Second, in 1992 Congress mandated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. When Bill and the Clintonistas came to town in 1993, they decided to use all within their power to browbeat, cajole and otherwise pressure the lending industry to provide low-income people with home loans. They were wildly successful! If you want to learn more, I would suggest reading a May 31, 1999, Los Angeles Times article by Ronald Brownstein headlined, “Minorities’ Home Ownership Booms Under Clinton but Still Lags Whites.” Radio talk show host Mark Levin features the Brownstein article at his show’s website (http://marklevinshow.com/).
In my opinion, the third and final straw that broke the polar bear’s back was the advent of the so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement created by environmental and social activists who, largely, despise capitalism and all that free enterprise stands for. The CSR crowd set about convincing appeasement artists in the public relations industry that their corporate clients had a social responsibility to focus on the “triple bottom line”—people, planet, profit.
The corporate socialists have also been monumentally successful. As a result, rather than concentrating on protecting and growing the investments of their shareholders, many business executives have been spending time and resources on social and environmental agendas that do not pass the economics red face test. Does this sound at all familiar?
Providing low-income people with housing loans that did not make economic sense may have felt good during the good times, but how does it feel now?
How does it feel now that many of the corporations involved in this social experiment no longer have a single bottom line, much less a triple bottom line? How does it feel to those who owned stock in these failed firms?
What about those of us who pay our mortgages and taxes; how do we feel about being asked to put billions of our hard-earned dollars in a pot controlled by Washington bureaucrats?
If the mainstream media told the truth about who created this debacle, I suspect there would be some feedback on Election Day. However, as people are saying more and more, don’t bank on it.
In the meantime, may I suggest that if you hear that a company in which you have invested has a fantastic Corporate Social Responsibility program, call that firm’s investor relations department and suggest that the CEO and the General Counsel might want to review what it means to have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders? Then, just for kicks, ask the person on the other end if polar bears are edible?