If you live inside the Washington Beltway, it is apparently impolite to point out that the Republicans ruined the economy and continue to ruin it, and that they are doing the latter on purpose. In fact, I’ve watched Steve Benen cautiously try to broach the subject for over a year, as if he might get his head taken off if he just made this obvious assertion and said it is beyond debate. Instead, he keeps saying it in conditional terms like, “Hey, maybe we should at least consider that the Republicans don’t want people to have jobs.” But we don’t need to consider it. They don’t want people to have jobs. Do we need to ask why? No. We all know why.
The Republicans care about nothing but destroying the Obama presidency. They have an infinite faith in the gullibility of the American people, and they hit better than .500 using that assumption.
Setting the elephant in the room aside, when will Jay Carney call out his fellow Villagers for their lies and bullshit? Make an example of Chuck Todd. Make an example of that clown from CBS.
what’s the elephant’s name?
Don’t be so thick, Boo. How can you expect anyone else to call out the GOP for the economic terrorists they are when the President won’t even do it(or at least hasn’t until just lately)?
If the president doesn’t do it nobody else can do it? Or are you being snarcastic?
The elephant’s name is Lloyd Blankfein.
Hell, we can not even say Bush’s policies Fd up the economy and caused the debt without the media having a tantrum.
Tonight there is another Republican debate. But I wonder how many people even receive Bloomberg TV on their cable systems. I have DirecTV and they have always had it. Dish Network has too. I checked at Bloomberg’s website and apparently all of the cable system options around me carry it as well. Who knew? In all of the years of my awareness of that network I’ve probably watched a cumulative 10 minutes of it.
But I don’t remember ever having Bloomberg on any of the cable systems I’ve ever had. Has this changed? We won’t even know how many people watched because Bloomberg doesn’t subscribe to Nielsen ratings, like C-Span and PBS don’t.
So, who does not get Bloomberg and who does? Maybe they will also webcast it.
Looking forward to the debate though because of the format. It will be Charlie Rose style with everyone sitting at a table together instead of the podiums.
Here in Taiwan we get Bloomberg and CNN Int’l, and that’s it, so far as I know. Interestingly, we have FX and Fox Crime but not Fox News.
What are you talking about?
The housing bubble was the prime cause of the recession–blame Greenspan, or Fannie and Freddie….
Then, Obama and the Democrats had two years of COMPLETE control of the government…
Presidency, House, even a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate…
You got your stimulus, you got your Obamacare, you got your Dodd-Frank…all job killers…two years of unbridled liberal policies…and it’s the Republicans’ fault?
And now the Republicans “don’t want people to have jobs” because they won’t let you guys waste another half-trillion dollars on this “jobs” bill?
What?
Talk about alternate reality…
You’ve got your Republican talking points all wrong. If you were more plugged-in to the collective, you would have cited the Community Reinvestment Act as the cause of all our problems because it forced banks to loan to poor people of color if they did business in their neighborhoods. Yeah, that’s it. Apparently you’re not watching enough of the Fox News.
that would be the Borg, not the Collective. these thugs abhor the word collective, even tho they can not function outside it.
The Housing Bubble? Kind of. Sort of.
The real problem wasn’t that people kept paying more and more for houses, though, was it?
No. The problem was that regulators fell asleep at the switch at every check point imaginable.
Bank regulators didn’t make sure the banks were well capitalized. The SEC didn’t make sure people weren’t misrepresenting their financial instruments and committing fraud. No one made sure chain of title was maintained. The rating agencies issued AAA rating to junk bonds. The discount mortgage issuers stopped asking for documents that proved income. The banks bought shitty high-risk mortgages and bundled them in a way that made them look like a good bet.
You know what happened? We developed a scam where everyone could get rich. Poor people good lie about their income, get a home they couldn’t afford, and flip it when the value went up. The mortgage issuers no longer cared if the mortgages went bad because they didn’t own them more than two seconds after they issued them. So, they offered mortgages to anyone on the street, in the gutter (want a free home?). The banks were selling their derivatives like hot-cakes, so all they wanted was more mortgages.
Let me tell you something. These people ruined the economy. Don’t blame gullible poor people. Don’t blame people who were misled about the real cost of their future payments. And don’t blame the push for more minority home ownership. That’s bullshit. There’s a difference between foolish hope and greed, and a difference between desperation and avarice.
Your party did this to our country, and you want to blame it on blacks and Latinos. It’s shameful.
