The Loud Talker

• 2:27 - “What we’ve got here is a situation in which the Republican Party has become, here obviously in Arizona, and nationally, the most extreme ideologically driven embittered partisan party that we’ve had in American history. You know, people complain about too much partisanship. And let me say, I [cough - unintelligible] the party’s doing great things I’m glad to be here from the auspices of the state democratic party, you can’t have democracy without political parties. we’ve got political parties in America not because anybody theoretically wanted them but because the people who started America  — Jefferson, Adam, Madison, etc. — they were simultaneously writing very eloquent essays about how terrible parties were, and forming them. Because you can’t have politics without parties, otherwise it just becomes a formless mass of personalities dominating. The problem is not when you have parties but when people become so attached to that party that even in areas where there should be agreement it spills over.”
• 3:31 – “And I want to say something I don’t want to say, but I have to say, what I hoped I would never have to say, we are at a point now in our country where almost all of the Republicans in Congress, I mean 99%, are consciously trying to stop the economic recovery from going forward because of [unintelligible] its going to effect. They are not opposing our programs because they think they will fail, they are opposing our programs because they’re afraid they will succeed. And unfortunately they’ve slowed things down some.”
• 6:06 – “They’ve been opposed to unemployment compensation. Extraordinary! Because it helps us get out of an economic situation. By the way, on unemployment compensation, one of the things we did, over their objections, we understand that foreclosures have been a problem here, there are various reasons why people are in trouble, by the way, one of the things we did with a bill, over Republican objections, cause we started trying to do this in 2004, a couple of my colleagues [unintelligible] Brad Miller [unintelligible] we tried to outlaw the kind of bad mortgages that have been made because the problem is that…  The mortgages that were being made by the regulated entities, and I forgot to mention [unintelligible] the credit unions and the community banks were making good loans on the whole, the bad loans came from the unregulated entities thanks to the Republicans that wouldn’t allow us to include them in regulation. And so, what we’ve done is to take the kind of rules that have applied to banks and credit unions in terms of mortgages and applied them to all mortgage lending, so that the kinds of bad mortgages, people getting mortgages without showing any income, people getting mortgages two years with a low rate that jumps up to 28% and no ability to pre-pay with an enormous penalty, those are all now would be illegal. But we still have the problem of people who made a perfectly reasonable decision to take out a mortgage, and they’re unemployed. It’s not their fault, you can’t make mortgage payments out of unemployment. We now have $3 billion available, and $2 billion goes to the hard hit states which include Arizona, for the federal government to make mortgage payments on behalf of people who are unemployed, they have solid mortgages, to be repaid when they get their jobs back. That’s a very significant, there are hundreds of thousands of people who will avoid foreclosure, I wish, we tried to do it in January, we had legislation that we passed then, the Republicans wouldn’t support it, in fact, we had it in the financial reform bill, we had $2 billion of that in the financial reform bill, they cut us to a billion. To get any Republican votes in the Senate, we had to cut that $2B to help people who were unemployed get a loan to pay their mortgage. You know what? What’s going on with that. Why would anyone rationally oppose that? The answer is they have a vested interest in failure. We were then able to free up $2 billion elsewhere.”
• 8:25 – “Thats’ where we are. The irony is, the frustration, these people with their extreme approach to government during the years of, you know remember the government was run for a very long time by Mitch McConnell, Tom Delay, and George Bush and their people. And the result was the worst economic crisis since the great depression. That’s not a disputed fact. Their failure to do any kind of regulation is where we got into this trouble.”
• 8:50 – “We have one [unintelligible] policy making a bad situation better, and two, we’ve adopted policies that will keep them happy again. The problem is they have successfully resisted our ability to have this as a [unintelligible] with the terrible abuse of the filibuster in the senate.”
• 9:07 – “The other point is that President Obama, out of a misplaced faith in the reasonableness of some of the Republicans, when he took office he didn’t hammer home how bad the situation was that he inherited. Literally. He’s now talking about how bad it was. He wouldn’t do that right away. He wanted to be “post-partisan,” and I said, to quote myself again this morning, “I knew what kind of right wing Republican domination of that party he was dealing with, and when he said he was going to be post partisan I told a couple of his people he was giving me “post-partisan depression.” So people didn’t understand how bad things were.”
• 10:13 – “I think we should have a contest. [unintelligible] do this.  Lets go back and read all the predictions of the terrible things that were going to happen when the health care passed. And lets have a contest for anybody who can document that any one of them happened. All those terrible things: Medicare, people losing their healthcare, premiums going up. Literally none of the bad things have happened.”
