From Dave Freddoso, noted “right-wing smear merchant” and the expert on all of Obama’s misadventures in Chicago:
Last week, Sen. Barack Obama compared the Savings and Loan bailout of the late 1980s to the situation of the mortgage-securities markets today: “Too many S&Ls took advantage of the lax rules set by Washington to gamble that they could make big money in speculative real estate. . . . [T]hey made hundreds of billions in bad loans, knowing that if they lost money, the government would bail them out. And they were right. The gambles did not pay off, our economy went into recession, and the taxpayers ended up footing the bill. Sound familiar?” Indeed, it does sound familiar – it sounds a lot like what Barack Obama did to Illinois taxpayers as a state senator in Springfield. Using his elected office and his clout, Obama helped Tony Rezko and other unscrupulous low-income housing developers obtain millions of dollars in state grants, tax credits, low-interest loans, and regulatory advantages. Taxpayers had no serious chance of recouping these “investments” in Rezko and other developers. And many beneficiaries went one step farther, depriving the public of even the benefits they could have gotten. These developers took government help to build low-income housing, and then let their buildings deteriorate into uninhabitable slums. To date, the most complete account of this sad story is Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece in the Boston Globe. Not only does it demonstrate the monumental failure of the low-income-housing policy that Obama vocally championed as a state senator, it gives a detailed look at how some of Obama’s donors and friends – the beneficiaries of that policy – neglected their own housing developments at the expense of the inhabitants.
Read more for the details on the slums, which are pretty horrific: backed-up sewage, un-heated apartments in the dead of Chicago’s winter. The McCain campaign is going after Obama’s unsavory associations today in an add called “Chicago Machine” (can a Wright ad be far off?):
I’d like it better, I think, if they went after Rezko specifically instead of lumping him in with others, and symbolically tied Obama’s actions, as Dave has, to the irresponsible behavior that got us into the mortgage/financial crisis of today.
