Bailout Transparency, Climate Politics and Mortgage Foreclosures
Rep. Carolyn Maloney introduces a bill to make public details of the bank bailout.
Critics accuse President Obama of failing the world on climate change.
New York passes new anti-foreclosure rules for home mortgages.
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI podcast, here.
1. BUSINESS
Rep. Carolyn Maloney introduces a bill to make public details of the bank bailout.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Journalism Fellow Ryan Young on why transparency isn’t enough:
“The House is voting today on a bill to improve transparency in the TARP bailout program. TARP is, shall we say, rather opaque. 25 different agencies administer TARP funds. Each one uses different accounting standards. Keeping track of everything is almost impossible…Transparency is welcome symptomatic relief. But TARP itself is a disease. The only way to cure the disease of bailout programs is to abolish them. Transparency is a good start. But the goal should be to not have government bailing out politically favored companies in the first place.”
2. ENVIRONMENT
Critics accuse President Obama of failing the world on climate change.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Christopher C. Horner on how the 2010 elections will affect climate negotiations:
“If the Nov. 2, 2010, elections go better than Team Soros/Obama fear, that will embolden them in the talks less than one week later (November 8-19). A wipeout ensures the right result. Too busy saving my presidency to spend whatever capital remains to push the whole global-governance routine just now. This means every candidate for every federal office must be pressed to state whether this underlying issue of prophesied yet oddly nonexistent catastrophic man-made global warming on which they bob and weave if they’re not shrieking to the heavens about the horrors, is sufficient grounds for the sort of binding international framework to which we are supposed to agree only days later.”
3. CONSUMER
New York passes new anti-foreclosure rules for home mortgages.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Attorney Hans Bader on how ACORN helped destroy the housing market:
“Federal affordable-housing mandates were a major factor in the mortgage crisis, fueling the housing bubble and the subsequent collapse of the housing and financial markets, which helped bring down the economy. Even the liberal Village Voice has admitted that. Who drafted those awful mandates? ACORN, reports the Washington Examiner, in ‘How ACORN Destroyed the Housing Market.’”
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI podcast, here.