Is Altruism Destroying America?

"It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.  So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other."[1]

"Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. . . . The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good, and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate.”[2]

In the opinion of our most powerful leaders, sacrifice is the most fundamental virtue, the very virtue that makes us special, human, concerned and partakers in the acts of God.  For the leader of the free world, sacrifice is what we need to improve the economy, improve the lives of others and make this a better planet. For the Leader of the Universe, sacrifice will get us to heavenly bliss.  Yet, have we asked whether sacrifice actually produces any good at all?  A virtue that is practiced by so many, so often and so fervently must surely have resulted in a better world.  Has it?  Well, look at it.

If we consider what these two men have said about the value and importance of sacrifice, otherwise known as altruism, I think the most important question is “what does altruism mean in practice?”  If we develop a new spirit of sacrifice, what does that say about our past spirit of sacrifice?  Does it mean that we haven’t sacrificed enough and that we should work harder for others than we have?  Just what is enough sacrifice and who is the authority on that?  When is it time for a person to stop sacrificing and start being concerned about his own well-being?  Just who should be the beneficiary of sacrifice, a person who has no choice about his problems, who is trying to be self-sufficient or the professional parasites dredged up by politicians? 

What about the person struggling to send three children to college?  Or the person who is wondering how he will get the money to buy a new tire for his car that might save the lives of his children?  Maybe after working 70 hour weeks, each of these people should join ACORN and agitate in bank lobbies for more loans for the poor.  Or should they drag their tired and worn bodies to a local soup kitchen to feed homeless people while they wonder when they will have their next meal.

I don’t know how Obama or God would answer these questions but I suspect that there are many millions of people already working hard and doing their best to take care of their families – who are now being asked by these smiling faces to work harder and give more for the sake of the “less fortunate”.  Perhaps they might say that the new spirit of sacrifice should extend only toward people that have too much money and that rich people should allow the government to raise their taxes so it can help the poor.  Yet, who has the moral authority to decide how much money is “too much”?  Which “mere man” has the moral authority to point the government’s gun at an individual and insist that he pay this percent or that percent from his income?  And what are the consequences for the economy of the use of that money? 

What does a person with “too much” money do with that money when he is allowed to keep it?  Most of the time, he invests it in a bank.  The bank then loans it to people who buy homes, cars, start businesses, etc., all of which have the result of creating jobs for people.  Isn’t the government’s forced sacrifice then hurting the very people it claims to be helping?  Isn’t it true that every dollar taken for charity to feed a poor person today is a dollar that would make it possible, through a job, to feed that person indefinitely?  Isn’t it true that a new job created by government costs more than a job created by the private economy?  And isn’t it also true that in order to have that new job created by government, you are destroying one or more other jobs in the private economy?

But sacrifice is our most fundamental virtue according to Obama and God.  How could it be that it hurts people?  If one dollar can have this kind of effect on the life of one poor person, how much harm could be done by trillions of dollars taken from the rich to help the poor?  How many millions of jobs are being lost down the abyss of sacrifice?  Worse, how many professional parasites are merely living off of the dole in order to survive because they don’t want to earn their keep?

What do these job losses make of this “new spirit” that our President exhorts us to have?  What do they make of government corruption, government grants and government programs that are nothing more than excuses that make it possible for politicians to skim money from the treasury in order to enrich themselves and their friends?  Certainly, he would say that these trillions represent an “investment” in the future.  He, in his singular wisdom, will decide how this money is to be spent; such as in jobs fixing bridges that do not need fixed, building new bridges where they are not necessary, laying fiber optic cable where profit-making businesses would not lay them, creating jobs for people who have never been productive and giving a tax reduction to people who do not pay taxes.  There is no end to the “good” that President Obama can do with the money of the people who have too much of it.  Just give it to him; then we’ll see how great and brilliant he is; all for the greater glory of Obama, our supreme leader.

Yet, is this politics as usual?  Not really, we have now a new situation that threatens to destroy America.  I call it “philosophy as usual.”  It is a technique of deception for which most Americans do not have an answer.  They cannot refuse to do anything that ‘helps people’, makes their lives better, ensures that they are treated fairly and keeps greedy capitalists from stealing from them and exploiting them.  It is not just redistribution, communism, socialism, fascism and all the other isms that have redistributed money and created corrupt government institutions in the past; it is altruism…sacrifice…that is the problem. 

Today, Americans are exhorted to get together, stick together, work harder, think of others, help others and ensure that everyone has a chance for a meal, a home, an education, health care; all provided by government, all examples of community services, all “good intentions.”  How can they say ‘No!” to this orgy of spending that does so much good?

