G.O.P.:LOSE YOUR HOME …..LOSE YOUR VOTE

[Anonymous]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/gop-lose-your-home-lose-y_b_128876.html
G.O.P.: Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote
Senator
John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which
triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In
Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of theP’s misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they
encouraged.

James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican Party of
Macomb County outside Detroit, said, “We will have a list of foreclosed
homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,”
the Michigan Messenger.com reported September 10. Barack Obama’s
campaign
and the Democratic Party quickly filed a lawsuit in federal court on
behalf of three Michigan residents who lost their houses to
foreclosure, to stop the Michigan GOP from carrying out what Democrats
called an “ugly” and “horrific” plan. Michigan is a key swing state
where a few thousands votes could determine who wins its seventeen
Electoral College votes.

McCain, who owns ten houses, has long
been a lackey of the banking industry and a strong supporter of the
industry’s efforts to weaken government safeguards against
irresponsible lending. Since 1989, the financial services, insurance
and real estate industries have contributed $23.8 million to McCain’s
campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This sector
far outspent any other industry in making donations to the Arizona
senator. Topping the list of McCain donors are Merrill Lynch
($366,035), Citigroup ($317,751), Goldman Sachs ($305,015), Morgan
Stanley ($253,871), JPMorgan Chase ($207,728), Credit Suisse Group
($178,825), UBS ($178,515), Pinnacle West Capital ($164,050), Bank of
America ($160,625), Lehman Brothers ($128,550) and Wachovia Corp
($121,346).

McCain was one of the Keating Five, who were behind
the 1980s scandal that epitomized Washington’s culture of corruption.
He and five other senators tried to intimidate federal bank regulators
on behalf of McCain friend Charles Keating, an Arizona real estate
developer and owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who had raised $1.3
million for the politicians. McCain, who received $112,000 from Keating
and flew to the banker’s home in the Bahamas on company planes,
attended several meetings in 1987 with federal bank regulators who were
investigating Keating for swindling investors. In addition, McCain’s
wife, Cindy, and her father, Jim Hensley, invested $359,100 in a
Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with
the regulators. McCain’s Senate colleagues censured him for his poor
judgement.

McCain didn’t just help one banker looking for a
favor. In the 1980s he favored the deregulation of the Savings and Loan
industry, which led to the industry’s collapse and a taxpayers’ bailout
of more than $500 billion. The industry, like Keating’s Lincoln
Savings, had balked at constraints on the S&Ls’ ability to compete
with conventional banks engaged in commercial lending. They got
Congress to change the rules, allowing S&Ls to begin a decade-long
orgy of real-estate speculation, mismanagement, and fraud. Banks and
S&Ls gobbled each other up and made loans to finance shopping
malls, golf courses, office buildings and condo projects that had no
logic other than a quick-buck profit. When the dust settled in the late
1980s, about a thousand S&Ls and banks (including Lincoln) had gone
under, billions of dollars of commercial loans were rendered useless
and the federal government was left to bail out the depositors whose
money the speculators had looted.In 1999, McCain supported the banking
industry’s top priority, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which, as consumer
groups had predicted, has been a major disaster.

Orchestrated by
then-Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the bill further deregulated the
banking and insurance industry and is directly responsible for the
current wave of home foreclosures and bank failures. It tore down the
last remaining legal barriers to combining commercial banking,
investment banking and insurance under one corporate roof. By 2005, the
ten largest banks controlled 60 percent of industry assets. Banks,
insurance companies, credit-card firms and other money-lenders became
part of a giant “financial services” industry. Washington walked away
from its responsibility to protect consumers with regulations and
enforcement. While federal regulators looked the other way, banks and
private mortgage companies indulged in risky loans and speculative
investments. They invented new “loan products”–such as subprime loans
and adjustable rate mortgages–that put borrowers, and their own banks,
at risk. Wall Street packaged these loans to investors without
scrutinizing their risk. Deregulation encouraged the industry to create
this house of cards. Every aspect of the financial industry was so
short-sighted and greedy that they didn’t see the train wreck coming
around the corner. Now major Wall Street banks are imploding.

Gramm,
McCain’s top economic advisor and campaign co-chair for most of his
presidential campaign, was the chief architect of the deregulation
laws. Like McCain, Gramm was a free-market fundamentalist and a puppet
of the financial industry. He used his power as chair of the Senate
banking committee to do the banking industry’s bidding–and he enlisted
McCain in that crusade. Gramm is now the vice chairman of UBS, the
Swiss investment banking giant. Since leaving the Senate, he has used
his political connections to lobby for further bank deregulation.

Gramm
was considered to be a leading candidate to be Treasury Secretary in a
McCain administration until he was forced to resign from his official
campaign position in July for his intemperate remarks that the country
had become “a nation of whiners” in a “mental recession.”

Nevertheless,
McCain has continued to parrot his mentor’s economic views, arguing in
favor of further deregulation of banks and business in general. “I have
a long voting record in support of deregulation,” McCain said in 2003.
“I am a deregulator…. I believe in deregulation,” he told CNN that
same year. Earlier this year, as Wall Street was in meltdown and
millions of Americans were at risk of losing their homes, McCain told
PBS that “we need less government [and] less regulation” and that “I’m
always for less regulation.” This March, after the collapse of Bear
Stearns, McCain continued to favor deregulating Wall Street.

