Donald Trump bashes President Bush(Flashback 2008)

Donald Trump trashed President Bush Tuesday as a "terrible" President who has destroyed the world economy - but insisted the global crunch wouldn't stall his planned $2 billion golf resort.

"We have a President in the United States who's terrible. He stinks," Trump said.

Trump said he can't wait to see Bush head back to Texas after the November election is done.

He praised both major party candidates - Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee and John McCain, his Republican counterpart.

The tycoon called McCain "a friend of mine" who made a stunning political comeback.

Trump, who was in Scotland on personal business and not for U.S. politics, told a hearing on his planned megaresort that the economic climate has dramatically worsened since he first started buying land north of Aberdeen for the project.

I see the word “minority” a lot, but not the word “illegals.”

Well, you've got to do more than simply scan the posted text or perform a string search for the word, "illegal".

Tell me, what is an "undocumented immigrant"?

What is the difference between a "documented immigrant" and an "undocumented immigrant"?

Why do no Mexican banks accept their own government's Matricula Consular card as ID to open a Mexican bank account?

2006 Finalist Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of Chicago
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Without access to banking services, even small necessities, like paying rent, incur high costs. For the "unbanked," payments are often made with an expensive cashier's check and paychecks cashed through predatory services that charge high fees. It is difficult and dangerous to save money when it must be kept at home, increasing the incentive to consume and placing the purchase of houses, cars, and even most large appliances out of reach. For 75 percent of Mexican immigrants living in the United States--and nearly one third of immigrants from all Latin American countries--these difficulties are part of daily life.

As in other immigrant communities around the country, the large Hispanic community of Chicago, composed of recent documented and undocumented immigrants, faced such financial problems. Most were without banking services, paying high premiums to predatory financial businesses such as check-cashing services. Then, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stepped in.

The FDIC branch in Chicago initially intended to fulfill one part of the 2001 "Partnership for Prosperity" agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. The agreement urged the U.S. to seek alternatives to the high-cost wire transfers to Mexico that many immigrants used to send money to families back home. Joining with the Mexican Consulate of Chicago, the FDIC created the New Alliance Task Force (NATF).

It was clear to members of the NATF that wire transfers were only the symptom of a larger problem: lack of access to financial services. Drawing on a coalition of 65 people from banks, mortgage industry representatives, community organizations, federal bank oversight agencies, and other government agencies, the NATF sought a comprehensive solution.

Four major working groups targeted specific problems; they addressed access to financial education, bank products and services, mortgage products, and social products. Each group developed specific strategies as well as programs to implement them.

In some cases, these solutions required dramatic change. Many immigrants lacked identification, which is usually required to open up even basic checking accounts. The NATF helped to sell the Matricula Consular card, issued by the Mexican consulate, as a valid form of banking identification. Partner banks began to accept income tax records to substantiate loan applications.

Other solutions employed common sense. Many in the immigrant population were suspicious of both banks and government presence in their lives. The NATF worked to overcome this by positioning bank representatives in the Mexican Consulate. As new immigrants waited in line for their identification cards, they heard about the benefits of banking.

The NATF's comprehensive programs helped nearly 160,000 immigrants to open bank accounts. Many thousands more received financial counseling, mortgage assistance, and other forms of support.

The success in Chicago has already prompted the FDIC to bring the NATF's innovations to other districts. Programs are underway in Charlotte/Raleigh, Boston, Austin, Kansas City and Los Angeles. More FDIC districts are scheduled to adopt similar initiatives.

You say that the Bush administration and the GOP tried to rein in FM/FM. Your assertion flies in the face of the facts of the actions they took.

Park Place South is, in microcosm, the story of a well-intentioned policy gone awry. Advocating homeownership is hardly novel; the Clinton administration did it, too. For Mr. Bush, it was part of his vision of an “ownership society,” in which Americans would rely less on the government for health care, retirement and shelter. It was also good politics, a way to court black and Hispanic voters.

But for much of Mr. Bush’s tenure, government statistics show, incomes for most families remained relatively stagnant while housing prices skyrocketed. That put homeownership increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers like Mr. West.

So Mr. Bush had to, in his words, “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.

Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs.

And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view.

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. “Corporate America,” he said, “has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place.”

