Robert Scheer: The Whistleblower They Ignored

from Truthdig:



The Whistleblower They Ignored
Posted on Apr 14, 2010

By Robert Scheer


There aren’t too many genuine heroes to come out of the banking disaster, but Armando Falcon is one of them. You have probably never heard of him, but his testimony Friday before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, available on the commission’s website, is must reading for anyone trying to figure out why U.S. taxpayers had to bail out companies to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Falcon was the chief regulator attempting to bring order to the houses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the first four years of this decade, and had he been listened to, a significant part of the housing crisis could have been mitigated. Instead his agency was denied serious regulatory power by Democrats in Congress including liberals such as Reps. Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, both of whom assumed he was undermining public support for more affordable housing.

He wasn’t, and instead was attempting to call attention to the reckless bundling of risky mortgages in which the government-chartered agencies acted like the other too-big-to-fail behemoths that together almost wrecked the entire economy. It was those on the lower end of the income scale who had put their life savings into risky mortgages that were most hurt when the bubble burst.

This is a guy whom Republican congressmen and the Wall Street Journal editorial writers have lionized, and for once they got it right. At least the part about Fannie and Freddie being out of control and their applauding Falcon’s past efforts to rein in the greed of their top executives. Where they go wrong is when they attribute the company’s misbehavior to the alleged liberal do-gooderism of the mostly Democratic Party hacks that ran the enterprises. The reality is that concern for affordable housing goals was simply a convenient mask for unfettered greed. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_whistleblower_they_ignored_20100414/