I’ve noticed that some prominent people who are complaining about this orgy of spending, some conservatives, some talking heads, are wondering if there is something wrong, not with government but with themselves.  They are paralyzed by their own premises.  Why do they dissent against a government that wants to do so much good?  They have no answer because they are also our most generous givers to charity and isn’t that the same thing that Obama is trying to accomplish; charity towards others done by the government? 

What they are missing is that this new ‘philosophy as usual’ is not about helping people; it is a con game practiced by professional parasites who know that they’ve got America by the throat and there is nothing to stop them.  This ‘change’ that America supposedly voted for is about taking from productive citizens their earnings, their savings, their futures and their retirement.  It is about exploiting the working people of this country for the sake of a bottomless pit where there is no good being done for the intended ‘victims’, where the only benefit goes toward those who want to rule a nation of slaves.  How can you say “No” to a socialist state when that socialist state is doing so much “good”?

In fact, it is not a better world that Obama and the Pope want – even with all this sacrificing going on – or should I say, because of all this sacrificing going on.  Whenever you hear calls for self-sacrifice, you invariably are never told that such sacrificing is working.  In fact, you are told that even more sacrificing is necessary.  Is it possible that altruism (sacrifice) is destroying America rather than making it a better world?  Is it possible that America is paralyzed and can do nothing about the mass looting that is going on today because it has accepted the principle of altruism, self-sacrifice, and that it cannot fight back until it rejects the notion of altruism as good?

Notice that in the quotes above, both Obama and Pope Benedict tie self-sacrifice to other concepts that are known to be good.  Patriotism, responsibility, freedom, self-discipline are all good; yet each of them does have a beneficial result to which we can point.  Patriotism leads to respect for our country, respect for the Constitution and the justice that is part of the American ideal.  Responsibility means accepting one’s role in the world as a parent, leader and individual.  It leads to good acts and tangible expressions of one’s love for those that are close to one.  Freedom is the idea that the individual has sovereign rights and that such freedom creates a dynamic and thriving country where people can pursue their own values and dreams.  Self-discipline relates to the controlled effort needed to accomplish high values. 

But sacrifice, altruism, seems out of place among those virtues because it does not involve, like these other virtues, the individual acting for himself; recognizing reality and succeeding.  Altruism relates to giving up the values one has created for the sake of other people.  It does not have that aura of virtue associated with the other virtues because through sacrifice the individual loses his production; he loses part of his life.  Is it possible that altruism does not belong among these values because it is negative and bad for the individual? 

Altruism is one idea that never has had to be defended by reason.  All you have to do is point to “victims” and demand that something is done to help them.  That coercion (government force) is “required” to fix the problem; and that this coercion creates new victims is swept aside in the frenzy to “do the right thing.”  In fact, there are two sides to altruism: 1) the appeal to pity that advertises the “victims” who need help and 2) the requirement of self-sacrifice – the appeal to pity felt for victims is supposed to justify the demand for self-sacrifice – which harms and sometimes destroys the industrious, the productive and the honest.  This is a con game.

The appeal to pity is the method of deception used by altruists to engender emotional reaction about the plight of the supposed victims.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis was created by this double attack on America.  Certain, low-income or no-income people were considered to be worthy of owning homes. They were considered to be victims of an economic system that demanded they be good credit risks before they take out loans.  This was supposedly the fault of a racist capitalist system; and the available statistics “proved” that this was true.  It was irrelevant to the parasites at ACORN that these poor could not afford to pay for these homes.  The lack of home ownership by the poor was a matter that needed to be fixed and the people who had put their savings into banks and mortgage companies were required to pay for the homes by means of adjustable rate mortgages.

The problem for altruism and why it is evil is that it demands sacrificial victims.  As with the primordial religious rituals, the collective must take the life of the best in order that it may propitiate the gods.  If the sacrificial victims refused to cooperate, then they were forced against their will.  The lie in this scam is told when the advocates of sacrifice tell the sacrificial lambs that they should want to give their life-blood for the sake of the collective.  If the collective demands it, who are they, mere individuals, to disagree?  They will be rewarded in heaven because they are doing the right thing in the eyes of God or the government.  They are being good citizens.  But they are either dead or (in modern times) without the product of their labor.

