Let me start off by saying that a couple of months ago, Rush Limbaugh said he was “dreaming” of a race riot. He was running his “Operation Chaos” platform to get Hillary elected in hopes that it would anger the blacks, cause them to riot and kill a bunch of people, and hopefully that would cause Obama to lose the election. Republicans have always said “Trust the free market” and now the “free market” has grabbed the country by the throat and demanded $700 billion or watch the country disintegrate. What would we do if a bunch of minorities took over the country and demanded that kind of money? We’d probably send in the riot troops. But these hijackers are rich, and rich people can never be blamed for anything, so they’re trying to convince people like you that, like all problems, it was all caused by Clinton and the blacks and the Mexicans.
Conservatives have been backstabbed by their friends on Wall Street and are being forced to eat their own heart or watch civilization crumble. People like Bill O’Reilly can do it, beacause they aren’t hard-core ideologues. But everyone else on Fox News and the radio are against it because that would mean they’d have to admit that you can’t run a country on an ideology of “regulation is always bad” and “government spending is always bad.” The problem is, they don’t have any plan. They just say do nothing, “let Wall Street burn”, and that’s stupid. Conservatives have made their entire careers out of convincing us that prosperity on Wall Street equals prosperity at home (which of course is not true) and now they want you to believe there’s absolutely no connection at all, and the death of Wall Street won’t carry significant aftershocks to Main Street. This is absolutely delusional. Not only will it have devastating effects on other Americans, it’s going to have devastating effects *on the entire world*. To pretend there is no problem (like Republicans have been doing for the past 3 months!!!) and do nothing would probably be the most childish, irresponsible thing the American congress has done in 100 years. At this point, doing anything, even passing a fake bill that did very little, would be helpful in trying to regain foreign confidence in the market, which is absolutely mandatory in order to stop the world economy from going down the drain.
Rush Limbaugh, like the rest of the conservatives, is now acting like Bush and his guys are actually Democrats and its McCain (who course they all hate) who are going to come in and fix things. The idea seems to be that Bush wasn’t right-wing enough (!) and that McCain will be better than him because he’s…. more left-wing on a few minor issues? So what Rush is saying is that the Democrats were for the “Paulson Plan.” Of course, neither side wanted the “Paulson Plan” of making Paulson Supreme Emperor of Unprecedented Powers. The plan that the House Republicans killed was a different plan that called for putting up about half the money. I would rather see a plan that involved putting liquidity into the market without the government purchasing the toxic loans.
Now let’s go to the task of dismissing these lies about the CRA and ACORN:
“– The Community Reinvestment Act caused financial institutions to lend to people who weren’t credit worthy. This is crap. The CRA was signed into law in 1977 — over 20 years before the current crisis. The second problem with this theory is the CRA only applies to banks and thrifts. Most of the mortgage lending during the last boom came from — mortgage lenders who aren’t regulated by CRA.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hale-stewart/whos-to-blame-for-the-mes_b_130044.html
Here’s an article named “ACORN Issue Fueling Bailout Opposition”:
“The draft bill includes a left-wing giveaway that would force taxpayers to bankroll a slush fund for a discredited ally of the Democratic Party,” reads one leadership alert. “At issue is ACORN, an organization fraught with controversy for, among other scandals, its fraudulent voter registration activities on behalf of Democratic candidates. Rather than returning any profits made in the long-term from the economic rescue package, Democrats want to first reward their radical allies at ACORN for their (often illegal) help in getting Democrats elected to office.”
In the end, how much of the bailout’s potential profits are earmarked for ACORN? “None. Absolutely none. All funds would go to state and local governments,” said Steven Adamske, spokesman for Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Financial Services Committee and a lead negotiator.”
One of the prinicipal causes in my opinion is that we’ve become corporate socialists. This Administration wants to “capitalize” all the profits of Big Business so that the money stays a the top and “socialize” the risks and losses, so that the middle class picks up the bill for the rich’s mistakes as well. This has caused a liquidity crisis in the middle class which has helped cause all the foreclosures:
“While the average American continues to suffer due to oligarchical policies of the Bush White House that has resulted in steady erosion of worker earnings; higher unemployment; more expensive medical care; higher gas and food prices – the reckless and fiscally irresponsible elitist continue to be bailed out. This White House exerts a free trade policy that advocates that market forces should rule. This was their rational for the absence of homeowner assistance in the housing crisis. Yet when these market forces are exercised against a favored company the White House steps in and again socializes the risk – placing it squarely on the back of the suffering taxpayer……
All of the above sounds quite dire, but most world experts believe our system is even worse! Many believe that the Tier III write-offs required is greater than $2 trillion dollars versus the $1 trillion dollar bandied by the government and Wall Street firms. If this number is valid and given that we have only written down about $350 billion, then we have a much deeper crisis than anyone envisioned. Last year the estimate to rid American companies of the toxic assets was $100 billion. By late spring this year the number had grown to $500 billion; and, now even the conservative estimates are $1 trillion dollars. However, if international experts are right then it is double that figure.
What does it mean to Americans? It means that the Bush Legacy will include a debt of well over $2,000,000 per household in this country and a wealth curve that is skewed greatly. Per the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances the top 5% owns over 59% of all U.S. wealth; the lowest 20% own zero; and, the middle own the balance of 41%. This is the most skewed wealth distribution curve we have experienced since 1929. The trend since 1929 has been a normalized curve that was shaped more along a standard bell curve, which means we maintained a strong middle-class. What has the Bush Administration economic policies really accomplished? It has managed to destroy the class of citizens that has made this country great and left us a new economic system, the American Socialized Capitalism that protects the wealthy.”
http://theamericanscene.com/2008/09/29/bluff-called
From Justin Fox, regarding House Republicans’ plan:
>…that of the House Republican Study Committee, seems to be a joke. It calls for a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax to “encourag[e] corporations to sell unwanted assets.” But the toxic mortgage securities clogging up bank balance sheets are worth less now than when they were acquired. Meaning that no capital gains tax would be owed on them anyway. If you repealed the tax, banks would have even less incentive to sell them because they wouldn’t be able use the losses to offset capital gains elsewhere. Seriously, where do these people come up with this stuff?
And here’s a FactCheck.Org article titled: “Who Caused the Economic Crisis? MoveOn.org blames McCain advisers. He blames Obama and Democrats in Congress. Both are wrong.” Notice that it’s MoveOn.org and McCain, *not Obama* who is doing the lying here. At the bottom of the article it says:
So who is to blame? There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn’t fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn’t do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of “layered irresponsibility … with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role.” Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
* The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
* Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
* Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
* Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
* The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
* Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
* Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
* Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
* The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
* An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
* Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html
Regarding the crisis, McCain accused Obama of “phoning it in”. Looks like this was true:
>Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a supporter of the bill, made calls to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who publicly credited him with changing their minds.
>Rep. Elijah Cummings and Donna Edwards, both Maryland Democrats, were among them. They said Obama had pledged if he wins the White House that he would help homeowners facing foreclosure on their mortgages. He also pledged to support changes in the bankruptcy law to make it less burdensome on consumers.
>”It’s not too often you get the future president telling you that his priority matches your priority,” said Cummings.
>Obama’s rival, Sen. John McCain, who announced a brief suspension in his campaign more than a week ago to try and help solve the financial crisis, made calls to Republicans. His impact was not immediately clear.
>Republican Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, who said she was switching her vote to favor the measure, said of McCain: “They told me he was going to call me. He didn’t.”
>Looking ahead to election day, she added, “I may lose this race over this vote, but that’s OK with me. This is the right vote for the country.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/03/national/main4497551.shtml
