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Bloomberg.com: Who Created the Financial Crisis? Democrats.
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How do you know you've got Progressives in a corner? They cry "let's not be partisan."
Bloomberg has a rundown of the last part of the history of the financial crisis, from its turning point in 2005 to now.
The problem actually goes back at least to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), if not all the way to 1938 with Franklin Roosevelt's creation of Fannie Mae, but it'll have to wait for another time.
There's a claim going around now that says "nobody knew this was coming."
It's simply untrue. In 2005, Democrats killed by a party-line vote, an effort by Republicans to try to control a situation that was becoming increasingly dangerous.
One of three sponsors of that bill - one of the three people who saw the problem and took action to prevent it - was Senator John McCain (R).
What was Junior Senator Barack Obama (D) doing? He was protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. While one might suggest it was for the huge pile of cash they had been giving him, he may have actually done it for ideological reasons - Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were instruments that allowed the government to socialize the mortgage and lending industry.
Even when it has become abundantly clear that bad regulations got us into this mess, Mr. Obama derides the idea that we need less regulation. In fact, one is hard pressed to find a single topic - other than leaving abortion survivors to die on the operating table - where Mr. Obama is in favor of less governmental control and coercion.
Full disclosure - because astroturfing is an appalling act (a sentiment not shared by Mr. Obama's Chief Media Strategist David Axelrod) - the writer of the article is one of John McCain's men.
That said, while Mr. Obama simplistically snorts, "capitalism! deregulation! bah!" Kevin Hassett actually explains how we get from Point T to Point Z. (He isn't telling the whole, long, sordid story from Point A.)
If there's a Progressive argument that can't be boiled down to, "capitalism: bah!" and actually shows a chain of causation starting from the development of the secondary mortgage market to its rapid expansion in the 90s, one which explains why the laws were passed, and exactly why corporations made the choices they were making (such as being forced by the CRA to give loans to bad credit risks, or why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were gobbling up bad paper which would appear as assets on its balance sheets, thereby increasing the bonuses of the Democrats who ran the quasi-governmental corporations), this writer hasn't seen it.
Were there Republicans who opposed fixing the problem when we had a chance? Of course there were. But don't cry for bipartisanship. Watch for who was at the helm of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - look at who supported them, who profited from their existence, including outside organizations like ACORN, known for its election fraud and its association with Mr. Obama and Chicago politics, and you will see an overwhelming preponderance of Democratic fingerprints.
Good theories make disprovable predictions. Here's one: in the coming days, weeks and months, you'll find far less coverage on the causes of this from the left-leaning media than we did on ENRON, and you will see a lot of articles playing Name That Party. If the Republicans were chiefly to blame for this, you'd see more in-depth coverage, and you'd see the little (R) next to the names of the people responsible.