Today, there are groups in our country who believe that sacrifice of the “rich” for the sake of the “poor” is a good thing; that our society should be based on this principle and that our government should seek to violate or disregard the rights of individuals to their property because, they think, that rich people have stolen their wealth from the poor.  Their propaganda assumes the right of the government to confiscate property.  This is altruism on the march, the very idea that has destroyed countless nations and created significant poverty and starvation.  Examples like the Soviet Union, Communist China and countless other countries have proven that this principle, because it systematically destroys the accumulation of capital, is the surest way to destroy an economy and create poverty.  That does not stop ACORN and Barack Obama, Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

If you have studied our present economic crisis, you know that it was precipitated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis where a large number of loans were issued to people who could not pay their mortgage payments.  In addition, the worthless mortgages had been bundled fraudulently into investment packages that were bought by financial institutions to populate investment portfolios owned by retirees and other individuals.  When it was discovered that many of the mortgages had been defaulted upon, the value of thousands of portfolios dropped along with confidence in our economy, precipitating sharp drops in the amount of equity held in some of our largest banks.  When these banks contracted the amount of lending they could do, this forced many of those banks into possible bankruptcy.

What most economists have refused to tell you is that this was plunder.  Investors put real money into those portfolios and bank accounts.  They expected a real return.  Where is that money now?  Check the Cayman Islands. 

Once the government realized that American banks and mortgage companies had been plundered, they reasoned that the only thing they could do to prevent a total collapse of the American economy was to pump trillions of dollars back into the system so that money could continue to flow.  Where did this money come from; from the savings left in the accounts of American citizens (by means of printing more money) whose portfolios had already dropped by as much as 50%.  This means that Americans have been forced to sacrifice their money twice; first by the sub-prime crisis created by government and, second by the printing of money by government that took more value out of their savings and incomes. 

We cannot ignore the fact that this crisis was created by government intervention in the economy using altruism as justification.  Politicians who wanted government to “encourage” more lending to low income people established policies that over time led to serious dislocations in the housing market.  Let’s analyze these interventions to see the altruism behind them.

“Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

For the first thirty years following its inception, Fannie Mae held a veritable monopoly over the secondary mortgage market. In 1968, due to fiscal pressures created by the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson privatized Fannie Mae in order to remove it from the national budget. At this point, Fannie Mae began operating as a GSE, generating profits for stock holders while enjoying the benefits of exemption from taxation and oversight as well as implied government backing. In order to prevent any further monopolization of the market, a second GSE known as Freddie Mac was created in 1970. Currently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control about 90 percent of the nation's secondary mortgage market.

GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, with their combination of private enterprise and public backing have experienced a period of unprecedented financial growth over the past few decades. The current assets of these two companies combine for a total that is 45 percent greater than that of the nation's largest bank.

On the other hand, their combined debt is equal to 46 percent of the current national debt. It is this combination of rapid growth and over leveraging that has lead to the current concerns of Congress, the Justice Department and the SEC with regards to the financial practices of these GSEs.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the only two Fortune 500 companies that are not required to inform the public about any financial difficulties that they may be having. In the event that there was some sort of financial collapse within either of these companies, U.S. taxpayers could be held responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding debts. A recent investigation by the Justice Department and the SEC into the accounting practices at Freddie Mac revealed accounting errors in the amount of 4.5 to 4.7 billion dollars and resulted in the termination of three of the company's top executives. Ongoing investigations by Congress, (in) particular the House Finance Services subcommittee that oversees the activity of GSEs, will determine the future role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the secondary mortgage market that they dominate.”[3]

This article was written in 2003 and, in hindsight, indicates that Congress was aware of the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  They certainly must have also known that a collapse of these institutions could wreak havoc on our economy.  What were they thinking?  Why did they so cavalierly dismiss any efforts to reform these quasi-governmental organizations?  I submit that it was because they thought that it was more important to help people get houses than it was to fix the corruption they had let loose in Fannie and Freddie.  The idea of using government to redistribute money from rich to poor was a way for them to practice their altruistic philosophy; a way for them to “do good.”  Besides those people in their new houses would vote for the Democrats who fostered this redistribution. 

But we can’t blame this all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  There were other players working whose altruistic goals led to the collapse of our economy.  The next nail in the coffin was the Community Reinvestment Act. 

Roger Kimball:

“The original Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law in 1977 by Jimmy Carter. Its purpose, in a nutshell, was to require banks to provide credit to “under-served populations,” i.e., those with poor credit. The buzz word was “affordable mortgages,” e.g., mortgages with low teaser-rates, which required the borrower to put no money down, which required the borrower to pay only the interest for a set number of years, etc.”[4]

Consider the practical consequences of altruism here.  Where mortgage companies and banks wanted to make loans that were more secure, that is, loans that would be paid back at higher interest rates, the government “encouraged” them to make riskier loans that would make less return with adjustable rate mortgages.  They were forced to engage in poor business practices that reduced their profits.  A banker has to strive to get the best deal for the bank and his depositors; not give their money away in high risk loans.  Their need to make a profit is not evil nor does it exploit the poor.  It ensures that depositors keep doing business with the bank and it ensures that money is used to provide a real return by bringing back real value.  Not only is this good for the bank but it is good for the poor who will benefit from new jobs and earn the ability to actually improve their credit ratings and obtain a house that they can afford.