• 16:22 – “If the right wing takeover of the Republican party in these primaries this year is validated in November, we’re in for a very bad period, and the values that all of us here are interested in, all of us, that’s why you are here, we believe in this set of ideas it will all be at risk.”
• 17:05 - Question: “You were saying earlier that the bad loans came from unregulated entities, could you tell us who those entities are?” Frank: “On the whole, I mean not every bank… people like New Century, Countrywide, some of them were technically regulated in that they got a swift charter from the [unintelligible] supervision but, it was almost a fig leaf. Here’s the situation. Thirty years ago, mortgage money came form deposits. The only way you accumulated money was you got a lot of people to deposit money in your bank, the federal government insured those deposits and regulated what you did. Then beginning thirty years ago the mortgage industry transformed. First, (maybe even a little, 20, 25 years ago) new sources of money showed outside to deposit: oil money from the Middle East, Asian countries with big dollars of trade. People accumulated sources of money so you didn’t have to be a bank taking deposits to have money to lend. Secondly they came up with securitization, whereby, again people got mortgages thirty years ago they got a mortgage from a bank and paid the bank every month for thirty years, most recently most loans were made by people having made the loan then sold the loan rights to be paid back. Not the community bank which tends to keep it. What happened was, if I lent money to everybody in this room , and I wait for everybody in this room to pay me back, I’m going to be much more carefully with who I lend money to, and now you have everybody in the room package that up into a security and sell pieces of it to different groups of people. It was the people who did not have deposits, weren’t regulated by the federal government, it was legal to do that. Now, we tried to get laws passed, Democrats did when we were in the minority, getting earlier in this century, and even earlier, to regulate these non-banks from making the loans, and the Republicans said no. In the bill that just passed, we’ve taken the rules that are applied to banks and credit unions for years and applied them to all mortgage lenders.”
• 21:12 – “As some of you know, Stephen Colbert noted, one Republican senator was with a record for moderation has been replaced in the Senate by a Republican candidate with extreme positions on all the issues. There’s John McCain being replaced by John McCain.”
• 22:51 – “On the other hand, and here’s one of the great Republican hypocrisies: yeah we have to spend less, we have to bring the deficit down, probably that’s with appropriate revenue measures, probably by, you know, taxing people who make, uh, three and four and five hundred thousand dollars a little bit more each year on that top [unintelligible] income. But there’s also need for spending cuts. But the major attack the Republicans are making on Barack Obama now, or one of them, is that we are not spending enough on the military.”
• 23:41 – “Obama is scaling down Iraq, [unintelligible] I want to continue to scale down. We have 50,000 now “non-combat troops” in Iraq. I am very uncomfortable with the concept of non-combat troops. First of all, the other side doesn’t know they’re non-combat, [unintelligible] secondly, if they’re non-combat what the hell are they doing there? What are they, documenting the political process, lets get them home, lets send combat troops when there is a need in America’s defense or an overwhelmingly moral situation to prevent a genocide through combat. And he’s trying to scale back in Afghanistan. He’s being attacked by the Republicans for trying to do that.”
• 24:25 – “He signed a treaty with the Soviet, the Russians, to reduce weaponry. John Kyle is saying that he will hold that treaty up unless Obama agrees to spend billions more for nuclear weapons testing, to make sure, and thats why I said the Soviet Union, ’cause Kyle wants to make sure we can defeat the Soviet Union in an all out war even though there is no more Soviet Union there’s a much [unintelligible].”
• 24:50 – “The answer is, the time has come for America to say to many of our friends and allies, we can no longer be the world’s protector. You’ve got to do a better job yourself. Because we spend too much money and we get into political trouble when we do.  Obama is truly trying to move in that direction, with Gates, with what he said, I want to bring the troops home from Iraq and spend the money here. And you watch, these great deficit hawks are gonna, they’re gonna be criticizing the president for trying to curtail excessive military spending. And Bill Clinton did curtail military spending and no one has pointed to an area where our security was anywhere different [unintelligible] Of course we want to fight terrorism. But you can’t fight terrorism with nuclear submarines, I wish you could because we would use one and they don’t have any. You need to fight terrorism much more intelligently in a tough way. If we had less than 10% of the money we spent on Iraq spent here on various forms of prosecution, of intelligence, of a whole range of things, we would be a safer country and a richer country.”

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