Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Possible reason for Wall Street crisis

Lots of people love to say this to take the sting out of their own failures (I'm looking at you, Democratic Party), looking for the remotest excuse so that they can lay a tiny bit of blame on the opposition so they can assuage their own guilt and absolve themselves of their malfeasance. And it's easy to say, too. Everybody loves to be bipartisan and say everybody's to blame. Well, that's just not true. I'm not one to play that old canard. The CAUSE of the problem can only be laid at the feet of one party and not the other.

So how is it that all the R's were on the right side, the D's were all on the wrong side, yet there's plenty of blame to go around? I'd say if it weren't for the strident opposition of the D's, we wouldn't be in the trouble we have today. If it weren't for the malfeasance of the D's we wouldn't be in the troubles we're in now. If it weren't for Clinton's redefinition of the Community Reinvestment Act, we wouldn't be in the troubles we're in now.

There's not a single Republican we can blame any of this on as no Republican tried to use the force of government to make banks issue bad loans as the Reno Justice Department did under the Community Reinvestment Act. No Republican organization like ACORN lobbied banks to make bad loans at the threat of labeling the banks as being insensitive to minorities and the poor. No Republican was high in the executive staff of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and used fraudulent accounting practices in order to inflate their bonuses (Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, Daniel Mudd, Herb Moses, Beth Wilkinson, Democrats-all). No Republican drove FHMA/FHMC into the ground by maintaining ridiculous reserves (Franklin Raines and his, "they're so safe, we should only have to have 2% reserves"). No Republican took on huge amounts of bad debt, repackaged it into "AAA"-rated securities and sold them to unsuspecting investment bankers. Lots of Democrats got sweetheart deals on their personal mortgages. Republicans were virtually unified in wanting to reform FHMA/FHMC. Democrats were virtually unified in wanting to stop reform of FHMA/FHMC. But there's plenty of blame to go around? Eh? This defies logic.

The only thing that Republicans seem "guilty" of is not forcing a filibuster that wouldn't have succeeded anyway. Oh, because they didn't force a filibuster, it's okay to ignore all the Democratic malfeasance and vote for Obama anyway because the GOP didn't do a procedural move? One side caused the disaster. The other side tried to stop the disaster. But we should vote for the people who caused the disaster because the other people didn't conduct a parliamentary move? I would say there's blame for the Republicans if the bill would have passed if brought to the floor. But there was no chance of passage. Any attempt would likely be cast by the media today as a publicity stunt to take away from the true blame of deregulation caused by McCain and Bush (and you know that's what the media would do). So basically the GOP has to take a lot of blame because they didn't do a publicity stunt, all style no substance? It must have been all Phil Gramm's fault, despite the fact that 3/4 of all House Democrats and all but 8 Senators supported including Joe Biden voting yes.

This bill not withstanding, every other attempt was snuffed and there were many. You seem to have a fixation on this one bill as the end-all, be-all, ignoring all other attempts. When the Administration tried two or three years earlier, they were rebuffed as well. And when the Democrats had control of the Congress, they did nothing, not even permitting a committee vote. Yet there's plenty of blame to go around? Doesn't that sound even remotely odd to you, Ann?

BTW, you still haven't commented on the video. What did you think of the video?