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Now Look What You Made Me Do
The next battle in the political war is going to be assessing responsibility for the destruction of the financial industry. At first this seemed like a no-brainer to me: capitalism had been deregulated and freed to do its thing, and its thing happens to be boom-and-bust, euphoria-and-panic.
But conservatives are now counter-attacking, in the way they do so well, finding some government or non-market actor and pinning all the blame on them. Last week, in the space of two days, I heard four different commentators (one of them being George W. Bush) try to saddle Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with responsibility for the entire disaster. Others have found different liberal/state/nonmarket actors to go after. However unlikely it may seem, conservative strategists seem to think this is a winner, an issue that their side can ride to victory somewhere down the road.
Where they will give us more tax cuts, more privatization, more deregulation . . . and more destruction.
See also www.tcfrank.com.
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As long as anyone still buys the idea that Democrats aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America, too, nothing is going to change. Democrats may pay a lot of lip service to liberal goals, but look at how much of the deregulation and other things that damaged the American middle class lifestyle went on while Dems controlled congress.
Democrats play a game with their constituents that goes like this: Okay, we will vote for this bill that gives all the middle class jobs away but only on the condition that there's a provision tacked on to it that establishes a Be Nice to Lesbians Day. Or for a more serious example, passing and signing a huge banking deregulation bill into law as soon as a provision for making mortgages available to more minority applicants is added. Both parties are guilty, both need to be purged, and serious reform must be instituted to clean up our election process. How many of you have even stopped to think how much money the candidates have spent thus far in this 2 year campaign for the presidency?
Until we have serious and realistic campaign reform--not just finance, but limits on time that may be spent campaigning, etc--we will continue to get candidates from both parties that are bought and paid for by vested interests. And they will continue to put on shows like the one we had this week that wind up with them doing the bidding of their corporate masters.
Gotta keep Wall Street out of the cabinet.. Rubin (100 million from GoldMan Sachs) was the man who
'fought ferociously to kill any of the jobs initiatives that Clinton had promised, promoted high stock prices by encouraging lower wages for middle class workers, opposed any increases in the minimum wage, breakfasted every week with Greenspan abd back those wage-stifling policies, bailed out rich speculators who gambled in Asia and Latin America, protected CORPORATE WELFARE while whacking health and housing programs that benefit working families and generally treated the middle class likea fire hydrant at a dog show" Jim Hightower 2000...
AND THOSE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOOD TIMES.
As far as what has "caused" this situation, subprime loans are a tiny little part. The Bush administration authorized the financial institutions to rob people blind, charging 30% and more on credit cards. Bush has adopted policies which result in throwing people out of work, forcing down wages, eliminating health care and pensions, freezing wages or rolling them back, and forcing citizens to borrow money at usurious rates just to pay their monthly expenses.
Wall street has looted the businesses, taken all the money, Greenspan has loaned them my money at 2%, Bush cut taxes for the wealthy and started wars against everyone to deplete the public coffers, people are out of work or work at radically lower-paying jobs, 5% of the public now has all the money and the rest of us can't afford to buy the lously imported T-shirts from WalMart. The economy has failed because of Bush. It was intentional. This gives the wealthy complete control -- they can do anything, and nobody can stop them. The "Wall Street has WMD and a Mushroom Cloud" is just the latest Bush con to try to take every last penny before he flees the country along with his co-conspirators.
The Democrats, who have received millions from their generous friends on Wall Street, are pushing this one through presumably because (1) they are stupid and think Bush knows what he's talking about, or (2) they're going to get a huge kick-back once they deliver the votes.
Blame the Poor is the mantra. Follow the Money is more accurate.
Lenders used to have rules which only allowed them to loan 80% of the value of the home, with a maximum loan of 3 times gross income. A couple earning $60,000 could only borrow $180,000, regardless of how valuable the home was.
With the Republican gift of deregulation, the lenders and financial institutions began loaning the full value of the home without regard to whether the borrowers were even employed. Greenspan held down the interest rates, and the cost of housing radically inflated by as much as 300%, so people had to spend a lot of money to buy or rent. (Lower interest means lower monthly payments so people can pay more for a home).
The lenders "bundled" the loans into packages and sold them off to somebody who was conned by Wall Street into believing the bundle was worth the face value of the loans. That was untrue because it was inevitable that the borrowers would default. And the property had been artificially inflated by Greenspan holding down interest rates, so it sold for as much as 300% of its actual fair value. The borrowers did not qualify for the loan but the lender ignored that. The borrowers could not afford the home -- but most cannot afford housing anymore, because the people running this con have manipulated prices so that many people have to pay 50% or more of their take-home just for shelter.
BINGO spot on, great comment! The housing bubble was definitely a game...
What should we have suspected?
We were given full warning.
