisis. And don’t forget Rubin is now at or did, for a time, run Citibank. They benefited from that rule change as well. They became a juggernaut by virtue of this deregulation until, of course, they got their own stock price problems, and Rubin was brought in to fix those and hasn’t quite pulled off the magic again. Ahem, ahem.
Don’t worry, folks, I have a secure and safe way outta here. But I just find it fascinating, given the choice — and it really isn’t that big a choice because the Clinton people do not want Obama to win. It’s just that simple. If Obama wins, bye-bye Hillary and a rebirth of the Clinton Camelot. So it’s just fascinating to watch all this shake down. I mean you’ve got Biden throwing Obama under the bus. I wouldn’t be surprised if J. Wright’s next. We haven’t heard the last of him. He’s out preaching.
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RUSH: Here’s Boyd in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Boyd, thank you el mucho for waiting. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, and it’s a pleasure to talk with you, Rush. I wanted to make a point about the bailout of $700 billion, you know, they’re having hearings about right now to bail out, you know, the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac and of course insurance company AIG, and my point kind of dovetails into your first hour where you were kind of making a point about the common person having a mortgage and then end up losing it because they can’t afford it. Well, my point is the mortgage bailout is to give the — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more money to lend. Well, that, to me, seems like, okay, they have more money to lend, but why wouldn’t the government bail out the person, you know, the everyday person who has the mortgage problem, give them the money to pay their mortgages.
RUSH: Well, that’s what Barney Frank wants to do. He wants to protect people that are foreclosed on so they can stay in their houses. It’s called affordable housing, costs you nothing. I think you’re slightly misunderstanding what’s on the table here. What’s going on with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not trying to get them more money to lend, because they’re actually not lenders. What’s happened is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have bought and bought and bought worthless mortgages, mortgages from people who can’t pay them back. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are holding assets that are worthless. They have been worthless for a long time. They started playing accounting games in late 1999, in the early 2000s to move these assets forward so that they could show that the asset column of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was going great guns, because these are companies, ostensibly. They are not government agencies. That’s always been a joke. But they’re structured as companies, and they sell stock, they’re publicly traded. The CEO and his executive team wanted to pump up the asset values, they bought all these mortgages that end up being worthless, and right now what this so-called bailout is: to try to peg a market price for what these mortgages are.
By the way, it’s not just the mortgages. After they bought up the mortgages, they then used the so-called value to go out and buy other assets. There are so many things involved in this, the derivatives, the credit swaps. Folks, this is deep and it’s entangled, and what’s happened here is that all of these people involved in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae started buying up worthless mortgages, worthless pieces of paper that the Clinton administration demanded that the banks make loans on, started buying them up, falsifying asset value of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to pay themselves incredible salaries and bonuses, and they’ve piled worthless paper upon worthless paper upon worthless paper trying to put off well into the future the day it all comes due, and it has. In the process, you had Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and all these other places that were buying into this whole scam, too. They were buying and they were borrowing against what was worthless. Everybody was living on leveraged debt that you could not survive on. What this bailout is about, if you want to call it a bailout, what the bailout is about is trying to pump enough liquidity, cash into all of this, so that these assets that are worthless have some kind of value. But that’s tricky because right now the market value of them is zero.
So if you try to set some sort of a value, it’s going to be artificial. And then, let’s talk about the 700 billion or one trillion. Let’s say that they come up with the notion that these mortgages and the derivatives and all these things that are worthless right now, let’s say that they are allowed to sell them added 70 cents on the dollar, better than zero. And then, after that happens, the market sets in, what happens if the market says these things are only worth a dime? Well, then you’re not just talking 700 billion, you’re talking a lot more. So to counter that, some of the wizards of smart are saying, ‘Well, what if the market says they’re worth a buck and a half instead of 70 cents, the taxpayer is going to make out big,’ which is one of the most creative ways I’ve heard yet of people trying to sell. But Fannie Mae, they’re not getting more money to lend to you so that you can go out and buy a house. And don’t worry. There are a whole lot of people here, ’cause it’s an election here, trying to make sure that if you have a mortgage that you can’t repay and you’re still in your house, that you get to keep the house. It’s an election year.
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RUSH: By the way, folks, a mortgage can never be worth more than 100, which is par. I was using a figure of speech, if the mortgage worth a buck and a half. What happened, the way these things will be pegged to value is at an auction. They’ll auction these mortgages off. That will establish what the market value is, but nobody’s going to know what that is until that process actually starts.