Sunday, December 27, 2009

Thanks to the soft-on-dummies Obama campaign, right-wingers can repackage their disastrous failed policies as "common-sense wisdom"

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by Ken

Confession time: I'm the one who added the clip of Rush Limbaugh talking to Sarah Palin to yesterday's Day 2 installment of Noah's Scorn Awards (The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Edition), and I'm still feeling slimy. As the caption noted, it's 10 minutes of listening to these tireless worshippers of ignorance and hate yammer about "commonsense solutions" to our economic woes. Actually, I suspect that Princess Sarah initially misspoke her mantra, which turns out to be "commonsense conservative solutions." You know, the tried-and-true things that history has shown work! Um, er, tax cuts. Yes, that's it, tax cuts!

[Expletives deleted. Many, many expletives.]

Shouldn't these blithering fools at least wait until the economy has been put together again before they set about crashing it again? Is it really possible that they don't understand that it was the doctrinaire conservative insanity of their saints from Ronnie through Chimpy that got us into this mess? Oh, they had help along the way from "centrist" bubble-blowers like Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin (whose cronies and disciples are now the Obama Economic Brain Trust), but it wasn't brain surgery identifying the chief culprits.

"Is it possible that they don't understand?" What am I thinking? Is there anything that they do understand? I mean, apart from how to manipulate sadly gullible people to further their own agendas.

A HISTORIC POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED

How is it possible that the whole litany of wacko economic bullshit that proved itself wrong to the point of catastrophe has survived to obfuscate and, potentially, enslave another day? It's easy, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama blew it. They were so persuaded by their wretched advisers -- truly the scum of the earth -- that they needed to be blander than bland, and run as "centrists" (meaning right-wingers only defanged versions of the psychotics who have taken over the Republican Party and the whole discredited Conservative Movement).

In the process they lost the opportunity to run hard against, not just George W. Bush, but the politics of death-and-destruction his regime inflicted on a helpless country for eight years. Every word out of those people's mouths was a calculated lie; every policy they promulgated, to the cheers of their de-brained right-wing worshippers, was garbage. Even before they collapsed the economy, there was an election's worth of teaching opportunity, a chance once and for all to show the American people how they had been lied to and deluded.

But none of the major candidates bit. That would have been both hard -- requiring a serious political conversation -- and really risky. So instead we got just vague alllusions to a possibly less-than-ideal recent past. Candidate Obama kept promising us "change," but he never bothered to articulate what we needed change from and why we needed it -- supposedly because that would have been "negative," and centrist American didn't want to hear negative campaigning. Of course that didn't stop the McCranky people from poisoning the political atmosphere with unremitting lies and slime.

By the time the election season was in full swing, the failures of the Bush regime, in domestic and foreign policy equally, had become so glaring and so deadly that all those onetime Bush worshippers, the people who for seven years screeched "Bush-bashing" anytime anyone tried to point out the simplest realities about those monstrous frauds, seemed to have forgotten that there ever was such a person. Even while Chimpy was still squatting in the White House, with all the powers of the presidency, the people who through two presidential terms had regarded him as the messiah even forgot, or denied, his name.

It wouldn't have been a matter of kicking him when he was down; it would have been a matter of making people see that running the country for the benefit of the people who bought and paid for his regime was politially and economically disastrous, that the new American imperial policy had not only been a disaster but had even broken our armed forces for use when they might genuinely be needed. The models developed by all of those lamebrains in neoliberal, neoconservative, and just plain right-wing think tanks were all wacko bullshit. Those crackpots thought they could create a "free market" utopia in Iraq; all they could do was destroy everything they touched, and put our own country through protracted agony. And none of this was helped by the generous helping of extreme-right-wing (especially Christian Right) social policy Chimpy unleashed on the rest of us to buy the loyalties of those increasingly out-of-control powermongers.

But the mainstream Democratic presidential candidates stuck to the handlers' lame scripts, and never laid a hand on the underlying failures of Reagan-Bush-Cheneyism. Of course President Obama in office has given us reason to wonder whether his reticence didn't have something to do with having less disagreement with Bush-Cheneyism than we assumed. An awful lot of the current administration seems to flow smoothly out of the Bush regime. So maybe in that sense there was no missed opportunity for the Obama campaign and future administration. But for the country, we lost the chance to discredit those disastrous ideas for at least a generation.

