Thursday, December 10, 2009

How Disparate Impact...AND “Affirmative Action in Lending” Caused the Housing Crash and the Global Credit Crisis











Throughout the 1970s Housing activists like Dale Rathke (co-founder of ACORN and the SEIU) and Gale Cincotta were able to shake down banks with bank lobby sit-ins, forcing them to offer millions of dollars in loans to “low income Americans,” another term for high-risk borrowers. Those early successes only emboldened these advocates for “marginal America.”

They found eager friends in the likes of naïve and die-hard liberals such as Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and William Proxmire (D-WI). Gale Cincotta was a devout opponent of the very necessary practice of redlining, where banks charged higher rates and higher fees for mortgages in areas where the default rate was higher.

Activists like Cincotta and Rathke and others claimed that such practices not only made it difficult for people to own homes in such areas, they kept businesses from opening in such areas due to the higher costs and lower profitability.

Business is the ONLY real force for GOOD in a free society. That’s right BUSINESS is the ONLY force for good in a FREE SOCIETY.

By solely focusing on making money for their shareholders (owners), businesses seek to help those who CAN and WILL pay to have their problems solved.

Those who CANNOT and WILL NOT pay need not darken their doorsteps. Such chronically poor people DON’T need access to wealth and capital, they NEED to get their lives in order by developing the skills they need to compete and earn a living!

Banks, like any other business are in business SOLELY to make money. They exist for NO other purpose. They do the most social good by delivering the highest profits to their shareholders/owners.

That’s why banks assiduously held to conventional or “traditional” mortgage lending guidelines or parameters, UNTIL forced to abandon them by a series of government law suits.

What were those traditional parameters? Why the same ones being applied to most loan applicants today; 20% down, no more than 2½X your income in mortgage debt and your monthly mortgage payment could NOT be more than 28% of the monthly net of the person/persons (limited to TWO for a residential mortgage) on the mortgage documents is the traditional lending criteria.

And yes, while it’s true that under those criteria, there were wide disparities in the rates at which various ethnic groups were able to meet the lending criteria, there was NOTHING at all “UNFAIR” about those traditional lending criteria, DESPITE whatever disparate or disproportionate impact they may have had. The SAME standards were indeed applied to all.

Anti-Capitalists/anti-Americans like Cincotta and Rathke, with the aid of allies like William Proxmire, they were able to turn what should've been harmless studies, that showed, for instance that banks in Brooklyn, NY invested only 11% of their capital in Brooklyn and that “blacks with similar incomes were far more often turned down for mortgages than whites.”

William Proxmire had no background and less understanding about how the financial services sector worked, which means he didn’t know that banks investing nearly 90% of their assets away from their local areas, was done SOLELY to generate higher profits for their shareholders/owners, which made those banks not only more profitable, but more viable.

And as Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute adroitly noted, “the banks protested that such studies did not take into account the creditworthiness of these applicants (ie, credit histories, existing debt to income ratio, the loan to value (of the property) ratio of the desired loan, etc.) which was far more important than income.”

By 1979 this anti-capitalist Axis was able to pass the Community Reinvestment Act, which even the NY Times assailed noting, “Our institutions are not social service organizations...” and added, “measures that would weaken (lending) standards are dangerous...New York’s savings banks already hold large numbers of defaulted mortgages, including many inner city properties...we raise a strong word of caution against the expectation that bank credit is a substitute for wages, salaries, and other income that is necessary to keep a community alive economically,” concluding, “It is hard to believe that anyone would argue that bad loans are good social investments.”

None-the-less, the CRA, which was only debated in one chamber of Congress (the Senate), and with very few legislators present, was passed. Senator Proxmire limited the visibility of the Bill by attaching it to the Housing and Community Development Act, which included the always popular block grants, which meant money to the Senator’s home states.

The CRA not only “gave the housing activists a seat at the table,” it enabled them to monitor every bank’s lending practices and block any mergers and acquisitions by reporting any complaints to specially set up departments within HUD and the DOJ.

By the mid-1980s Housing activists had developed their assaults on banks to an art form. Seattle’s rainier Bank was hit by a campaign organized by a bus driver named Keith Dublanica, who claimed that Rainier Banks lending policies “discriminated against minorities,” and the protesters demanded more “flexible terms” for specific groups of borrowers.

The Seattle Times reported that what Dublanica wanted was “a kind of affirmative action proposal in the making of loans.” And indeed that’s exactly what Keith Dublanica wanted, demanding that the banks offer a 2% discount on rates and waive fees for certain (predominantly minority) neighborhoods. As Dublanica put it, “If the racial mix is different from the rest of the city, perhaps the (lending) criteria should be somewhat relaxed.”

