More from the A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste Dept.: Don't know nuttin' 'bout economics but I know what's what

"Even now, it's hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we're in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is -- tax cuts and deregulation."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today

by Ken

Yesterday I wrote a piece called "Thanks to the soft-on-dummies Obama campaign, right-wingers can repackage their disastrous failed policies as 'common-sense wisdom.'" It drew the following comment from one John Tecumseh Shawnee:

The current economic meltdown is not the fault of former President Bush. The current economic recession is the result of the “Community Reinvestment Act” started my Jimmy Carter and the Democrats and escalated by Clinton that forced Banks to make bad mortgage loans to unqualified low income buyers. Bush tried to fix the problem but was blocked by the Democrats lead by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. It was Obama’s community action group, ACORN that further intimidated the banks and mortgage companies to push the bad loans. Obama was one of the Senators that is most responsible for forcing the irresponsible loans made Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac.

It's all lies, delusions, and deliberately fraudulent bullshit. I'm sorry, but it's impossible to tell this many lies in such a tiny space without doing it deliberately.

First off, you obviously don't have have the slightest idea, not the slightest, what the Community Reinvestment Act was or did. All you know is the Talking Points lies invented about it and regurgitated by your only source of information: the Right-Wing Noise Machine. In this case the lies are so pathetic and transparent that nobody with a working brain has any excuse for being deluded by them. You only swallow such rank bullshit become you love bullshit.

Think for just a second. (I know you're not used to thinking, and it's going to hurt for a while, but it's worth trying.) Of course you've been taught to hate poor people, because the rich people who control the RWNM want suckers like you to have a scapegoat for the stuff they do, and they know you won't think too deeply about how illogical it is that poor people could cause the kinds of problems it takes rich people to create. Not even the wildest leap of illogic could make it reasonable to imagine that the pittance in bad loans to poor people could possibly have brought the economy down.

If you had taken any trouble at all to inform yourself -- in the real world, not in the world of Right-Wing Bullshit Lies -- what actually happened, it would occur to you that the Community Reinvestment Act all too obviously had nothing to do with the insanity of the housing bubble, which was fueled by the people who pay for the RWNM. You would understand that the Community Reinvestment Act had nothing to do with the orgy of greed and fraud perpetrated by the insurance companies, the banksters, and Wall Street, who were churning out as much of that crap "securities" paper as fast as they possibly could, and they were able to because the short-sighted apostles of "deregulation," including some D's, yes, but pretty much all of the R's, had carefully removed the needed regulatory controls. They were issuing all that crap paper to meet the demand for it, because until investors awoke from their spell, as long as they were willing to buy that crap, it had "value." (And hey, isn't that how the sainted "free market" works? Supply and demand.) Naturally, once people began realizing that other people's opinion of their value didn't matter, they were barely worth the paper they were printed on, the illusion couldn't be sustained. Inveitably, they rushed to try to salvage something from their "investments," and the bottom fell out of the market.

And no, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had very little to do with any of that. (The reason Chimpy the Prez went after Fannie and Freddie was the while Republicans were stealing every dollar from the federal government they could get their hands on, their was profound resentment that a few dollars might be siphoned off by Democrats. He did nothing about the budding economic catastrophe except to signal "full steam ahead.")

There were plenty of sane, responsible economists, of various political persuasions, warning for years that the shit was going to hit the fan. Your response illustrates my point exactly: Failure to learn the lessons of disastrous incompetence guarantees that we'll repeat them, or new versions of them, as witness the powerful activity of Wall Street and the banksters to resist minimal recontrol of their activities, which they've demonstrated all too well they can't control themselves.

Once again, you obviously know nothing at all about ACORN, not to mention this delusion of yours that it's "Obama's." Your brainmasters in the RWNM have done an astoundingly good job of making it the Grand Bogeyman in the nonfunctioning brains of pathetically gullible dunderheads like you. Again, it works with poor people, to help them secure their basic rights as citizens, and on your side of the sanity fence poor people are devils who have no rights. You do know, for example, that not a single fraudulent vote was cast a result of the small number of bogus people registered by employees of ACORN? They were just trying to get the extra few bucks for the extra sign-ups; nobody was ever going to cast votes under those names. And of course it was ACORN, following the law that reported the abuses as they were discovered. Meanwhile on your side of the political-crime gap Republican operatives work 365 days a year committing intentional and systematic fraud gathering petition signaures and voter sign-ups, and stealing every election they can get their grubby mitts on.

As for the "incriminating" ACORN videos, well, we still don't know what to make of them, though we do seem to know that they were heavily edited, by highly suspicious people. There is no evidence or indication that they represent any systematic problem inside ACORN. And ACORN intimidating banks and mortgage companies? In what universe?

I gather, JTS, that you didn't read my recent proposal ("Do you have to be a moron or a nutjob to be a right-winger? No, but at least that would give you an excuse?") that right-wing delusionals whose delusions are caused either by mental illness or imbecility identify themselves as such, so that we would at least know that the delusions possibly can't be helped. That way, any one of you who doesn't so self-identify can be assumed to belong to one of the other groups spouting such claptrap. The ones I identified were "the corporate predators, for example, or the ideological hooligans or the 'too lazy to learn' or the compulsive liars or the 'just wanna be told what to do by somebody in charge.'" Does one of those cover your situation?

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