Newsweek runs a provocative article this week on the fledgling effort by Georgia democrats in 2002 to curtail and regulate predatory lending practices in the state-- a move which would have spared that state the grievous losses now being experienced as a consequence of un-controlled mortgage lending. The effort was led by then democratic governor Roy Barnes, and was opposed by armies of lobbyists sent in by the usual NeoCon free-marketeers-- and by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151722/output/print(snip)So when Barnes was elected governor of Georgia in 1998, he decided to push through the toughest antipredatory lending law in the country. The 2002 law made everyone up the line, including investment banks on distant Wall Street and rating agencies like Standard & Poor's, legally liable if the loans they sold, securitized or rated were deemed unfair. "There has to be accountability," Barnes told NEWSWEEK. "In the end you have to be able to say, do I really want to make this loan? Because I may have to eat it." "A victory for Georgia consumers," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the new law, which was also hailed by AARP and the NAACP.
It was when Roy Barnes started talking about accountability that the Feds began marching into Georgia. Barnes found himself besieged by lobbyists from major banks and national regulators—as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage issuers whose mandate is to help people obtain affordable homes at fair prices; today, Fannie and Freddie are so financially fragile that the government has agreed to bail them out if necessary.
The major mortgage issuers hinted that they would turn Georgia into a financial pariah if the state made them liable. They let Barnes know in no uncertain terms that he was something of a "country bumpkin" when it came to banking, says his legislative aide, Chris Carpenter. As Barnes recalls, "They would say—and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were part of it—'This is a complex global market. If you start interfering with the free flow of money, then Georgia will become an island that has no credit'. I kept telling them, 'You're in for a crash here'."
Ultimately, the Georgia Legislature, under Barnes's successor, gutted his law in early 2003 after a dramatic eleventh-hour vote in which a Republican senator warned that Freddie Mac was about to cut off most of its business with the state. "It broke my heart," Barnes says. (Fannie and Freddie declined to comment specifically on any efforts against Georgia's liability law, but in general they say they have "always supported efforts to fight predatory lending," says Fannie spokesman Brian Faith.)(snip)
What they couldn't turn back at the legislature, they could-- and did-- turn back at the ballot box; and in rather dramatic fashion:
http://www.truthout.org/article/election-fraud-and-tyranny-part-1Barnes, Cleland and Their Stunning "Losses"
Robert Kennedy Jr. tells the compelling story of the 2002 Georgia election where two popular incumbents, with solid leads four days before the election, lost in stunning reversals.
How could two popular incumbents, in the same state, with leads like these, both experience rarely seen reversals?
Under pressure due to uncounted votes in the 2000 election, the Georgia Secretary of State virtually turned over the election to the state's touch screen e-voting vendor, Diebold. Chris Hood was a Diebold technical consultant who bravely reported that he and others applied a software "patch" to Diebold voting machines just before the election.
This patch was so important that the president of Diebold, Bob Urosevich delivered it in person to Diebold technical personnel in Georgia. State law required that any changes to e-voting machines be cleared by the state. This was not done. When questions were raised after these highly improbable election results, Urosevich claimed the patch simply changed the clock on the voting machines, a claim deemed not serious by whistle blower Hood. The state failed to mount a thorough investigation and the Democrats were largely silent.(snip)
The bill to taxpayers for the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is fast approaching $5 Billion, according to Newsweek.
Many election fraud experts insist that the Georgia 2002 election was the shake-down cruise for wide-scale election fraud using source code "patches" in high democratic districts. Computer experts throughout the country have opined with confidence that source code patches can be used for a variety purposes-- including the "flipping" of the votes being cast, in largely non-detectable ways.
Experts have long suggested that those with knowledge and access to the proprietary source codes would have the means and opportunity to steal an election.
The Newsweek analysis of Roy Barnes' Anti-Predatory Lending bill-- and its opponents' need to have it overturned at all costs-- seems to suggest a motive.
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