And corporate America, eyeing a lucrative market, delivered in ways Mr. Bush might not have expected, with a proliferation of too-good-to-be-true teaser rates and interest-only loans that were sold to investors in a loosely regulated environment.

“This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.”

But Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.

The president’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission promised a “kinder, gentler” agency. The second was pushed out amid industry complaints that he was too aggressive. Under its current leader, the agency failed to police the catastrophic decisions that toppled the investment bank Bear Stearns and contributed to the current crisis, according to a recent inspector general’s report.

As for Mr. Bush’s banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry. When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks.

The administration won that fight at the Supreme Court. But Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, said, “They took 50 sheriffs off the beat at a time when lending was becoming the Wild West.”

The president did push rules aimed at forcing lenders to more clearly explain loan terms. But the White House shelved them in 2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block confirmation of his new housing secretary.

"In the 2004 election cycle, mortgage bankers and brokers poured nearly $847,000 into Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign, more than triple their contributions in 2000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The administration did not finalize the new rules until last month."

Among the Republican Party’s top 10 donors in 2004 was Roland Arnall. He founded Ameriquest, then the nation’s largest lender in the subprime market, which focuses on less creditworthy borrowers. In July 2005, the company agreed to set aside $325 million to settle allegations in 30 states that it had preyed on borrowers with hidden fees and ballooning payments. It was an early signal that deceptive lending practices, which would later set off a wave of foreclosures, were widespread.

Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush’s former chief of staff, said White House aides discussed Ameriquest’s troubles, though not what they might portend for the economy. Mr. Bush had just nominated Mr. Arnall as his ambassador to the Netherlands, and the White House was primarily concerned with making sure he would be confirmed.

“Maybe I was asleep at the switch,” Mr. Card said in an interview.

Brian Montgomery, the Federal Housing Administration commissioner, understood the significance. His agency insures home loans, traditionally for the same low-income minority borrowers Mr. Bush wanted to help. When he arrived in June 2005, he was shocked to find those customers had been lured away by the “fool’s gold” of subprime loans. The Ameriquest settlement, he said, reinforced his concern that the industry was exploiting borrowers.

In December 2005, Mr. Montgomery drafted a memo and brought it to the White House. “I don’t think this is what the president had in mind here,” he recalled telling Ryan Streeter, then the president’s chief housing policy analyst.

It was an opportunity to address the risky subprime lending practices head on. But that was never seriously discussed. More senior aides, like Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political strategist, were wary of overly regulating an industry that, Mr. Rove said in an interview, provided “a valuable service to people who could not otherwise get credit.” While he had some concerns about the industry’s practices, he said, “it did provide an opportunity for people, a lot of whom are still in their houses today.”

The White House pursued a narrower plan offered by Mr. Montgomery that would have allowed the F.H.A. to loosen standards so it could lure back subprime borrowers by insuring similar, but safer, loans. It passed the House but died in the Senate, where Republican senators feared that the agency would merely be mimicking the private sector’s risky practices — a view Mr. Rove said he shared.

‘We Told You So’

Armando Falcon Jr. was preparing to take on a couple of giants.

A soft-spoken Texan, Mr. Falcon ran the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, a tiny government agency that oversaw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two pillars of the American housing industry. In February 2003, he was finishing a blockbuster report that warned the pillars could crumble.

Created by Congress, Fannie and Freddie — called G.S.E.’s, for government-sponsored entities — bought trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgages to hold or sell to investors as guaranteed securities. The companies were also Washington powerhouses, stuffing lawmakers’ campaign coffers and hiring bare-knuckled lobbyists.

Mr. Falcon’s report outlined a worst-case situation in which Fannie and Freddie could default on debt, setting off “contagious illiquidity in the market” — in other words, a financial meltdown. He also raised red flags about the companies’ soaring use of derivatives, the complex financial instruments that economic experts now blame for spreading the housing collapse.

Today, the White House cites that report — and its subsequent effort to better regulate Fannie and Freddie — as evidence that it foresaw the crisis and tried to avert it. Bush officials recently wrote up a talking points memo headlined “G.S.E.’s — We Told You So.”

But the back story is more complicated. To begin with, on the day Mr. Falcon issued his report, the White House tried to fire him. (See: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

Thanks for the link.

This video was created by the Bush administration itself (read: Karl Rove) as a form of damage control in an attempt to deflect blame for the economic meltdown off Bush and onto the Democrats.

