GSEs: Government Sheltered Enterprises

If we had anything resembling a fair and independent media then the Dems wouldn't control Congress today. If instead of slavishly hyping failure on the part of the Bush administration to regulate the financial services industry the press simply presented the facts and allowed them to speak for themselves, Americans might have learned the truth about the role that Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Chris Dodd and company played in the recent housing market bust and related credit freeze. These Democrats did everything they could to keep the wraps on the corruption and accounting shenanigans at the GSEs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac), notwithstanding increasing pressure from the White House, Treasury and the Fed and even the GSE regulator (who is accountable to Congress) to reign in the massive bureaucracies.


This doesn't come as a shock to those of us who pay attention to these kinds of things. Many have seen this video of Maxine Waters, Barney Frank and others excoriating the inspector general of the agency overseeing the GSE's when he tried to raise the warning flag about problems at Freddie and Fannie in 2004. The money quote from Maxine: "Everything [with the GSE's] has worked just fine...what we need to do today is to focus on the regulator...so as not to impede [the agency's] affordable housing mission."


But shouldn't this have been Page One material? Doesn't a congresswoman's attempt to intimidate a government regulator warrrant serious attention? It took internet blogger sleuths to find this stuff and feed it to YouTube and talk radio because the media elites shunned it. A journalism industry worth more than spit would have not only brought this shameless shilling and intimidation by Democrat bigs to light but would have asked the obvious question: why?

Well, there apparently was one "mainstream" media outlet that made a run at the story. In September Fox News Special Report ran this segment exposing the GSE protection racket. (Why it took months for this to hit my inbox is beyond me.) It has been viewed an incredible $3.4 million times since it was posted by ProudtobeCanadian.ca, a conservative group of...proud Canadians (who knew?). Think things today might be different if the story had been pushed by CNN, The New York Times and the rest of the elite media?


That this is not a scandal of huge proportions is itself a scandal of huge proportions, and future historians will have plenty to chew on in analyzing why a free and independent press would engage in a cover-up that rivals the cover-up they were covering up.