Heh, hold on. How does that differ from anything else they blame their woes on? Lack of jobs? Latinos. Crashing the economy? Blacks and poor people. Deficit? Spending on poor people, but also they pay no taxes. And don’t forget that in this conversation, “poor” is synonymous with “minority.”
I’d like to add that to blame this mess on Fannie and Freddie is shameful as well. Before the Investment Banks got into the CDO business with mortgages, Fannie and Freddie demanded “Conforming Mortgages” from banks. They would not buy crap. They required documentation to back up stated income, etc on mortgages. But then the Investment Banks got into the business and would buy ANY mortgage and they paid-off ratings agencies to give them AAA ratings. So Fannie and Freddie were then screwed, as it was so much easier to sell mortgages (good or bad) to the investment banks. So Fannie and Freddie found themselves (as for-profit corporations) having to compete with the crooks on Wall Street who were selling junk bonds as AAA securities.
The rest is history.
Good point, Randy. Privatizing Fannie and Freddie had a lot to do with the problem too.
I definitely do not blame blacks and latinos…
I blame White Liberals…the greatest scourge to effect blacks and latinos in this country…
You use of the word “WE” is instructive…
The Great Recession was indeed a group effort, with plenty of blame to go around…
But the “My Party” comment is absolute B…s..t…
The fundamental difference between right and left is really quite simple…
You believe that your life circumstances are created by forces out of your control…
We believe that your life circumstances are created by your thoughts, and efforts…
You need Excessive Government, because you are victims of circumstance…
We do not need Excessive Government because we create our life circumstances…
It really is that simple…
Take solace…in the long run, you guys always win…
My only solace is that the greatness of the Founding Fathers, and the Original Principles upon which they founded this country will prevail against the human propensity to gain the most with the least effort…your “Occupy Wall Street” protestors who want the World, but want someone else to pay for it…
Back to your original post Boo, the cynic in me, and I’m getting damn cynical, thinks just about inside the beltway is insulated from what’s going on in the country. They all make money and have jobs while they are either playing the political game or keeping score in the press.
In fact the more fucked up the country gets the more power flows there. The most power that flows there the more important it is for the rich and powerful to feed it money to keep and expand their own control and power.
What I am perplexed by is that the grassroots on the right, tea partiers and otherwise, are attacking the Occupiers as losers and thugs who pee in the street and don’t pay their student for their art degrees.
In reality they actually have a ton in common in terms of their discontent with what’s going on, but don’t try to tell them that.
There’s been a lot of comparison between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party lately. True they are both protest groups, but there the similarities pretty much end. The OWS is a genuine grass-roots movement, mainly of youth and very diverse racially and culturally. The Tea Party is (mostly) astro-turf, mainly older people, mainly disaffected Republicans. But since we’re talking about Wall Street, there’s an even more important difference.
A recent poll by Democracy Corps found that only 20% described themselves as “cool” to big corporations (of which 15% was “very cool”), while 54% described themselves as warm (24% very warm).
Looking at likely voters as a whole (which would include nearly all Tea Partiers in the mix), 42% were cool to Wall Street, 30% warm.
Thus, the percentage of likely voters cool to Wall Street was double the percentage of Tea Partiers that are. Only one-fifth of Tea Partiers are cool to big corporations at all.
How do you suppose the average OWS person feels about big corporations?
Sorry, I forgot the links:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/09/17/anti-wall-street/
http://www.democracycorps.com/strategy/2010/07/special-report-on-the-tea-party-movement/?section=Ana
lysis
Meh. Sort of. What the Tea Party was and what it became once it was co-opted by RW money interests are two different things.
I think members of both have serious WTF moments when they look at their paychecks withholding (or unemployment/welfare/foodstamp checks)and think about how much money is flowing directly or indirectly to big money via a corrupt, bought and paid for and incompetent elected government.
There is a big difference in that the OWS folks seem to think the government could have a bigger better role in fixing things if it wasn’t corrupted by money and the Tea Partiers think government is always the problem, not the solution.
But the two groups actually could and perhaps should find common ground — well if the TP wasn’t now a Rove surrogate.
Hey Booman, could we have a Debate Thread?
yeah, sure.
It is hard to understand how you have no criticism of the current Presidential administration and its refusal to say so. I am sure it is more criminal to not defend yourself than to be a martyr in the name of turning the clock back. Even South Africa and other countries that have engaged in genocidal behavior do not attempt to reconcile until they have reached exhaustation on the field of mayhem.