Naturally, there is no mention of Bush's actions during his first term which actually caused the meltdown, such as those detailed on my FR home page. (P4P agreement and NATF) Other items not mentioned are his loosening US banking laws, such as allowing US banks to accept phony Matricula Consular card and ITIN to open a US bank account and obtain business, home, auto loans and US credit cards.

Prior to Bush, this was not possible because banks were prohibited by law to serve illegal aliens because the illegal aliens could not produce legal identification, which would be a US driver's license or their home country's passport with resident visa.

The video tries to blame Clinton for the creation of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), but the video neglects to mention that Bush changed this law so that banks that served the 'minority' market via remittances, i.e.: Mexican illegal aliens sending money home to Mexico, would receive the same CRA credits they would have previously only gotten if they had given home loans to low-income, US minorities.

The real estate bubble wasn't supposed to blow-up on Bush's watch. But, Bush's banker buddies got too greedy and it blew up during Bush's last year in office instead of after Obama took office.

As far as the documented and undocumented immigrants and such goes I know very little of all of this — I’m a Canadian — and you may very well have a point in Bush being too sympathetic to illegals in different ways (including financial). He did try to push through some immigration reform (amnesty) that wasn’t too popular.

There is no such thing as 'undocumented immigrant'. The term is a political euphemism for 'illegal alien'. FWIW, the term used in all US immigration laws is 'illegal alien'. The legal term for a 'documented immigrant' is 'resident alien'.

Bush was sympathetic to illegal aliens only insofar as they were an untapped source of income for his true constituents, the Wall Street bankers. Never forget that Bush comes from a long line of Wall Street bankers and it is with them that his true loyalty lays.

This was the underlying purpose behind the Partnership for Prosperity Agreement (with Mexico), New Alliance Task Force and the $700 billion bail-out.

Democrats had the majority since 06 and it seems you can’t exclude them.

Had you actually spent the time reading either the material I posted on this thread or on my FR home page, you would know why the Demo majority in Congress since 2006 is irrelevant to this discussion.

Bush's damage was done during his first term between 2000 and 2004 when the Republicans controlled both the Legislative and Executive branches of government.

The reason why the Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 mid-term elections was because they spent more money than had the Democrats before them.

The Partnership for Prosperity Agreement (with Mexico) was signed in 2001 solely by the Executive branch and had nothing to do with the Legislative branch.

The New Alliance Task Force was put together in 2003 solely by the Executive branch. The Legislative branch had no say in the matter.

The Social Security Totalization Agreement with Mexico (which would have allowed Mexican illegal aliens access to the US Social Security system) was signed on June 29, 2004.

Attached to the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 was the provision that made it legal for the banks to accept the Mexican Matricula Consular card as ID. Congress sent a request for opinion to Bush's Treasury Dept. (Executive branch, again) about 326(b). Bush's Treasury responded:

“The proposed rules set forth the requirement that financial institutions would have to establish a customer identification and verification program applicable to all new accounts that are opened, regardless of whether the customer is a U.S. citizen or a foreign national. While the proposed rules prescribe minimum standards for such programs, they leave sufficient flexibility to permit financial institutions to tailor their program to fit their business operations. The customer identification program would have to contain reasonable procedures for identifying any person, including a business, that opens an account, setting forth the type of identifying information that the financial institution will require. At a minimum, for U.S. persons the proposed rules would require financial institutions to obtain the following information: name, address, taxpayer identification number, and, for individuals, date of birth. While a taxpayer identification number is not required for non-U.S. persons, a financial institution must describe what type of information it will require of a non-U.S. person in place of a taxpayer identification number. The regulations state that financial institutions may accept one or more of the following: a U.S. taxpayer identification number; a passport number and country of issuance; an alien identification card number, or the number and country of issuance of any other government-issued document evidencing nationality or residence and bearing a photograph or similar safeguard.”

This also contained a footnote (17):

“Thus, the proposed regulations do not discourage bank acceptance of the ‘matricula consular’ identity card that is being issued by the Mexican government to immigrants.” (See: Treasury Department Issues USA PATRIOT Act Report to Congress)

I also say this because the I also saw another video tracing the problem all the way back to Carter. It seems like it was evolving over time with everybody contributing.

