Obama called the mortgage crisis a year ago

[cameozalaznick]

I saw this on TPM.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/03/obamas-year-old-letter-to-bern.php

The more I find out about this guy, the more I like. Why doesn't this kind of stuff get headlines?

[MADem]

1. So did Clinton. Slightly over a year ago.

http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=270820

Other statements on the subject between March 2007 and today listed here:
http://www.senate.gov/~clinton/issues/housing/subprime/index.cfm



Address to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition
March 15, 2007

...... I want to focus on one aspect of the American Dream, of that basic bargain, because I am worried about homeownership. And as we have seen in recent days, the basic bargain that may be breaking down is homeownership.

There has been a lot of attention recently on the volatility in the subprime housing market. But the subprime fallout takes a toll on families as well. These are not just statistics, these are flesh and blood people who are so proud of that first home, who felt like they finally had a real foothold in the American middle class that they were going to have their children in a safer environment.

Now we know that there were more bankruptcies in America last year than college graduates. And half of those bankruptcies were due to an illness and people unable to pay their medical costs.

So a lot of these new homeowners are one illness away from foreclosure. They're one job loss away. They're one, let's cut your hours away. They are hanging on. Because despite what you hear from the happy-talkers on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and for some of those folks they put on TV, wages have been stagnant, haven't they?

So you've got CEO pay up. You've got corporate profits up. You've got productivity up, which means that we're all working harder than ever before. But the folks who are doing the work are not getting rewarded. And a lot of those folks during the 90s, when we created 22 million new jobs and lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in our history, they felt that we and our country were on the right track, didn't they? And they thought the sky was the limit. They were going to send that child to college. They were going to get that home. Well, now we are concerned, and NCRC has been sounding the alarm to try to wake us up for the last several years. Well, I sure hope we're awake now.

You can't be surprised, can you? Because the alarm bell about the subprime home market has largely gone unnoticed by this Administration because they keep arguing we have to give trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthy. They keep arguing that a $9 trillion national debt and an increasing trade deficit -- the highest in history -- are signs of increasing strength. Well, I have to say that I don't buy that. I think there are trouble signs below the horizon. Maybe they're not as obvious to some, but you keep sounding that alarm. Because I believe that we've got to take action. ......

[niyad]

2. shheeez, I called it more than a year ago, when I saw the empty houses, the

tremendous foreclosure rate and screwed up economy.

it didn't take a genius to see this coming.

[sdfernando]

3. Same here

I've been telling people that the bottom of the housing market was going to fall out since 2002. so I was off by several years, but that only make the drop all the worse. Didn't take rocket science to see it coming.