A huge economy like that in the U.S. often absorbs bad ideas easily because of the tremendous amount of production being done in the private sector.  This constant growth of production has always dwarfed the efforts by government to redistribute a mere few million dollars.  If the money skimmed by a government program and its intrusions represent a small part of the overall production in the economy and if the economy is even relatively strong, socialist ideas can exist with minimal damage to the economy yet with major damage to the lives of thousands of people.  The practical result of altruism is decaying neighborhoods, people with no motivation, drugs, crime, gangs and corruption.

When one person is forced to loan his money to a high risk borrower this represents an altruistic transfer of money from one person to another. The borrower gets a loan upon which he will default and a home that he will be allowed to keep. The lender, thinking that the loan is backed by the government, loses his investment through a drop in the value of his portfolio or through lower interest rates paid by the bank that must cover the loss in some way.  This represents fraud perpetrated on the investor who would otherwise invest his money in a more secure and profitable way. 

The Community Reinvestment Act was intended to prove the government’s dedication to helping people by making more money available for home purchase.  I’m sure that some economists knew that the Act would “hurt” banks…but, they thought, not too much.  The end justified the means.  But the end was not homes for more people but votes for politicians.  Further, these lending institutions did not see these loans as drains on their profits; they saw them as government backed loans and good PR.  They were proof that the lenders in local communities were committed to strong communities and home ownership. 

Yet, the CRA’s negative impact was minimal.  Housing prices were rising and all would work as long as there wasn’t a major economic downturn.   And as long as the economy was strong, the CRA, as it was originally drafted, was not a major drain on the economy.  That changed with President Bill Clinton:

“In 1995, Bill Clinton’s administration made various changes to the CRA, increasing “access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities,” i.e., it provided for the securitization, i.e. public underwriting, of what everyone now calls “sub-prime mortgages.”

Bottom line? It forced banks to issue $1 trillion in sub-prime mortgages.  $1 trillion, i.e., a thousand billion dollars in sub-prime, i.e., risky, mortgages, in order to push this latest example of social engineering.

But wait: how did it force banks to do this? Easy. Introduce a federal requirement that banks make the loans or face penalties. As Howard Husock, writing in City Journal way back in 2000 observed: “Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A’s for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count.” Way back in 1994, for example, Barack Obama sued Citibank on behalf of a client who charged that the bank “systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods.”[5]

Now the screws were starting turn.  Mortgage companies and banks were put on notice that they were “required” by government to issue “questionable” mortgages to people who might not otherwise qualify.  The government had decided that it can “encourage” businesses to issues these loans; that in its estimation, the poor “deserved” these loans; that lending institutions are engaged in systematic racism that must be stopped.  Certainly all previous programs to encourage home ownership were examples of “forced altruism” but now we have massive government coercion imposed upon lending institutions in an effort to get those loans out there – to help the poor (voters) by making $1trillion dollars available.  Poof!  Magic!  And they all lived happily ever after.

Notice that Barack Obama was part of this movement.  One could say that he is one of the architects of it.  By this time, he had already been a trainer at ACORN teaching the methods that this organization would use against banks and lending institutions.  One such method was to threaten these organizations with “exposure” and law suits if they did not loosen their lending standards.  Was this an intentional effort to destroy one of the pillars of our society?  Possibly not, but it was certainly a major play of the race card.  It was an example of forced altruism practiced by an individual who would have a profound impact on ACORN as well as on our government.  At this point, few defended the banks, few saw the danger ahead; and most saw this as an opportunity to altruistically redistribute money from rich investors and business executives to the poor.  The tentacles of altruism are beginning to squeeze our economy.

To understand the big picture, we must also point out that the professional parasites at ACORN and Obama were married at this early stage for the sake of raising seed money for more aggressive efforts to “socialize” our country.  Their goal was to agitate on behalf of the poor.  Their basic philosophy was altruism, self-sacrifice and a socialist takeover of the economy. At that time, Obama and William Ayers were involved in efforts to direct foundation and government money to ACORN so it could do its work and build its grass roots organization.  If directing grant and government money to a political organization is not corrupt, I don’t know what is.  Once again, they are hiding their motive of influencing the government and business under the banner of helping the poor.

“Barack Obama and his associated organizations, in particular Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, ACORN and other individuals associated with these companies are directly responsible for the financial crisis.  "Most significantly, 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. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn't seem to have come out of it too badly.