Only
in the last week has McCain changed his tune. He’s endorsed the Bush
plan to bail out Wall Street firms that engaged in risky, irresponsible
behavior, instead of supporting government help for millions of
troubled homeowners.

Many of those homeowners live in Michigan,
where the economy is in free-fall–the direct result of Bush’s
misguided economic policies that McCain has consistently endorsed. In
the last year, Michigan’s jobless rate has jumped from 7.2 percent to
8.9 percent–the nation’s highest. Michigan had the highest foreclosure
rate in the the nation and economists expect it to get even worse as
the state sheds more and more jobs. So far this year, 95,272 Michigan
residents have received foreclosure notices–13,605 in August alone,
according to RealtyTrac.

So, to rub salt in these wounds, the
Michigan GOP hatched a plan to take away the votes of people who’ve
lost their homes. As reported in the Michigan Messenger, Republicans
intended to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters at the polls. In
a conference call with reporters, Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan
Democratic Party, said that the McCain campaign “wants to add insult to
injury by denying those residents their right to vote.”

Bob
Bauer, general counsel for the Obama campaign, called the GOP plan “a
new and especially repellent version of caging.” Caging is a technique
used to challenge voters by taking a list of addresses, mailing letters
to them marked “do not forward” and then claiming that those voters
whose letters were returned no longer live at the addresses at which
they are registered and thus are ineligible to vote.

Said Bauer:
“It is an absolute attack on their right to vote,” and a “completely
false and completely illegal basis” to challenge votes. He explained
that getting a foreclosure notice is not evidence that the person’s
address has changed. In Michigan, homeowners have the opportunity to
redeem the foreclosure even after a sheriff’s sale has occurred,
permitting them to remain in the house for several months after a
foreclosure notice has been sent. In addition, Michigan law allows
people vote at their old precinct if they lost their home within sixty
days of the election.

Bauer told the Wall Street Journal that
the Michigan suit against the Republicans was meant to send a message
to Democrats around the country to be on guard against voter-supression
tactics. “This can’t be just an isolated event,” he said. Republicans
use these tactics “where they expect the vote to go to the other side.
They’re not caging in Beverly Hills. By filing the suit, we are
assuring people they can be allowed to vote.”

Carol Guzman,
director of ACORN’s Financial Justice Center, said foreclosure lists
would be unreliable indicators of who had been forced to leave their
homes. Because state law allows a redemption period of up to a year
after a foreclosed home has been sold, “you could still legitimately
and legally be in your home and be challenged,” she told the Lansing
State Journal. But she believed that the GOP was trying to intimidate
voters facing foreclosure from going to the polls in the first place.
“I think they’re hoping that there will be people who will just stay
away,” Guzman said.

David Lagstein, head organizer for Michigan
ACORN, which has registered 200,000 new voters this election cycle,
said, “You would think they would think, ‘This is going to look too
heartless.'” ACORN runs a foreclosure counseling program and has
battled the Republican-led State Senate, which has opposed several
anti-predatory lending and anti-foreclosure bills. “The Republicans
won’t protect homeowners from predatory lending but they try to prey on
those who have fallen victim to foreclosure to suppress the vote,” said
Lagstein.

Michigan Republican leaders insisted that they never
had such a plan. Carabelli claimed that he was misquoted by the
Michigan Messenger. Reporter Eartha Jane Melzer stood by her story. So
did Jefferson Morley, editorial director for MichiganMessenger.com’s
parent organization, the Center for Independent Media. “The reporting
is 100 percent accurate and there is no validity to the claim that
statements attributed to Mr. Carabelli were fabricated,” Morley said in
a statement.

McCain’s headquarters is located in a building
owned by Trott & Trott, a law firm that specializes in
foreclosures. ACORN’s Lagstein called them “notorious and aggressive
foreclosure lawyers” who are “hated by anyone who has faced
foreclosure.” On September 12, about twenty-five members of ACORN and
Jobs for Justice protested outside McCain’s Farmington Hills
headquarters to demand that McCain fire Carabelli, the Macomb CountyP chairman. (See a video of the protest here.)

In their
lawsuit, the Democrats accuse the Republicans of a “long history” of
voter-suppression practices. Obama counsel Bauer said that “this is a
standard operating procedure in the Republican Party.” Michigan
Democrats chair Brewer told the Detroit News, “Every two years for the
last 20 years we’ve seen a Republican Party program to intimidate,
harass and suppress voters.” These charges are documented in a Project
Vote report showing longstanding GOP efforts to intimidate voters,
especially African-Americans, in many states, including Michigan.

Last
week, thirteen senators petitioned Attorney General Michael Mukasey,
asking the Justice Department to guarantee that voters are not harassed
or intimidated at their polling places. “Foreclosures are devastating
enough for affected families and neighborhoods without adding the
outrage of disenfranchisement,” wrote Michigan Democrats Carl Levin and
Debbie Stabenow along with Senators Barack Obama (D- IL), Charles
Schumer (D-NY), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Edward Kennedy (D- MA), Joseph
Biden (D-DE), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Russell
Feingold (D-WI), Richard Durbin (D-IL), Benjamin Cardin (D- MD),
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).Rep. John Conyers
of Michigan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called on
McCain to “step forward now and halt the Republican Party’s efforts to
profit politically from the economic misery of others.”

[Author]

September 25, 2008 at 1:11 PM