The funniest thing I’ve seen today? This:
The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot. The villains? An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros. (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)
If the GOP can make this narrative mainstream, and put this picture into the heads of voters nationwide, the Democrats are toast.
Good luck making that narrative mainstream. I think it’s fair to say that the housing bubble and all the fancy financial instruments that fueled it took many years to develop and relied on a variety of weaknesses in the system, some of which were created by Bill Clinton. But, let’s remember that the bubble burst in late 2008, after nearly eight years of Republican ownership of the White House. And, during those eight years, the Republicans controlled the House for the first six and the Senate for part of 2001 and all of 2003-2006. They alone had the power to make the kinds of laws or utilize existing regulatory authority to prevent the giant fraud that was being perpetrated on the public. They didn’t do anything. They looked the other way. They let Wall Street run free.
Before we can get to any Democratic complicity in this, we first have to assign blame to the people who actually had the power to do something. Of course, Gretchen Morgenson served as Steve Forbes’s press secretary and is known for writing hyped and slanted opinion pieces posing as analysis. She also likes to steal bloggers’ work without giving attribution. We know how her bread is buttered. As for Rosner, he was prescient about the housing crisis, but he didn’t blame Barney Frank and ACORN for the impending doom. He blamed the rating agencies and the SEC for failing to do due diligence on the collateralized mortgage bonds. If he now has found new villains, it just means he has a book to sell. But, in truth, I don’t think Mr. Mead is giving a fair and balanced portrait of the book, which has won the praise of people like Bill Moyers. It sounds to me like it has a lot of villains that were conveniently left out of this review.
But, yeah, if the Republicans could convince people that they’re underwater on their mortgage and out of work because the Democrats gave free houses to blacks and Latinos, the Democratic Party would be toast.
you do realize that people have been convinced of exactly that, right?
When you say: “They didn’t do anything. They looked the other way”, you do realize that they actively pushed Fannie and Freddie into the subprime market, right?
Um, no. The people who pushed Freddie and Fannie into the subprime market were the Wall Street banksters looking to make money.
There’s a great scene in Liar’s Poker where the head of one of the big houses – Goldman maybe? – threatens the head of Fannie Mae, telling him that they will stop selling the mortgages entirely unless they start buying sub-prime.
Gretchen Morgenson used to be a paid flack for crank Steve Forbes? Jumpin’ Jeebus in a pogo stick! And what’s amazing is that she’s a more honest reporter than Andrew Ross Sorkin.
A lot on the left like to cite her. Not only is that her history, but most of her reporting is wildly inaccurate with gross exaggeration. She’s terrible.
I like Calculated Risk’s assessment of her:
Morgenson’s articles have been described by Calculated Risk, a popular financial and economics blog, as “a noxious mixture of fact and hype, information and innuendo.”
I’m not sure how things are where you live, BooMan. But here in flyover country, where groups like the Tea Party have taken root and where Fox News and talk radio are on in every venue imaginable, that view is simply looked on as an indisputable fact. It is what huge numbers of people believe, and have believed now for at least two years. In your Red/Blue Election post earlier today, there was a comment by Geov Parrish that stated, “While we’re still 17 months out, a lot of people, on both left and right, have made up their minds (for vastly different reasons) that Obama does not deserve re-election. The economy alone would normally be enough to doom him.” And one of the “vastly different reasons” around is this very meme. And there is absolutely nothing, even this far out from election time, that is going to change even a small percentage of those minds. There might well be other issues that come along and push this meme to the backs of peoples minds. But it will still be an accepted fact and not subject to change.
Do you mind if I ask what state you live in?
Ohio. There are parts of the state where this delusion has not taken hold. But with the exception of the Cleveland area and maybe portions around Columbus, it is generally viewed around the rest of the state as a fact. Now whether it will, in the end, really influence how one votes depends largely on the general state of the economy and the job picture down the road.
He is also perfectly describing many other places in middle America. I live in central Colorado — home of Representative Lamebrain, Focus on the Fascist Family, and the Air Force Christian Fundamentalist Academy — and everything he says is believed here without question. I also see it throughout my regional travels from Kansas to Nevada.
Exactly. The GOP slime machine works in the following way: they throw every attack they can at the Democrats in general or a Democrat in particular and test for traction. When they have traction, they run with it at full speed.
And this attack might actually have wings. I mean, who’d have thought in January 2004 that John Kerry, 3-time purple heart, would be the candidate tarnished as fake military veteran while draft dodger Bush rode his Mission Accomplished act to victory? Or that 75% of America would believe Obama raised taxes when in fact he cut them for 95% of America and repeated that fact throughout the campaign and the first 6 months of his presidency?
The great thing this attack has going for it is that it has enough truth to ring true. The problem is that both political parties were in on the massive mortgage fraud, and just about every politician in Washington has been done a favor by a Wall Street lobbyist at some point. Yes, I know that the GOP was 80% responsible and the Dems 20%, and I know that the GOP filibustered a bill in 2007 that might have actually prevented the worst of it. But in the world of the low information voter there is enough here to ring true IF it is messaged well and consistently — which you know the GOP will do — and IF the Dems don’t respond effectively — which you know they won’t.
The problem is that both parties are as throughly corrupt and corporate-owned as they possibly can be, and America knows it. Most of America is voting for the lesser of two evils. The GOP might just use this to convince America that they are the lesser evil.
The Democratic Party has done nothing substantial that they can point to which will differentiate them from the insane GOP in a significant enough way to convince most low information voters that they are a better option. They have passed a good sum of decent legislation, but have been unable to make those accomplishments stick in people’s minds. It seems they are once again failing to figure out a way to counteract the “let’s sling a ton of shit and see what sticks” technique that is the standard of today’s GOP. It is maddening.
The Democrats have passed some good legislation. But heck, even the GOP instituted the national “do not call” directory and required wireless number portability. But on the most significant issues of the day the Democrats have fallen short. They aren’t the disaster that the GOP has been and will be, but that is the Dems SOLE selling point.
This is the mainstream in republican circles. I don’t think it can really penetrate much more because too many white people got burned by wall street as well. But that it exists is depressing enough.
Yeah, Mead’s attitude is the consensus.My brother, a former DFH, now rabid knee-jerk reactionary (from Chicago, Illinois, by the way), mentioned that he thought Barney Frank should be in jail. Of course, no recognition that Barney Frank included Freddie and Fannie at the White House insistence, that he only got the job in 2006, and that no one, that is no Republican in control the prior six years had made any regulations at all. But it’s all Barney Franks fault.
My favorite element of this fairy tale is the Community Reinvestment Act.
Because a law that doesn’t provide banks with credits for mortgages that they sell brought about a meltdown caused by the selling and securitization of mortgages.
Nevermind that non-banks, who weren’t covered by the CRA, had higher default rates on their mortgages. Nevermind that the CRA includes the requirement that banks demonstrate that they loans they make are affordable to the recipients. Nevermind that the suburban areas of central Florida, the Imperial Valley, Phoenix, and Las Vegas which were the epicenter of the meltdown weren’t even areas targeted by the CRA. Nevermind that the CRA doesn’t include any requirements to lend to minorities.
The CRA forces banks to make unsound loans to black people and Hispanics, which were then sold off to turn into securities. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it.
I keep this link around for years now to show people that Fannie & Freddie did not cause the melt down because the disinformation campaign is severe. Of course, brainwashed people will respond by attacking McClatchy but some actually feel enlightened.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-loans-not-fannie.html
So far, the step-by-step instructions in the fascist playbook are being followed faithfully (ie, scapegoating). Expect matching uniforms soon. Plus the flag pin.