As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.”[6]”[7]

Consider that ACORN, an organization supposedly engaged in voter registration, an effort that should be non-partisan, while also endorsing Barack Obama, was trained by Obama on how to shake down banks and other institutions.  That no one considers this questionable is an indication of how protected Obama is from the media’s eye.  To have Obama direct money to ACORN, to have ACORN endorse Obama’s political campaigns, to have Obama steer campaign money to ACORN before the election, to have Obama as a master mind of the sub-prime crisis, should raise eyebrows.  These issues have not been raised because it is assumed that Obama was not seeking to destroy the economy in those years; he was merely trying to “do good” for the poor.  (Don’t forget that ACORN was started by people who once tried to bring down the welfare system of New York by increasing the welfare roles) Yet, who benefitted from the economic disaster that magically happened while he was running for President?  Could this disaster have been avoided?  Sure, if the Democrats had allowed for more oil drilling when oil was in short supply. This fiasco, while the Democrats were on vacation, caused millions of Americans to restrict their buying and their payment of mortgages which started an avalanche that reverberated through out the economy.  Sure, if the Democrats had fixed the corruption at Fannie and Freddie years before in order to stop the scamming going on. 

To understand the damage that Obama and his minions have done to our country, it is necessary that we understand how a free economy should function and how these “agitators” strove to destroy one of the pillars of capitalism which is the free flow of capital.  Man survives by the use of his mind.  When the individual is free economically, and when his Constitutional rights are protected by government, he is free to pursue his happiness without fear of expropriation or other violations of his rights.  If the individual decides to buy a product, he should pay the price that the seller wants; not the price that government adds to the product.  If an investor wants to put his money where it will yield the highest return, he should not be forced to put his money where the government insists. 

When there is no government intervention in the economy, people are responsible for making their own economic decisions and for moving forward in their lives.  The result is a thriving economy where innovation constantly improves the lives of people, where large amounts of investment capital make possible large production projects with thousands of jobs, where the lives of millions are noticeably improved on a continuing basis.  A fully free capitalist system is one where the rich get richer and the formerly poor get richer.  There is no trickle down here; everyone benefits from free trade.

The historical enemies and destroyers of capitalism are Marxism and socialism whose proponents have sought to implement altruism as the foundation of government.  The lie in these philosophies is that capitalism exploits the people to their detriment.  Early proponents of Marxism and socialism promised to fix the so-called “inequalities” created by capitalism by taking over the factories of the capitalists and giving them to the “exploited” masses.  In America today, those who favor socialist ideas, no longer proclaim an allegiance to socialism.  They declare that they are practical people who will do what they must to ensure an “equitable society” (a euphemism for socialism) – while they still adhere to the lies and fallacies that Marxists shouted about capitalism.  Their methods are not violent overthrow but steadily increasing economic interventions, laws and regulations.  The goal, however, is the same, to take over the means of production and skim the profits, not for the sake of the “exploited masses” but for the sake of power. 

What these socialist exploiters never tell you is that they would not exist, nor would they be necessary, if we had a truly free society where it was forbidden for the government to interfere in the economy.  All government intervention is theft that takes money from the productive in our society, using false charges against capitalism, and redistributes it to government and corrupt politicians, corrupt businessmen and professional parasites.  There is no benefit for the productive through government intervention.  For instance, rent controls steal money from the property owners and destroy housing.  Coerced unionization (empowered by government) extorts money from workers and companies for the sake of union officials, raises wages that raise prices and force businesses to go out of business or leave the country which destroys industries and jobs here.  Government regulations and compliance standards in many industries make entry into given industries more difficult and enable entrenched and mediocre industries to stay in business while innovation and new companies are forced out.  This also reduces the availability of jobs and better products.  Government meddling in the medical industry causes doctors to leave the country, creates shortages of proper medical care and restricts innovation and improved technologies that would otherwise save more lives.  Government grants create huge non-productive boondoggles for so-called scientists and professional grant recipients and divert money from free market R&D.  They also create products and services that the free economy does not need and does not purchase.  Government jobs destroy productive jobs and create an entitlement attitude among government workers who don’t have to be productive.  Financial regulations increase costs for small financial institutions, increase the cost of compliance and reporting and drive smaller companies out of business.  Price controls reduce profits for some products and eventually force companies that cannot adjust to lower prices out of business.  Restrictions on oil production raise energy prices for individuals and businesses; raise the prices for other products and destroy whole industries such as the auto industry.  Government nationalization of any company destroys that company.  Government ownership of utility companies raises prices and results in less efficient energy production which raises prices for and reduces the availability of other products.  Any time you reduce the ability of the free market to be as productive as possible, you do harm to people.  Regulations regulate…freedom liberates people to be productive and make their own moral decisions…rather than to have the government make decisions for others.  Do you wonder why Obama says we have tried capitalism and it has failed?  Perhaps it is he who is making it fail.

