Sharp Sticks: Was the financial meltdown a planned attack?

But a video of the televised skit, which initially appeared on SNL’s website, was abruptly withdrawn and edited by NBC. The network’s lame excuse was that it slandered Frank (a public figure) and the Sandlers, who sold Golden West Financial Corp. to the now defunct Wachovia Bank for $24 billion in 2006.

Golden West was anything but golden, however. More like a toxic waste dump for bad mortgages. The acquisition directly led to Wachovia’s demise last month.

The Sandlers not only had a starring role in the housing bubble, they also started the Washington-based Center for American Progress, a think tank funded by multibillionaire George Soros, the titular head of what authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe call “The Shadow Party” – a coalition of leftwing billionaires, labor union officials, street radicals, open border advocates and socialist operatives that now controls the Democratic Party.

Wherever financial markets are in turmoil, Soros’ fingerprints can often be found. For instance, his speculation in international currency won him notoriety as “the man who broke the Bank of London” – the center of the global financial network. He has also been accused of negatively affecting the Malaysian ringgit during Asia’s financial crisis.

There has yet been little reporting about who or what was really behind the speculative home buying frenzy that forced housing prices up into the stratosphere, but there are hints it wasn’t all pure market demand. For instance, I’ve been told that many foreclosed homes in Fairfax County were bought by Middle Easterners who immediately refinanced them, pulled out most of the equity, and then stopped paying their mortgages, leaving banks in the lurch.

This same pattern was hinted at by Cook County, IL (Barack Obama’s hometown) Sheriff Tom Dart, who stopped evicting people from foreclosed homes when he discovered that most of them were tenants, not owners. Just two years ago, there were less than 19,000 foreclosures in Cook County, but the number is expected to more than double to 43,000 this year. How many of those homes were bought by speculators who had no intention of living in them?

Then there’s ACORN, a tax-supported, pro-Obama group (Obama’s campaign gave it $800,000) that is now under investigation in 15 states for suspected voter fraud. It was founded by Wade Rathke, a former member of the Students for Democratic Society (just like domestic terrorist and Obama pal Bill Ayers). It was the Chicago chapter of ACORN that first aggressively pushed for the Community Reinvestment Act, which was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, that forced banks to make loans to poor and minority people who didn’t qualify for conventional mortgages. CRA would eventually trigger the nation’s worst financial implosion.

To keep investment bankers on Wall Street from squawking about being forced to abandon sound underwriting practices, government entities Fannie Mae (one of Obama’s main campaign contributors) and Freddie Mac agreed to buy the questionable mortgages, bundle them together as securities, and then sell them in a high-stakes game of financial musical chairs. None of the pampered capitalists complained – until the music stopped.

In the Oct. 15 edition of American Thinker, former White House economist Jim Simpson outlined a chilling scenario (http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html) that should give every American pause: The current financial meltdown, he asserts, was a manufactured crisis. In other words, there was a planned attack on American financial institutions – and Barack Obama was right smack in the middle of it.

Simpson cites Saul Alinksy-trained Columbia University (Obama’s alma mater) professors Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, who argued in a 1966 Nation article that the left needed to create a political, financial and social crisis in order to take over the U.S. government and force the redistribution of massive amounts of wealth. The recent loss of trillions of dollars in the stock market and the federal takeover of even healthy banks is their dream come true.

“Most significantly,” Simpson writes, “Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama’s presidential campaign, helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers.”

Is it just a coincidence that Soros, the Sandlers, ACORN, Fannie Mae, Penny Pritzker and Barack Obama himself can all be linked to the financial tsunami Simpson calls a “Marxist tidal wave” that now threatens to drown so many Americans?

Simpson doesn’t think so. I’m from Chicago – the epicenter of this disaster, where political corruption has been rampant for decades – and neither do I.