Misery Index

PELOSI:  This is Herbert and Marion Sandler.  Tell us your story.

HERBERT:  My wife and I had a company which aggressively marketed subprime mortgages, and then bundled them into securities to sell to banks such as Wachovia.  Today, our portfolio is worth almost nothing - though at one point, it was worth close to $19 billion.

PELOSI:  My God.  I am so sorry.  Were you able to sell it for anything?

HERBERT:  Yes, for $24 billion.

PELOSI:  I see.  So in that sense, you're not so to speak, actual victims.

HERBERT:  (chuckling):  Oh no.  That would be Wachovia Bank.

MARION:  Actually, we've done quite well.  We're very happy.

HERBERT:  We were sort of wondering why you asked us to come today.

MARION:  Anyway, it's delightful to see you, Nancy. (Kisses Pelosi.)

HERBERT:  And thank you, Congressman Frank, as well as many Republicans for helping block Congressional oversight of our corrupt activities.

FRANK:  Not at all.  [...]

The real life Sandlers, who use their wealth to finance a variety of nonprofit organizations such as the Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACORN,  are infuriated over the skit. 

Sandler, 77, spoke to the Associated Press in the San Francisco office of his family's charitable foundation the morning after NBC's "Saturday Night Live" broadcast a skit deriding the Sandlers as predatory lenders who had duped unsophisticated borrowers and Wachovia, too.  A caption shown during the sketch skewered the Sandlers as "people who should be shot."

Although the timing of the interview was coincidental, Sandler was seething after watching a replay of the skit on the Internet.

"I have been listening to this crap for two year," Sandler said.  "We are being unfairly tarred.  People have been telling us to speak out for some time, but we didn't think it was appropriate.  That was clearly a mistake."

The video was re- released by NBC with the statement above in red being removed from the newly posted NBC video.  Additionally during the skit,  the statement of "People who should be shot" that was shown below as a footer, was also removed.

On October 5th, a Los Angeles Times article addresses the issue of the removal of the video and a response from NBC.

The skit, a parody of a C-SPAN news conference, ridiculed subprime borrowers, housing speculator and Herb and Marion Sandler, the real-life couple who built Golden West Financial into a subprime lending powerhouse and sold it to Wachovia before the subprime collapse.  At one point in the skit, the Herb Sandler character says he made $24 billion off the subprime boom.  Graphics then appear labeling the Sandlers as "People who should be shot."

"Upon review, we caught certain elements in the sketch that didn't meet our standards," a spokesman for the program said in an e-mail message today.  "We took it down and made some minor changes, and it will be back online soon."

Ed Lasky recently reported on how the Sandlers - allies of left-wing billionaire George Soros - helped bring down Wachovia Bank:

Herbert and Marion Sandler, a New York lawyer and Wall Street analyst respectively, bought a small California thrift in 1963 and built it into GDW - one of the largest thrifts in the nation.  The company's business was built on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).  These were mortgages offered at low "teaser" rates that ratcheted upward as interest rates increased.  They were often sold aggressively to unsophisticated home buyers who did not comprehend the vast financial risks they were taking, or who assumed that housing prices would rise high enough to provide a profit to them when they sold their houses.  They were targets for lenders peddling mortgages that should have been stamped with a skull and crossbones, for these were among the most seductive and dangerous types of mortgage.

This book of business is the core reason for Wachovia's current difficulties.

The Sandlers knew their business far better than any other person could.  Not only were they the founders and major owners, they famously ran the company as a husband and wife team for all these years.

So why did they happen to cash out at precisely the right time?  Did they see the handwriting on the wall, realizing the massive risks inherent in the mortgages they originate throughout one of the most overheated real estate markets in the nation's history?  They are not talking, but when smart people cash in some of their chips, it's rarely a good time to bet against them.  Nevertheless, Wachovia bet 24 billion dollars and lost big time.

The collapse was primarily caused by the GDW purchase, which became an albatross around Wachovia's neck soon after the purchase.  "Wachovia found itself in ARM's Way" was the headline  of a recent Wall Street Journal article.  A huge percentage of these Wachovia ARMs were made to deep subprime borrowers with very poor credit scores.  Most of these were "inherited from its ill-timed acquisition of Golden West" at the end of the housing boom in 2006.

The Sandlers have started to invest their billions of dollars politically, in the manner of George Soros, sugar daddy of many far-left wing groups and an early and prominent supporter of Presidential candidate Barack Obama.  Soros has developed an empire of so-called 527 groups, putatively independent political activists groups that have influence within the Democratic Party.  These 527 groups include the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, Human Rights Watch, Media Matters and a slew of other like-minded groups...

Soros, Lewis and the Sandlers form a core group of billionaire activists and Democrat partisans who have formed a group called The Democracy Alliance.  They realize that they could magnify their power by working in unison and tapping other wealthy donors to further their agenda

(the superb Boston Globe article “Follow the money” is a good primer on how money and 527 groups have come together to have a huge impact on politics in America).

The Democracy Alliance is a major avenue to help them achieve their goals. The roster of its growing membership consists of a list of billionaires and mere multi-millionaires who collectively hope to give upwards of 500 million dollars each year to further promote a left-wing agenda. A partial roster of the Democracy Alliance membership can be found here.

Half a billion dollars a year can purchase a great deal of influence.

The Sandlers certainly know quite a bit about leverage from their savings and loan days.

Among the beneficiaries of their largesse: Air America, ACORN (a group that has very close and long lasting ties to Barack Obama and has a long history of engaging in voter fraud. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (basically a private detective group focused on the private faults and foibles of Republicans), Media Matters, a media watchdog group that engages in harsh partisan attacks against media figures and articles it considers supportive of Republicans). The list goes on and on.

They are not merely out to elect Democrats, but to also permanently realign U.S. politics and shift our society and culture in a far-left wing direction…

The website snlbailout.com, has followed the updates on this video, and hosts the original unedited video on their website and the edited version or just the portion of the video that was eventually edited, in unedited format.

Michelle Malkin has a transcript of the original skit on her website.