When ACORN and Barack Obama came on to the scene, their basic tack was that the laws that governed lending companies were bad, racist and punishing the poor.  ACORN, in particular, sought to shake down banks through protests and methods of civil disobedience. 

“The banks that ACORN has shaken down refuse to discuss their contributions to a political organization that, to put it mildly, is hostile to free enterprise. But one prominent consultant to the financial industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, admits: “The banks know they are being held up, but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Some of ACORN’s fellow community activists are even blunter. “ACORN knows that corporate America has no starch in their shorts and, therefore, what they try to do is buy peace from groups that agitate against them,” says Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a community-action group that stresses moral regeneration and individual responsibility rather than government handouts. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN.”[8]

Who are those banks? 

“In addition to the millions of taxpayer dollars AHC has taken in, one of the organization’s tax returns shows private donations of more than $4 million from major banks. Whistleblower documents covering AHC’s revenue sources from July 1, 2004 through June 31, 2005 included:

• ACORN (Citibank Partnership)...............................$127,500

• ACORN (Citibank Partnership)...............................$240,000

• ACORN (Freddie Mac)..............................................$35,000

• Ameriquest Mortgage................................................$130,000

• Fannie Mae (for Broadband).......................................$20,000

• Fannie Mae FYE 2005–2006....................................$100,000

• JP Morgan Chase 2005–2006................................$1,000,000

• Bank of America 2005–2006.................................$1,390,000

• Washington Mutual..................................................$175,000

• M & T Bank.............................................................$150,000

• United Way (American Dream)...................................$15,000”[9]

Don’t forget the “relationship” that ACORN has with Countrywide and many other organizations that consider their “cooperation” with ACORN to be the “cost of doing business.”

“They spent three years going after Wells Fargo, a bank that had the highest lending standards and highest credit rating in the industry. Wells has never originated a pay-option ARM and did very few subprime loans at any time. ACORN protested at Wells branches all over the country and constantly accused it of discriminatory lending practices. They got nasty articles in local newspapers. They sent people to the home of Wells' CEO and intimidated his family.

Finally, Wells buckled under the PR pressure and signed an agreement with ACORN.”[10]

This “shakedown” practice has put many lending institutions into a precarious situation and they felt they should accept the blame for being racist and also try to prove to the nation that they were good citizens.  They had no problem giving bad loans to people who might not be able to pay them back so long as the government backed up the loans.  So altruism, the philosophy of Fannie, Freddie, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and ACORN created a situation where it was more important to give people homes than to make good loans.  Standards were loosened for the sake of the poor.  No one questioned the bad investments or the fact that altruism was creating those bad investments.  But the question is how much of an impact did ACORN’s shakedown practices (in other words altruism) have on the sub-prime crisis? 

""You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.”[11]

The National Review Article by Stanley Kurtz continues:

“At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.

I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.”[12]

Consider that the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac account for the diversion of huge amounts of money to home loans, the total of which represents a major portion of the available capital in our country and that a collapse of the value of these loans (because their was no money to pay them back) has contributed to a drop in the stock market (to date) of about 50% and you can see that the sub-prime crisis is the very cause of our current situation.  This is altruism on the march, protesting, threatening, intimidating and succeeding in inserting itself into the heart of mortgage financing – creating the very crisis that is now blamed on Wall Street greed.  ACORN has managed a national effort to “shakedown” banks and precipitate one of the largest transfers of money that has ever taken place in the history of the world.  For every lower interest rate reduction; for every loan granted to a poor credit risk; for every home turned over to lower-income people, a theft was being perpetrated that profoundly affected our nation’s economic health.  Is altruism destroying America?

“In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.

Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” ACORN has long employed Washington-based lobbyists who understand very well how the legislative game is played. ACORN’s national lobbyists may encourage and benefit from the militant tactics of their base, but in the halls of congress they play the game with smooth sophistication. The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy.

Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. While the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act did call on banks to increase lending in poor and minority neighborhoods, its exact requirements were vague, and therefore open to a good deal of regulatory interpretation. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” (and Obama idol), Saul Alinsky.