Instead, they're all back. We're once again hearing from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner about his famous "radical centrism" -- though this raises the question, if the Obama people don't even pay attention to someone as commitedly centrist as Senator Mark, whom do they take seriously?

And inevitably we have Druggie Rush and Princess Sarah fobbing off their "commonsense conservative" solutions. Don't kid yourself: Americans are prepared to swallow it all again.
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17 Comments:

At 2:30 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

He clearly agrees with the Bush/Cheney years to some extent, or he would have put them out to pasture instead of wanting to re-invigorate the Patriot Act, allow banks to have no limits on credit cards, continue the Iraq war, and turn over all of our tax dollars to the insurance companies, forcing us to pay into their multibillion dollar businesses or be fined.. even if we can't afford it. Dickensian times were.. I thought.. the Bush years.. but we may talk one day about Emmanuelist times a la Dickens.

 
At 2:44 PM, Anonymous Lee said...

Our government is broken. Maybe we should stop spinning our wheels and have a real third party and make Dr Dean in charge. And we need to stop fighting with each other. And stop dumping on Jane Hampsher because she co wrote a letter with Grover Norquist.

I worked as hard as anyone to elect Obama. But I always saw a man who wanted too much to be liked by everyone, and ran away from conflict.And why would anyone want to be liked by knuckle draggers like McConnell and Demint? They are completely divorced from reality. I saw McConell on tee vee this morning and he just makes shit up.

 
At 3:41 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

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.

 
At 5:14 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

The root source of Obama's now ongoing loss of enthusiastic support is his failure/refusal to vigorously go after Bush, Cheney, their administration, supporters and agents who have seriously damaged America and left Obama to clean up or continue their remarkably unpatriotic reimagination of our country. Many people voted for Obama expecting and wanting him to pursue and prosecute the Bush/Cheney/GOP criminal activity but Obama and company haven't laid a glove on them and clearly won't. The mental depression that our countrymen are suffering for economic reasons is exacerbated by the Obama administrations letting Bush/Cheney and Company off the hook.

 
At 5:44 PM, Anonymous Balakirev said...

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.

That's nonsense, even on the surface of it: come on! Everybody knows that there was nothing in it that "forced" banks to do anything.

Bush tried to fix the problem but was blocked by the Democrats lead by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

So the question really is, are a dumb shill for the neo-con incompetents who ran the last administration, or are you a cynical opportunist who wants to see on the top again so you reap more rewards, yourself? Not that I like Obama--he's a weak-knee'ed conserva-Dem, who can be rolled from the right endlessly, as events have shown. But to try and lie about near history which can easily be researched for facts as you've done takes willful stupidity, or or a sweet desire for gain at the expense of all else. Which is it?

 
At 5:57 PM, Blogger KenInNY said...

Just a quick note to John Tecumseh: What you've written is almost pure delusion. The notion that the Bush regimistas tried to fix the problem could only be repeated by someone who knows absolutely nothing about: (a) economics, (b) history, or (c) the Bush regime and its fellational relationship with the Big Money interests, many of which made out like bandits from the meltdown.

It wasn't poor people getting mortgages that caused the meltdown -- doesn't it occur to you what a tiny pittance that represented of the $$$$ worth of insupportable risk the insurance companies, banksters, and Wall Street took on?

Of course you're responding from lying shithead right-wing Talking Points Almost everything you've written is either directly contrary to fact; very little is even subject to interpretation, though of course there are plenty of right-wing-whore economists who make a nice living producing such lies. Do you have any idea at all what the Community Reinvestment Act was or did?

I"m going to respond at slighty greater length in a post tomorrow, because your desperately confused response illustrates the very problem I was writing about: Failing to provide a proper accounting for past disasters pretty well guarantees that they'll be repeated, albeit in slightly different form. It shouldn't be possible for you to regurgitate this gibberish without knowing it's all lies.

Till tomorrow --
Ken

 
At 6:05 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Boom and Bust is how Goldman shake the money tree. Its how they rob the rich. We just get caught in the crossfire.

 
At 8:21 AM, Blogger DownWithTyranny said...

Lee, you say McConnell "just makes things up." Dude, the man lives a lie! He's a closet queen in a very homophobic environment, Republican Party politics. "Makes things up" doesn't BEGIN to describe the way this man has led his entire life. He doesn't even know the truth from his well-constructed illusionary world any longer.