In fact, it’s the REVERSE. Poor credit risks SHOULD ALWAYS pay HIGHER RATES and HIGHER FEES to get loans, that’s the only way to limit default rates among that largely reckless and irresponsible group. In fact, EVERY high risk loan made to the poor directly HARMS working people who CAN afford conventional mortgages under traditional lending parameters. It harms them because the costs of those failures are placed on their backs when they apply for loans and they pay for the subsequent and necessary bailouts with higher taxes.

Ironically enough, the 1990s saw the Clinton administration borrow from the Conservative’s “Ownership Society” endorsed by the likes of Jack Kemp, G W Bush and Bob Dole, to replace public housing as the liberal Democrats’ top priority with an ownership agenda of their own.

As economist John H. Makin noted, "No longer would public housing be at the top of the liberal Democratic agenda...instead, borrowing from conservative ideas about the inestimable benefit of home ownership to the striving poor, the Clinton administration and members of his Party in the House and Senate decided to use government power to achieve that aim.”

Janet Reno (the AG) and Henry Cisneros (HUD Secretary) began suing banks which didn’t make enough loans to low-income Americans and the legal concept behind that screwball policy was yet another screwball concept called “disparate impact.”

Disparate Impact is a deliberate LIE and a SHAM. It seeks to label ANY standard that has a different/disproportionate impact on one group than another to be deliberately discriminatory against the negatively impacted group.

According to this fatally flawed concept, a bank might have policies that were fair and equally applied to all, but if the outcomes were different, the policy was deemed deliberately or objectively discriminatory. For instance, if a bank had a longstanding policy of not issuing mortgages on homes valued at less than $80,000, it could be considered guilty of discrimination because that policy would be determined to adversely and disproportionately impact the poor.

When Henry Cisneros left the Clinton administration in 1997 to accept a very lucrative appointment to the board of Countrywide Mortgage, his successor, Andrew Cuomo actually used the term “affirmative action” when defending the use of disparate impact to force banks to loosen their lending criteria.

At an April 6th, 1998 press conference, Andrew Cuomo said, “but for the affirmative action on the part of the banks, most of these recipients would not have qualified for conventional mortgages." Cuomo went on to acknowledge that the loans were at a “higher risk of default,” and the banks HAD TO “lower their standards on loan applications” to make those loans.

With that admission, Andrew Cuomo had chronicled the perverse and disastrous consequences of what was then two decades and would become three decades of government-coerced lending, via the concept of "disparate impact," to millions of non-creditworthy borrowers.

By 2008 over $4 TRILLION in high-risk, subprime loans were made, almost all of them bought by Fannie Mae and packaged by Freddie Mac into “mortgage backed securities” which were then sold to Wall Street and the rest of the world as highly safe and secure “AAA-rated bonds!”

In short, the entire housing collapse, the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent global credit crisis was caused by government’s adherence to the flawed and pernicious concept of “disparate impact” and its subsequent meddling in the mortgage market (almost solely by politicians with little or no understanding or experience in the financial services sector) in order to effect what Andrew Cuomo accurately called “affirmative action in lending,” or what numerous economists have called “credit socialism.”

Worse yet, subprime loans have not been outlawed, the CRA that’s been used to coerce banks to make TRILLIONS in high-risk, subprime debt has not been abolished, Credit Default Swaps and other murky forms of derivative trading have not been stopped. In short, the SAME policies that caused the current crisis, including many in Washington’s adherence TO and affection FOR the very flawed and pernicious concept of “disparate impact” have yet to be eliminated!


SEE Andrew Cuomo's April, 1996 Pres Conference lauding "affirmative action in lending"; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314&feature=PlayList&p=529CA6593D352484&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=97

15 comments:

Stogie said...

Excellent analysis and spot on. Read "Melt Down" the book for additional information on the subprime mortgage scandal -- which was a Democrat scheme.

JMK said...

I'll definitely check out Melt Down, another great book on the subject is Peter Schweizer's Architects of Ruin which also chronicles the etiology of the "democratization of credit" or "Credit Socialism" movement, led by the likes of Wade Rathke and Gale Cincotta.

Attorneymom said...

Blank stare.

JMK said...

Not much of a rebuttal AM, but given the way I lay out the facts of this situation, I can see where it's virtually impossible to refute my arguments.

I'm currently actively working with a group that seeks to eradicate the use of the absurd concept of "disparate impact" as a basis for any public policy.

The legal sector is already moving away from the fatally flawed concept of "disparate impact" and that's a good thing for all Americans.

All that will do will be to require that any individual claiming discrimination prove that they were deliberately discriminated against and how...that's not too high a bar.

Without the foolishness of "disparate impact" there's no basis for looking at "group outcomes" or results. The fact that one group does significantly less well on various standardized tests or fewer people of one group are eligible for mortgages than others could not be used in any U.S. court. Such things prove no intent and thus, no actual discrimination.

