Posted by
Bert Chapman on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 9:31:48 AM
During last night's presidential debate and at other times during his candidacy, Barack Obama has viteruperatively denounced what he claims are eight years of Republican efforts to gut federal regulations of financial activities which have contributed to our mortgage and larger economic problems. As usual, Barack and his liberal dimwits are wrong. There are thousands of pages of federal laws and regulations on mortgage banking, financial services, and investment practices which are easily accessible to the public and to members of Congress. The U.S. Code, which is the complete cumulation of U.S. laws, is accessible at
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/ This compilation is broken up into 50 different titles or subject areas. Title 12 covers laws on banks and banking, Title 26 is the titanic Internal Revenue Code governing tax laws, and there are many other sections of the U.S. Code which will cover investments. Complete revisions of the U.S. Code are done every six years (the 2006 revised vols. are currently being published) and updated annually. These laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President. Many of these laws have significant criminal penalties if they are violated and many of them require agencies enforcing these laws to prepare regular reports on their enforcement of these laws and on trends and developments in these areas of law which may require further reform.
Once laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President, agencies are charged with drafting and adopting regulations to enforce these laws. These regulations are accessible in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/ which, like the U.S. Code, is broken up into 50 different titles or subject areas. CFR volumes are updated annually on a rotating basis throughout the year. Title 12 of the CFR covers banks and banking and Title 13 covers business credit and assistance. The general publication may comment on proposed regulations by going to
http://regulations.gov/ which are published in the Federal Register
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/ which is published Monday-Friday.
What has happened is that Obama and others of his ignorance ilk, have not bothered to learn how to make effective use of existing laws and regulations to punish financial criminals. He would rather encourage ignorance of federal economic laws and regulations by making false charges against McCain and conservatives instead of taking the time to actually study these laws and regulations and conduct effective oversight as to how well or poorly these laws are working. Birdbrained Barack probably has never read a document from the Treasury Dept., Federal Reserve Board, Securities and Exchange Commission, or other federal agency monitoring trends and developments in the mortgage or financial markets. It's to easy for him to engage in demagogic denunciations without looking in the mirror as to whether existing laws and regulations have contributed to and exacerbated our financial problems. It's probably beyond the intellectual capacity of Barack Obama to admit that legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act and the failure of individuals to realistically assess their economic capacity to sustain a mortgage are equally responsible for the mortgage crisis mess we're in. Obama and the Democrats want Americans to remain ignorant of the real laws and regulations covering financial activity while denouncing amorphous Wall Street greed and lobbyists and interest groups whose interests and activities they don't approve of.