 
At 8:39 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Reading here from Balakirev and Ken, indeed ignorance appears to be self assured bliss. They imply to having some insight in economics, yet seem blissfully unconcerned with the devastating direction our current government is taking us economically. This will prove out over the next few years so I will leave it to time to prove or disprove my concern. Regarding the cause of our current recession, they protest vehemently, yet their insight is simply ignorant of fact. Perhaps they should do more reading and research regarding the issue before ranting. Balakirev and Ken might start with the following: (1) Comments from John Carney at The Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cra-debate-a-users-guide-2009-6 and (2) some background information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act. And yes, the Bush administration tried to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddi Max and was shot down by Barney Franks and the democrats who said there was no problem with the financial condition of Fannie Mae and the loans they were making. Is it possible that Balakirev and Ken are truly unaware of this fact? By the way Fannie and Freddi are broke again and are currently begging for more bailout.

 
At 9:26 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

From the New York Times:

September 11, 2003– The Bush Administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry,

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.


The democrats voted down the recommendation.

 
At 5:52 AM, Blogger KenInNY said...

JCT: You're still living inside your tight circle of ignorance. Fannie-Freddie have problems, all right, but they had virtually nothing to do with the economic meltdown. Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with those billions of dollars of crap paper bundled as "securities" and spewed forth by worshippers and cronies of that arch-criminal George W. Bush, under whose watch Wall Street and the banksters created the conditions for the crash.

Selective quotes don't change the fact that you are totally ignorant of everything to do with Fannie and Freedie, what they are and what they do. You don't even understand why the propganda masters who feed you your bullshit go apeshit over Fannie and Freddie -- stealing from the government is supposed to be an exclusively Republican enterprise, and the chance that some Democrats might be playing the game (we don't even know that it's true, but the possibility is enough to send your crooked heroes into the red zone) makes them nuts.

Do you know what was ACTUALLY happening in the mortgage market in 2003? Obviously now. Not lthen, and not now. Why? Because you're not interested in what was actually happening. You need lies to conform with your world of psychotic bullshit.

Ken

 
At 6:57 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Ken, your rabid rant is simply void of fact. You passionately present empty rhetoric. Here’s an informed statement filled with facts regarding the issue that begins Earlier this week I noted that I had changed my mind on the Community Reinvestment Act. Contrary to my initial conclusion, the evidence is overwhelming that the CRA played a significant role in creating lax lending standards that fueled the housing bubble. Once I realized this, I had to abandon my suspicion that the anti-CRA case was a figment of the rhetoric of Republicans attempting to distract attention from their own role in the mortgage mess.

Read this and be better informed of actual fact: Here's How The Community Reinvestment Act Led To The Housing Bubble's Lax Lending

The crap paper your mention above were actually the bad loans made by Fannie and Freddi, and the loans that the federal bank regulators forced the banks to make, which were bundled and sold. And yes, they were worthless crap that eventually undermined the economy and brought on this recession. I am neither a Republican nor Democrat, and I find fault with the bunch, but I am not so ignorant to ignore the facts because of political bias.

 
At 10:09 AM, Blogger KenInNY said...

Do you actually read this crap, JTS? Or just pick through it for some comforting buzzwords. Mostly this is bullshit, but even so, it doesn't say what you think (or for that matter what Carney thinks).

"Contrary to my initial conclusion, the evidence is overwhelming that the CRA played a significant role in creating lax lending standards that fueled the housing bubble."

(1) Even though Carney claims to be establishing a connection, he isn't -- all he's talkikng about is "lax standards." The closes he comes is the argument: "In short, the lax lending standards created in response to the CRA had dug a pit that was waiting to get filled when the circumstances were right." So you see, he's no longer even talking about the CRA but what he claims were responses to it. If you read any of the accounts of the build-up to the meltdown that talk to the people who were actually involved, people from the mortagage companies, banksters, and Wall Street greedheads you won't see any mention of any awareness of lax standards created by the CRA that drove them to their rapacious behavior. They saw their openings, and the plowed on through.

(2) Although the housing bubble is obviously crucially related to the economic meltdown, they're not the same thing. So even when Carney preposterously credits the CRA's lax lending standards as what "fueled the housing bubble," even he's not connecting it to the meltdown. Because a lot had to happen to create that bubble and then turn it into an economy-buster, and once again, loans to poor people weren't it.

