Austin Scott: “You know, I'm wondering whether the Republicans are looking at the same America I'm looking at, and that the American…”

“You know, I'm wondering whether the Republicans are looking at the same America I'm looking at, and that the American people are feeling. Between 7,000 and 8,000 American families file for foreclosure every day. While we were up here debating this bill the last day and today over 15,000 American families have filed for foreclosure. We have a crisis. Now, I want to deal with three points here right quick in my 3 minutes. The first one is this: I think it is wrong as wrong can be for the other side to continually blame this crisis on the backs of the American family. Let me read here for a moment from this morning's Hill newspaper, and I hope that you all will read this as well, this article by J. Morton Davis of the Harvard Business School, an economist. He tells you what the cause of this is and who is to blame. Because mortgage originators themselves were not taking any of the risk of holding this paper and were being well paid by providing mortgages to Wall Street banks that were packaging them, they became more aggressive, less demanding of the conditions traditionally required upon them. The mortgage brokers and bankers introduced a whole series of new criteria that made it easier to obtain a mortgage, they introduced nothing down, no equity mortgage, interest-only mortgage, no income, no job requirement as sufficient basis to receive the mortgage. That's why we're in the condition that we're in, not on the backs of the poor American family.”