At first, ACORN’s anti-bank actions were relatively few in number. However, under a provision of the 1989 savings and loan bailout pushed by liberal Democratic legislators, like Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy, lenders were required to compile public records of mortgage applicants by race, gender, and income. Although the statistics produced by these studies were presented in highly misleading ways, groups like ACORN were able to use them to embarrass banks into lowering credit standards. At the same time, a wave of banking mergers in the early 1990's provided an opening for ACORN to use CRA to force lending changes. Any merger could be blocked under CRA, and once ACORN began systematically filing protests over minority lending, a formerly toothless set of regulations began to bite.”[13]

According to Kurtz, in these early days, once ACORN had shaken down a bank, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would still not accept these loans because of the poor credit risks that the borrowers represented.

“So the eighties taught ACORN that a high-pressure, Alinskyite outside strategy wouldn’t be enough. Their Washington lobbyists would have to bring inside pressure on the government to undercut credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only then would local banks consider making loans available to customers with bad credit histories, low wages, virtually nothing in the bank, and even bankruptcies on record.

Democrats and ACORN
As early as 1987, ACORN began pressuring Fannie and Freddie to review their standards, with modest results. By 1989, ACORN had lured Fannie Mae into the first of many “pilot projects” designed to help local banks lower credit standards. But it was all small potatoes until the serious pressure began in early 1991. At that point, Democratic Senator Allan Dixon convened a Senate subcommittee hearing at which an ACORN representative gave key testimony. It’s probably not a coincidence that Dixon, like Obama, was an Illinois Democrat, since Chicago has long been a stronghold of ACORN influence.

Dixon gave credibility to ACORN’s accusations of loan bias, although these claims of racism were disputed by Missouri Republican, Christopher Bond. ACORN’s spokesman strenuously complained that his organization’s efforts to relax local credit standards were being blocked by requirements set by the secondary market. Dixon responded by pressing Fannie and Freddie to do more to relax those standards — and by promising to introduce legislation that would ensure it. At this early stage, Fannie and Freddie walked a fine line between promising to do more, while protesting any wholesale reduction of credit requirements.

By July of 1991, ACORN’s legislative campaign began to bear fruit. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “Housing activists have been pushing hard to improve housing for the poor by extracting greater financial support from the country’s two highly profitable secondary mortgage-market companies. Thanks to the help of sympathetic lawmakers, it appeared...that they may succeed.” The Tribune went on to explain that House Democrat Henry Gonzales had announced that Fannie and Freddie had agreed to commit $3.5 billion to low-income housing in 1992 and 1993, in addition to a just-announced $10 billion “affordable housing loan program” by Fannie Mae. The article emphasizes ACORN pressure and notes that Fannie and Freddie had been fighting against the plan as recently as a week before agreement was reached. Fannie and Freddie gave in only to stave off even more restrictive legislation floated by congressional Democrats.”[14]

“Another factor working in ACORN’s favor was that its increasing success with local banks turned those banks into allies in the battle with Fannie and Freddie. Precisely because ACORN’s local pressure tactics were working, banks themselves now wanted Fannie and Freddie to loosen their standards still further, so as to buy up still more of the high-risk loans they’d made at ACORN’s insistence. So by 1993, a grand alliance of ACORN, national Democrats, and local bankers looking for someone to lessen the risks imposed on them by CRA and ACORN were uniting to pressure Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards still further.

At this point, both ACORN and the Clinton administration were working together to impose large numerical targets or “set asides” (really a sort of poor and minority loan quota system) on Fannie and Freddie. ACORN called for at least half of Fannie and Freddie loans to go to low-income customers. At first the Clinton administration offered a set-aside of 30 percent. But eventually ACORN got what it wanted. In early 1994, the Clinton administration floated plans for committing $1 trillion in loans to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, which would amount to about half of Fannie Mae’s business by the end of the decade. Wall Street Analysts attributed Fannie Mae’s willingness to go along with the change to the need to protect itself against still more severe “congressional attack.” News reports also highlighted praise for the change from ACORN’s head lobbyist, Deepak Bhargava.

This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.”[15]

“Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.”[16]

After telling us in 1995 that the Clinton Administration’s new policy to broaden home ownership would not cost the taxpayers a single penny, you must wonder what the government’s largesse, its use of lower credit standards to redistribute income, will eventually cost us.  The authors of this mess, including and especially Barack Obama have escaped scrutiny.  If they didn’t do it on purpose, they certainly didn’t understand the free market and how it protects peoples’ money from fraudulent use.  Selfishness, the hateful virtue for Barack Obama was his enemy and he thought it was evil for banks to be selfish.  And his effort, witting or unwitting, to destroy lending practices also destroyed our economy.  In fact, Obama and his professional parasites are the very individuals most responsible for the economic crisis that they are now responsible for guiding us through. 