Were "lax lending standards" a key issue? You bet. And who brought us lending standards lax enough to bring the economy down? Not the CRA, but the administration that was bought and paid for by the greedheads seeking still-laxer standards -- and the Bush regimistas gave them their money's worth, dismantling what was left of the federal regulatory apparatus that had held their greed slightly in check. The Bush regime, far from doing anything to deflate or ease the housing bubble did everything it could to pump that sucker up -- because a lot of its good friends and investors made fortunes out of it.

As I said, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Ken

 
At 4:52 PM, Blogger Mac G said...

So the CRA made Wall St Bankster bet at 100 to 1 odds? That is pure delusion.

It blows the mind that wingers ignore facts.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

 
At 8:29 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 9:05 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Admittedly the cause of the current recession is extremely complex and is almost impossible to define in simplistic terms. This is the reason there can be so many different perspectives that seem valid in isolation yet do not encompass the totality of the cause. However, Ken, you missed the point made by John Carney. His article is a summary of his change from believing that the anti-CRA case was a figment of the rhetoric of Republicans attempting to distract attention from their own role in the mortgage mess to his personal conclusion after research that the evidence is overwhelming that the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) played a significant role in creating lax lending standards that fueled the housing bubble.. It was the housing bubble that was the root cause of the financial failure that sparked the recession. I understand that you feel you know more about what John Carney meant in his article than even Mr. Carney knows himself. I get it that you do not get it. This arrogant self assuredness seems to be the basis of your intellect.
Here is another simplistic statement that might help to illustrate my contention that the Community Reinvestment Act was the root cause of the current recession. The Federal Government in the Act began to require that all banks and mortgage financial institutions make at least half of all home loans to low income borrowers. The Government then agreed to buy these subprime loans from the banks and mortgage companies through Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac. The Government agreed to back and guarantee the subprime loans and all the loans bought by Freddie and Fannie. Fannie and Freddie failed financially and had to be bailed out by the Feds. This caused the financial world to become alarmed. It was realized that the subprime loans had been bundled together and sold as AAA securities throughout the nation and world. It was also realized that the AAA securities should not have been sold as reliable AAA securities and were actually questionable in actual value. These came to be considered as Toxic Assets because no one knew what they were actually worth. No one wanted to buy or trade these toxic securities anymore. People like me who held some of these securities did not know if they had any real worth. The financial condition of Fannie and Freddie, who held over half of the actual mortgages, detoriated even further. People who had speculated in real-estate due to low interest rates and accelerating market value suddenly faced a declining market. Foreclosures began which meant that the subprime mortgages were actually worthless. People who wanted to renegotiate their individual loans found that their loans had been bundled and sold as securities and could not actually find out who owned them within the bundles. It was a financial mess that essentially froze the markets. Banks were unsure of their actual net worth and capital position and ceased to make loans. Uncertainly in the financial world is a cause for crisis. Therefore the recession.
But, Ken, let us agree to disagree on this issue. It is far too complex to resolve in this dialectic. I would far more like to have you explain what you mean in your prior post calling former President Bush an arch-criminal. Is this language for effect or do you actually have fact or reason for making such an accusation?

 
At 9:24 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

THIS JUST IN (Sorry could not resist)
U.S. to Lose $400 Billion on Fannie, Freddie
“The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The Treasury Department recognized last week that losses will be more than $400 billion when it raised its limit on federal support for the two government-sponsored enterprises, he said.

The U.S. seized the two mortgage financiers in 2008 as the government struggled to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. The debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks grew an average of $184 billion annually from 1998 to 2008, helping fuel a bubble that drove home prices up by 107 percent between 2000 and mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case- Shiller home-price index.

The Treasury said on Dec. 24 it would provide an unlimited amount of assistance to the companies as needed for the next three years to alleviate market concern that the government lifeline for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest source of money for U.S. home loans, could lapse or be exhausted.

Lax regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to the mortgage companies taking on too many risky loans, Wallison said.

“It turns out it was impossible to regulate them,” he said. “They were too powerful.” He said no one knows how much will be needed to keep the companies solvent. $400 billion, according to Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The Treasury Department recognized last week that losses will be more than $400 billion when it raised its limit on federal support for the two government-sponsored enterprises, he said.

The U.S. seized the two mortgage financiers in 2008 as the government struggled to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. The debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks grew an average of $184 billion annually from 1998 to 2008, helping fuel a bubble that drove home prices up by 107 percent between 2000 and mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case- Shiller home-price index.

 

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