Another video produced by the Bush administration (read: Karl Rove) designed to dupe people like you who only skim the material and take away sound bites instead of substantive details about what really happened that put this country into the situation it's facing.

Yes, the ITIN was created under Carter. But between the time it was created in 1976 and 2001, it could only be used by foreign nationals who were in the country legally.

Yes, the CRA was Clinton's creation. But, again, it could only be applied to US citizens.

It was under Bush's watch that the banking laws were changed to allow illegal aliens access to the US banking system. And, this was done by Bush to benefit his true constituents, the Wall Street bankers because they wanted to tap into the large and growing illegal alien segment occupying US society.

But, the gambit would not have paid off for Bush's banker buddies had their customers been deported. So, using his executive powers, Bush hobbled border and interior immigration enforcement.

Believe it or not, lefty-liberal Clinton had a better immigration enforcement record than so-called conservative Bush.

Worksite arrests of illegal aliens fell some 97 percent, from 2,859 in 1999 to 159 in 2004. Investigations targeting employers of illegal immigrants fell more than 70 percent, from 7,637 in 1997 to 2,194 in 2003. Arrests on job sites fell—precipitously, from 17,554 in 1997 to 445 in 2003. Fines levied for immigration-law violations fell from 778 in 1997 to 124 in 2003. Notices of intent to fine employers fell from 865 in 1997 to just 3 in 2004.

Keep in mind that Barney Frank is not Omnipotent. He's had plenty of Republicans helping him in Congress.

When the USA PATRIOT Act came up for renewal in 2004, some republicans wanted to remove the provision that allowed banks to accept Matricula Consular ID as the consular ID is unreliable.

Barney Frank (D-MA) and some of his Republican and Democrat friends swung into action to protect it:

Anti-matrícula proposal defeated; financial institutions can continue accepting consular ID's:

In a vote of 222 to 177, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan amendment, H.Amdt. 754, introduced by Reps. Michael Oxley (R-OH), Barney Frank (D-MA), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), Ed Pastor (D-AZ), and Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX) to strike the so-called Culberson amendment that would have prohibited the Treasury Dept. from implementing regulations that allow financial institutions to accept matrícula consular identification cards as part of a valid customer identification program under the USA PATRIOT Act... In countering Culberson’s allegations that the FBI and the Justice Dept. were opposed to the bipartisan amendment to preserve the use of matrícula consular cards, Bachus presented a letter for the record written by Deputy Atty. Gen. James B. Comey and addressed to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. The letter, dated Sept. 14, 2004, stated: The Department of Justice fully supports the Administration’s current policy under the USA PATRIOT Act that requires banks and other financial institutions to establish reasonable procedures for the identification and verification of new account holders, which is set forth in regulations of the Department of the Treasury. Therefore the [Justice] Department supports the Oxley-Frank-Kolbe amendment to H.R. 5025 that preserves these regulations. . . . The Department of Justice, including the FBI, continue[s] to work closely with the Treasury Department on this and other issues related to halting all financing of terrorists.

In the final roll call vote, 49 Republicans supported the Oxley-Frank-Kolbe-Pastor-Hinojosa amendment and 16 Democrats opposed it. This legislative victory was a joint effort by financial institutions, immigrants’ rights groups, consumer groups, and many others who worked in coalition to defeat, once again, efforts to limit the acceptance of consular ID cards by banks, credit unions, thrifts, and other financial entities.

So, as you can see, all the real damage to the US economy was done during Bush's first term and he had a lot of Republican Congressional help.

His second term was all about trying to keep it from spinning out of control long enough so that he could escape untainted.

N-i-c-e deconstruction, ODT. Deserves a repeat.

.........not one Mexican banks accept govt-issue official Matricula Consular card as ID to open a Mexican bank account b/c the MC bearer's identity is all but untraceable. MC cards are government-issued phony ID's. The Mexican govt designed MC cards to allow Mexican nationals (who violated our borders) to swamp the US banking system using multiple identities. The Mexican govt's objective is to weaken the US financial system, create chaos, and to ripoff US banks. US taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab for the resultant frauds........

All thanks to Bush---duped again by the pukeneos. And watch Obama on all fours, all puckered up, sucking up to the Mexican govt (and their advance troops in the US) preparing for the takeover.

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REFERENCE Here's one way to proceed against illegals.

