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NR: Obama Hits Suburbs After Election
President Obama repeatedly assures us that this will be his “year of action.” He’ll boldly issue executive orders because “we can’t wait” for Congress. This has meant a lot of talk about carbon regulation and campus sexual assault, issues that rally the Democratic base in advance of the midterm elections.
Yet not a word has been heard of late about a truly transformative Obama executive action, his rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH). That rule will push Americans into living how and where the federal government wants. It promises to gut the ability of suburbs to set their own zoning codes. It will press future population growth into tiny, densely-packed high-rise zones around public transportation, urbanizing suburbs and Manhattanizing cities.
You won’t see a more ambitious Obama administration initiative than this. Yet Obama never discusses AFFH. Although a preliminary version of the rule was released in July of 2013, the president didn’t mention it in his State of the Union address. The controversial rule was the subject of a Weekly Standard cover, yet as far as I can tell neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has ever done a story on AFFH.
Now it emerges that the Obama administration released its planned regulatory agenda quietly on Friday, just ahead of the three-day holiday weekend. The object, of course, was to minimize press coverage of controversial rules like AFFH.
As I read it, the long-delayed issuing of the finalized version of AFFH is nowscheduled for December of 2014, right after the midterms. The Obama administration seems to specialize in short-circuiting democratic accountability. Obama’s reelection bid would likely have failed had he not delayed the implementation of Obamacare until after 2012. His scheme to nationalize Common Core was developed out of stimulus funding, with no public debate. Now Obama plans to launch a housing initiative dedicated to gutting suburban independence and urbanizing America, but only after the midterms.
I can’t think of an issue more worthy of public debate and discussion in advance of the 2014 midterm election than the AFFH rule and the Obama administration’s “regionalist” housing policies. You can see dry runs for what Obama hopes to do with his new housing rule in recent planning initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Twin Cities. This is a hugely ambitious program.
As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including theirSocial Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy.
FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning document for 2013-17 describes the bureau as monitoring 95 percent of all mortgage transactions.
FHFA officials claim the database is essential to conducting a monthly mortgage survey required by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and to help it prepare an annual report forCongress.
Critics, however, question the need for such a “vast database” for simple reporting purposes.
In a May 15 letter to FHFA Director Mel Watt and CFPB Director Richard Cordray, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, charged, “this expansion represents an unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of ordinary Americans.”
Crapo is the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Hensarling is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
Critics also warn the new database will be vulnerable to cyber attacks that could put private information about millions of consumers at risk. They also question the agency’s authority to collect such information.
Earlier this year, Cordray tried to assuage concerned lawmakers during a Jan. 28 hearing of Hensarling’s panel, saying repeatedly the database will only contain “aggregate” information with no personal identifiers.
But under the April register notice, the database expansion means it will include a host of data points, including a mortgage owner’s name, address, Social Security number, all credit card and other loan information and account balances.
The database will also encompass a mortgage holder’s entire credit history, including delinquent payments, late payments, minimum payments, high account balances and credit scores, according to the notice.
The two agencies will also assemble “household demographic data,” including racial and ethnic data, gender, marital status, religion, education, employment history, military status, household composition, the number of wage earners and a family’s total wealth and assets.
Only 12 public comments were submitted during the 30-day comment period following the notice’s April 16 publication.
The mortgage database is unprecedented and would collect personal mortgage information on every single-family residential first lien loan issued since 1998. Federal officials will continue updating the database into the indefinite future.
The database held information on at least 10.1 million mortgage owners, according to a July 31, 2013, FHFA and CFPB presentation at an international conference on collateral risk.
FHFA has two contracts with CoreLogic, which boasts that it has “access to industry’s largest most comprehensive active and historical mortgage databases of over 227 million loans.”
Cordray confirmed in his January testimony that CoreLogic had been retained for the national mortgage database.
The credit giant Experian is also involved in the mortgage database project, according to an FHFA official who requested anonymity.
Unfamiliar with UN Agenda 21, and what it has to do with all of this?