PJ Media

@16. Herb – the billions in losses were due to government meddling, which tanked the housing market and the securities that market supported. It was a house of cards the Democrats built and then blew down by forcing paper to be written which they knew would drive housing into a bubble and then become toxic as soon as normative interest rates returned. 17 rate increases later, that stack of cards miraculously hit the floor at precisely the moment when BHO’s poll numbers were dropping. Almost like an act of God, huh.

Oh, and don’t bother with any noise about deregulation, non-CRA sub-prime, Alt-A or any other deflections. Loans based on those rates, but written according to sane lending rules, would NOT have instantly become toxic assets at the drop of a hat. Those rules were in place to avoid that very problem. Fifteen years of the Dems’ CRA-driven “affordable mortgage” insanity, based on rules that guaranteed foreclosures under any normal market fluctuation, is what gave us the securities devaluation and the ensuing credit meltdown.

There’s no mystery behind why the facts in your article(s) aren’t common knowledge, Tom: Bush’s, pathological ‘civility’ (read: total lack of leadership) in response to 8 straight years of fifth column treason and mendacity spewing from the Democrats and their wholly-owned entrenched media. We saw the result of this lack of leadership when the electorate turned in blind adulation to someone who’s never done anything but run for office.

BHO’s attack on CEOs is simply an extension of the demonization phenomenon that worked so well against Bush and the GOP. We know this because the “salary caps” he made so much noise about are coupled with so many loopholes that they’re really no cap at all – they’re just bread for the mob he’s inciting. The mob – absent any voice of reason – then simply runs in the direction they’re told to run. Much easier to do when the electorate is as ignorant, apathetic and entitlement-minded as Americans have become. These tactics are as old as the French Revolution and have been exploited by every despot from Stalin to Che to Mossadegh to Castro to Mao to Pol Pot.

And folks should realize that “I won” is the language of a despot, not that of a leader.

Private enterprise business began to tank as soon as the Democrats took over Congress in 2006. Prior to January of 2007, the economy was experiencing steady recovery from the Clinton recession of 2000/01 (even though hampered by unnecessary rate hikes) and was driving a trend that had the federal government on track for a balanced budget by October of last year.

One thing changed that trend: no market confidence in what the Democrats were going to do to taxes, and no confidence in Bush’s leadership due to his near-socialist second-term domestic policies and relentless silence in response to constant attacks by the disloyal opposition and the press, which any fool could see was going to guarantee us a Democrat sweep in November (and gee, isn’t that just what we were saddled with).

The situation worsened thanks to the Democrat Congress’ suicidal energy policies, which allowed oil prices to skyrocket until the day Bush reversed the executive ban on domestic offshore drilling. But by that point it was too late – CRA had done its damage and firms heavily leveraging Franklin Raines’ Riskless Real Estate Securities™ were already starting to fail. Then FM/FM crumbled after Dem interference prevented oversight enforcement and revamping of management practices in 2004 that would have prevented it.

Yes, Herb, this economic trouble is entirely the Democrats’ doing. And they’re making exactly the same mistakes FDR made, which prolonged the Depression by almost a decade.