Rep. Barney Frank Named 2009 Porker of the Year
On Monday, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) “announced the results of its online poll for the 2009 Porker of the Year,” and named “House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, (D-Mass.).” Frank received 49% of the vote.
Others who received votes included: “In second place was Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) with 26.3 percent. Third-place honors went to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) with 6.6 percent. In naming Frank as Porker of the Year for 2009, CAGW wrote:
“Chairman Frank garnered the lion’s share of the votes as a result of his relentless and garrulous role in the failure of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage government-sponsored enterprises (GSE), which were taken into government conservatorship in September of 2008 after they began to collapse. The two GSEs, which own or guarantee half of the nation’s $11 trillion home mortgages, have been on life support with $112 billion in taxpayer funds since then and taxpayers could be liable for trillions in bad loans on their balance sheets.
Among GSE defenders, Chairmen Frank is without peer. He safeguarded their lavish franchises and fended off any attempts to establish GSE oversight even when it became clear that GSE executives had manipulated earnings statements, given themselves huge bonuses based on bogus numbers, and steered the companies into such a precarious condition that they threatened the entire financial system. In one of his most outrageous statements, he told The New York Times on September 11, 2003 that the GSEs were “not facing any kind of financial crisis…[t]he more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” During a 2003 committee hearing, he casually announced that he didn’t want “the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”
“In an astounding “Barney-Come-Lately” statement on January 22, 2010, Chairman Frank said that his committee will now recommend “abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance.” Taxpayers should not hold their breath in the misguided belief that the Chairman has suddenly gotten religion on privatization. “The seeds of the GSE meltdown were sown by politicians like Barney Frank. He has no intention of giving up federal control over housing finance. Taxpayers can be certain that he is already cooking up a new and obscenely expensive scheme to permanently nationalize housing finance,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz.”
Hopefully, Massachusetts' voters will keep CAGW's dubious award in mind when they go to the polls in November.