One can say that they were counting on the scheme to keep working.  As long as property values kept going up, these organizations, the investors and the people who bought the mortgages would continue to make gains.  But I think the real reason they thought the scheme would work was because they felt that their philosophy of government was working; that the idea of allowing home mortgages to go to the poor was good for the economy and good for their own coffers.  It was a validation of their philosophy of government, a proof of their belief that altruism, helping the poor, works economically.

Yet, the economy collapsed.  The first to be blamed for the collapse was not the quasi-governmental organizations that created and managed this scam but the old standby “greed” and “lack of oversight.”  But is this true or are we being bamboozled by the very people whose philosophies have created the situation? 

The principle of altruism is still Obama’s guiding principle and he has promised more of the same that created the present situation.  In the guise of a program to “stimulate” the economy, he has created the biggest altruistic “giveaway” of money to radical and socialist leaning organizations in the history of our nation.

President Obama’s first “stimulus program” will redistribute even more money from the productive by creating unproductive jobs, windfalls, boondoggles and probably outright fraud by the many organizations waiting in the wings for their political payback from Obama.  Under Obama, tax policy is being written that will give checks to people who do not pay taxes.  Jobs programs intended to stimulate our economy take money from productive citizens in order to provide make-shift jobs for people who will probably not be very productive. 

In short, the sub-prime crisis has shown that altruism is a failure at taking care of people.  A turkey dinner, a block of cheese or an adjustable rate mortgage won’t get it.  A check comprised of constantly devalued money won’t take care of anyone’s future.  In fact, the sub-prime crisis is more than a failure of altruism; it is an example of how poor epistemology can destroy a society.  Few saw the altruism at work in giving mortgages to people who could not afford them; some called is redistribution and others called it socialism.  Likewise, when Hitler proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan race and preached that Germans should sacrifice themselves to the “Volk” he was not just preaching National Socialism or fascism; he was preaching altruism.  When Marx said “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” he wasn’t just preaching communism, he was preaching altruism.  And when Obama declares that redistributing the production of the rich to the poor is the right thing to do, he is not just preaching socialism or fascism, he is preaching altruism.  When the conservatives seek to answer Obama with Jesus, they will lose the political fight because they are not just preaching theocracy, they are preaching altruism.  Whether you call Obama’s pet projects spending programs, pork or ear marks, what they are is altruism.  And the reason that Obama gets away with his atrocities and violations of individual rights is because there is no one on the horizon with the courage to challenge altruism; to say “Enough.”  All Obama has to do is give the liberals in Congress a free hand to spend as much as they want and the conservatives will say “if you are going to spend all that money, we might was well do it too.”  People argue against “socialism” while Obama declares that he is merely doing the right thing; that his good intentions justify his bringing us to the edge of disaster and that anyone who is against him is part of the past.  Obama’s advancing of the principles of altruism, no matter what political system you call it, is the sure way to destroy progress, create poverty and collapse economies. 

Barack Obama is an altruist by conviction.  His entire election campaign was based upon the idea of income redistribution and one can be certain that altruism will guide virtually every policy of his administration from domestic to foreign.  This is because he has accepted the notion that altruism works, that it is moral and that it can be used to gain power.  We can be certain that the policies that animate ACORN will continue to steal money from productive citizens. 

We need to understand that altruism is not about helping the helpless; altruism is about harming the productive and violating their individual rights.   If you don’t believe this, observe the hatred with which many altruists criticize people who are self-sufficient.  This vitriol shows the pleasure that such people derive from the denigration of individual accomplishment and excellence.  Notice government officials whose jobs it is to redistribute money when they scream that government benefits should only go to those who have no skills and “have never had a chance.”  Seldom, in the pronouncements of these people, do you find a defense of the individual, his accomplishments or even of his right to keep what he has earned. 

Professional parasites like ACORN who make outrageous demands on our society (from our productive citizens) are the altruistic storm troopers, the practitioners of plunder that Obama has turned loose on society.  They, and other groups, along with leftist politicians, will become ever more demanding about the “need” of our society to move ever faster toward bigger and bigger government redistribution programs.  The tipping point for the decline of our civilization was the sub-prime crisis and you can be sure that Obama will keep his finger on the scale.

Certainly Obama will give speeches about the value of hard work and self-sufficiency in a cynical effort to make us think he is a normal President who admires the Constitution – while he designates “Czars” to manage our economy and our personal lives.  While the nation sinks further under the demands of altruism and while lawlessness, joblessness and starvation become the order of the day, Obama will try to win the next election on the backs of the productive who won’t vote for him.  For every big problem caused by Obama’s policies, Executive Orders and legislative initiatives, you can be sure that every “solution” offered will be more of the same…sacrifice, altruism and theft.  What can you expect from a plunderer?

Is altruism destroying our country?  The answer is “You bet it is.”