In 1996, Congress expanded the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to include violations of federal immigration law.

1 While this expansion may not have received much publicity, it could potentially change the face of U.S. immigration law enforcement. Under the new RICO provisions, a violation of certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) meets the definition of racketeering activity, also known as a "predicate offense,"

2 and an entity that engages in a pattern of racketeering activity for financial gain can be held both criminally and civilly liable.

3 Among other things, the INA makes it unlawful to encourage illegal immigration or employ illegal aliens,

4 which violations were included as predicate offenses under RICO.

The 1996 law changes in the INA made hiring illegal aliens a predicate act of racketeering activity under RICO, but illegal hiring wasn’t the only violation of the INA made a predicate act. Other INA prohibitions made RICO predicate acts were encouraging or inducing illegal immigration, smuggling, and harboring illegal aliens.10 Together, these additions make the RICO Act potentially a very strong new tool in the hands of private parties against persons and companies that profit by violating U.S. immigration law.

Additionally, the RICO provision regarding the unlawful encouragement of illegal immigration could justify a suit against a private entity, such as a bank, that accepts foreign-issued identification cards that are only needed by illegal aliens. One example of this, of course, is the matricula consular issued by the Mexican consulates in the United States. Since both the supporters of the matricula and those who oppose its acceptance agree that only illegal aliens have need to rely on the card, acceptance of the card knowingly encourages illegal immigration. Part of the legislative intent of the RICO laws in general was to afford private citizens a remedy for lawbreaking when authorities normally charged with such enforcement became derelict in their duties.

BACKSTORY In places in which political corruption and racketeering combine to the detriment of law-abiding citizens and the rule of law, the RICO Act was intended to provide private citizens the ability to initiate court action to compel enforcement and respect for the law.

REFERENCE----STATUS CUOMO-GILLIBRAND: Their fingerprints are all over the current depression/recession. ap When NY Gov-elect Cuomo was pointed Housing and Urban Development Secy under Clinton, Cuomo w/ Clinton's approval, was the prime mover behind programs that destabilized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and his programs to mandate banks loan to low-income and bad-credit homebuyers were a significant factor in the housing collapse.

Congresswoman Gillibrand served as Special Counsel to Andrew Cuomo, Pres Clinton's appointee as Secy of HUD. Gillibrand played a key role in furthering HUD’s Labor Initiative and *New Markets initiative (sub-prime mortgages); Gillibrand worked to strengthen the Davis-Bacon Act and drafting new markets legislation for public and private investment in building infrastructure to revitalize lower income areas across the nation."

"Sure, I know how I got the HUD job. Clinton needed my daddy in his corner,
so I got the HUD job. HUD is where I got the $18 million to run for Governor."

CUOMO AND BILL CLINTON CREATED CONDITIONS FOR MELTDOWN (Village Voice 8-5-08) Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the sub-prime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans.

Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.......

SOURCE http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-05/news/how-andrew-cuomo-gave-birth-to-the-crisis-at-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/

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Raines says housing bubble won't burst
Washington Post Biz Journals, June 2003, Jeff Clabaugh
FR Posted by STARWISE

(Excerpt) With home prices in the District up almost 78 percent in the past five years, there is growing concern there is a housing bubble that is about to burst - both locally and nationwide.

Fannie Mae CEO Frank Raines, however, is dispelling those concerns. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Raines, a former budget director in the Clinton administration, says the housing rally won't end like the stock market did three years ago. "We do not see any sign of a housing price decline nationwide, let alone the bursting of a bubble," Raines is quoted as saying. Read more at washington.bizjournals.com ...

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ANALYSIS And this would have made a difference, how? Raines was on the wrong side of history, but he was hardly alone. Housing cheerleaders were everywhere. And back in 2003, the fun had barely even started.

Many of the laws requiring government oversight of the market written after the last great market crash-----in 1929---- were eliminated during the Clinton administration---one of many ignorant moves by the self-absorbed liberal Clintons.

Quota-pimp Clinton made stupid PC appointments----he put know-nothing Franklin Raines into Fannie Mae where the crook proceeded to loot the agency while fraudulently cooking the books.

(Wonder what Clinton's cut was?) Thanks to sap-happy Clinton, 2008 markets are devastated, and multi-billion dollar bailouts will crush the backs of working class taxpayers.