Democrats have held majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives for four years.

There was a huge red flag that financial hanky-panky was going on in the mortgage market.

It was in 2004, the same year Melissa Bean was elected. Here it is:

Securities and Exchange Commission found that Fannie May had used improper accounting. Fannie Mae was ordered to restate its earnings for the previous four years. This wiped out some $6.3 billion in profits that Fannie had reported but weren’t real.

Liberal Democrats like Bean did nothing to put a stop to reckless mortgage lending. She has sat on the House Financial Services Committee for four years.

People didn’t call it reckless but instead coined the phrase sub-prime.

They were happy to give out mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay back the loans as long as they collected their fees and we the taxpayers got stuck with the bill.

I pointed out how Bean got more than the $465,000 of “independent” campaign expenditures from the National Association of Realtors. She also got direct political monies to her campaign from the Realtors.

Bean took plenty of political money so the mortgage bad-loan money would keep on flowing.

Bean had plenty of green incentives to look the other way and forget to stop abusive practices that left us with a mountain of debt and foreclosures.

The Federal Election Commission shows Bean directly taking:

Melissa Bean

• $27,500 from the American Bankers Association PAC
• $8,000 from Equifax PAC, which does credit reports
• $24,500 from Experian North America Inc PAC (Experian is in the credit report business)
• $25,999 from the Financial Services Roundtable PAC
• $5,000 from the First American Financial Association PAC (First American is in the title insurance business)
• $31,500 from the National Association of Realtors Political Action Committee
• $23,000 from the Mortgage Bankers Association Political Action Committee
• $7,000 from the National Association of Mortgage Brokers
• $24,175 from the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts PAC
• $7,775 from the National Multi Housing Council PAC
• $6,500 from the PMI Mortgage Insurance Company PAC
• $1,000 from the Title Industry PAC
• $25,000 from the Trans Union LLC PAC (Trans Union is in the credit report business)

The above totals $236,949 without listing individual banks heavily in the mortgage business.
Bean politically profited from looking the other way.

It might help explain why she put no reforms of any kind about Freddie Mac and Fannie May into the financial reform law she now grandstands as a wonderful Democrat achievement.

Had Bean stood up for the taxpayers instead of her reaching out with palm facing up for political money, we might not have a glut of foreclosures that has depressed everyone’s home prices.

Bean also took another $34,387 from Fannie Mae ($20,000) and from Freddie Mac ($14,387).

Bean grabbed another $106,322 from Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Countrywide, CNA Financial (into subprime mortgages) and Washington Mutual. Washington Mutual gave Bean thousands in the months before it was seized by the FDIC and became the largest ever bank failure.

How much did this add up to?

To recap

• $465,000 National Association of Realtors “independent” campaign spending for Bean
• $236,949 directly from list detailed above
• $34,387 from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• $10,500 from Sallie Mae
• $106,322 from Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Chase, etc, list detailed out above
• $ 853,858 for the above and
• this doesn’t include securities associations, foreign banks, G.E (G.E. Capital) credit card companies, life insurance companies and mutual funds, for example.

That easily runs more than couple of hundred thousand dollars more.

It is easy to say that Bean allowed the bad mortgage mess.

It got worse while she was adding over a million dollars to her campaign fund.

A coincidence?

Perhaps, but there should have been no surprise when she voted for billions of dollars of bailout monies to the big banks, including big foreign banks.

They got the money, Bean took the campaign contributions and we ended up with

• lower home prices and
• a national huge debt.