Destroying itself from within
...This space does not have length enough to tell how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were so thoroughly hijacked. The accounts given in Reckless Endangerment of executives James Johnson and Franklin Raines, just to pick two examples, are astonishing. These two were/ are monsters of rapaciousness and arrogance. They so brazenly used the truly vast resources of their mortgage retailing to launch public relations campaigns, hire relatives of the politicians who oversaw them, fund lobbyists by the dozens, and orchestrate fake campaigns of "public support" every time two or three brave regulators began the Sisyphean task of calling them to account.

Reckless Endangerment tells us which elected officials did their bidding. If there is ever a Mount Rushmore for hypocrites, the face of Democratic Congressman Barney Frank -Fannie Mae's friend in every sordid scrape (until nothing could be hidden anymore) -should be the first to go up. It was the complaisance and complicity of elected politicians like him that enabled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to achieve the power they did, to violate so utterly their own charters, to defy and slander their regulators (they set rumours afloat that one honest overseer was having "mental problems") as long as the mortgage giants tossed funds into their political kitties, gave them ribbon cutting ceremonies for "minority housing," and greased their re-election efforts....