Remember the movie 2001?
That was the year Bush became President.
The movie foretold that Hal would take over the spaceship and that is sure as hell what happened.
oooo, good analogy . . .
In the movie, he locked Dave out without a helmet. In the book, he let all the air out of the ship. He blamed "Human error" and acted like he had to do what he was doing. You know, for the good of the mission. In a way, it WAS human error because they had created conflicts in his programming by making completing the mission more important than the lives of the crew. Plus, it being 2001, he was running Windows ME. On the other hand, I think Dubya & co. are still running the Reagan Ideology 1980 beta. It was written for the Radio Shack TRS80, but they added the flashy Rove front end in 2000.
oh my gosh it really does sound like the republican machine at work...
The financial crisis has at least forced people to start taking politics seriously. Instead of debating pig lipstick, now the future of the American economy is at stake in this election. That is why Obama is pulling ahead.
The Congress is gonna do whatever this week. But at some point there will be an Obama administration and a solid Democratic majority in Congress.
Perhaps then we can build a financial system that will benefit everyone instead of a bunch of Wall St. gamblers.
Are Americans capable of understanding what building a financial system that will benefit everyone means? If not, Obama will be tied hand and foot.
Obama has already warned that he will not be able to do much.
Will the public let him end the war and cut military spending? Do they see any connection between the military-industrial complex and the moribund economy?
Even now the latest Republican attack ad blames Wall St. and Obama for the crisis. They wouldn't be running it if experience hadn't taught them a lot of people will believe it.
Republican BIG MEDIA will PUSH MORE LIES, LIES, LIES.
Guess what?
WE CAN'T AFFORD REPUBLICANS ANYMORE.
They're just TOO EXPENSIVE!
they don't govern, they always campaign nonstop, they blow middle income Americans' money nonstop.
NO MORE YEARS to liars and crooks.
Party ideology even trumps the great minds of conservatism. In his "The Road To Serfdom", Nobel-laureate Freidrich Hayek equates economic central planning with authoritarianism. But even he acknowledged that without regulations to even the playing field for everyone, free enterprise would eventually devour itself. Adam Smith also recognized the free market's unstable nature in "The Wealth OF Nations". It's the nature of man and the nature of the market to behave unfairly.
There's a huge chasm between central planning and laissez-faire. It's too bad that many of our politicians and policy-makers don't have the maturity or the knowledge to recognize it.
will be a tough sell, but then again one must never overestimate the intelligence of the american people
I was explaining to my nephew some history regarding the current crisis. He was surprised to learn that the republicans laissez-faire governance of the 1920's help bring on the '29 crash and Hoover's 'let the markets work it out' caused the depression. FDR put in some checks on the capitalist system so the foxes could not cross over and eat the chickens. This worked from mid 1930's until the 1970s when Nixon started chipping away the regulations. Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 all worked on deregulating the markets. None of the democratic presidents were FDR democrats - mainly centrist. While republican presidents were more hard nosed about deregulating and used it as their campaign strategies, etc., democrats played a big part too.
By the way, in the 1930's there were some moneyed republicans so pissed with FDR new deal programs that they wanted to have him done away with. (google this, interesting reading). Hillary mention the incident once during her primary stump.
Agree wholeheartedly.
ReFoolagins and their corporate puppet master never quit. They never stop. They are on salary. They don't get to quit at 5pm. They are busy turning lemons into lemonade. They don't question, they don't lose faith, they NEVER repudiate or punish their leaders.
They have basically ONE goal, and it is not a human goal. So, it can't be derailed by hunger, or pestilence, or climate crisis, or suffering.
Dems however are constantly dealing with earthy issues, human faces, real families. It fractures our party platform. Too many needs, an unnecessarily complex world. Minorities, Gays, Women, Children, Hunger, Health....etc. Where will we find the time for utter Corporate Domination?
Don't worry Dems, the ReFoolagins are working on it 24/7.
This Bailout is just handing off the whole system BACK TO THE SAME FOLKS who created it all. There will be fewer of them (will consolidation ever end? Yes, when it get's to ONE)
But it will be the same folks, running the same system, back at their old familiar places at the switches and levers.
Another analogy? We are hitting the rewind button, going back to just before we went into the abyss.
And we are hitting play. And still heading right for the abyss.
The difference? We still had 700B the first time. We will do a replay of what just happened, except the 2nd time around we will be 700B poorer when we go over the cliff.
historical revisionism is a key component to neocon idealogy.it's what they do.a 19 year old democrat can bew held accountable for something Abby Hoffman or Jerry Rubin did back in the 1960's but neocons won't accept responsibility for their own actions.As I've often said:Republicans have the best of both worlds.They get to make the mess then bitch about what a poor job the democrats do cleaning it up.
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