As an attorney, you should support us in this effort. You can find us at; http://meritmattersusa.blogspot.com/

JMK said...

P.S. If someone, ANYone could refute these facts, I'd certainly appreciate the input....of course by "refuting" I mean "proving them wrong," or factually/historically inaccurate....NOT merely arguing "there were other factors involved as well."

That's NOT an argument or refutation.

I've acknowledged that there were "other ancillary factors, though NONE of them as vital and central to the collapse as THIS ONE."

I DO NOT expect any takers, certainly no successful ones...

Skunkfeathers said...

You wouldn't get any arguments from here, JMK...you just filled in another part of the puzzle, one badly muddled by Barney Frank, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Chris Dodd, and a badly-serving media.

JMK said...

"You wouldn't get any arguments from here, JMK.." (SF)
<
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I wouldn't expect so SF, but I had to offer AM or any surrogate the opportunity, given here "blank stare"....

I do tend to leave opponents speechless, but I do welcome dissenting views so long as they can FACTUALLY support their arguments.

I know what you're thinking, "How often does that happen?"

Not very often.

For a GREAT book chronicling the abuses mentioned here and more check out Peter Schweizer's Architects of Ruin http://www.amazon.com/Architects-Ruin-government-liberals-economy/dp/0061953342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260725035&sr=8-1

It's an eye-opening read.

So is Saberpoint's (Stogie's) referral Meltdown; http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260725126&sr=8-1

Cody said...

Workingclass Conservative - I think your analysis is atrocious. Did you simply read a talking points memo written by some 23 year-old conservative congressional or thinktank staffer and take their word for things? You make many factually inaccurate and poorly researched claims. I'm sure your argument is persuasive to an uninformed reader as you like to use bold, italics, out of context quotes, AND CAPITAL LETTERS TO REALLY DRIVE HOME YOUR POINTS!!!! However, perhaps your time would be better spent researching than it is using hypertext to make your analysis appear informed.

I will refute some of your facts. And yes, I will REFUTE them, not merely argue that there were other factors.

"if a bank had a longstanding policy of not issuing mortgages on homes valued at less than $80,000, it could be considered guilty of discrimination because that policy would be determined to adversely and disproportionately impact the poor."
-Factually inaccurate. There is no constitutional protection for disparate impact on the poor. Wealth is not a protected class. See San Antonio v. Rodriguez. If business policies are determined to have no explicit business necessity (such as minimums on loan amounts) AND they disproportionately affect minorities, only then are they deemed discriminatory under federal law. If a bank could show an explicit business necessity, it could certainly have imposed floors on loans. Buuuut... there is no business necessity.

Cody said...

continued....

"the CRA that’s been used to coerce banks to make TRILLIONS in high-risk"
False. The CRA applies only to deposit-taking institutions, and it simply prohibits “extractive” banking practices: if a bank actively solicits deposits in a community, it is also expected to make loans to qualified applicants there. The subprime crisis was not the fault of the CRA which did not apply to the unregulated brokers that originated a disproportionate number of loans that went to delinquency and foreclosure. In the subprime market, the three largest lenders were independent mortgage companies, not subject to supervision by any bank or thrift regulator -. 51% of subprime loans were made by unsupervised mortgage companies in 2005. If there is any racial preference in CRA it is now a blatant case of white privilege: Whites are 50 percent more likely than Blacks to obtain loans from CRA-covered institutions. Blacks are more likely to obtain loans from less-regulated, non-depository, thinly- capitalized independent mortgage companies that are not subject to the CRA.

"By 2008 over $4 TRILLION in high-risk, subprime loans were made, almost all of them bought by Fannie Mae and packaged by Freddie Mac into “mortgage backed securities” which were then sold to Wall Street and the rest of the world as highly safe and secure “AAA-rated bonds!"
Again, false. Fannie and Freddie and other government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) brought prime mortgages to capital markets. However, GSEs do not play nearly as great a role in the subprime market. Many subprime mortgages do not qualify for the underwriting standards of the GSEs and the GSEs do not purchase subprime loans nearly as automatically as they do prime mortgage loans. Large financial institutions learned the process of securitization and large lenders or other financial intermediaries began to pool subprime loans, along with other loans, into securities that diversify risks. Those securities are then sold directly on capital markets. As the latest lawsuits, like the Goldman Sachs suit, show, lenders allowed manipulation of those pools of mortgages and fraudulently represented the risk associated with them by pressuring credit rating agencies that essentially work for them- while at the same time letting the manipulators bet against the securities.


Subprime loans are not the problem. When used responsibly, they can effectively open the mortgage market to an otherwise excluded group (of white people as well - minorities were not the only people given an opportunity to buy a house for the first time). However, when there is no regulation, perverse incentives to create originations despite a likelihood of default, and a fraudulent securitization process, subprime mortgages are certainly troubling. Subprime mortgages are not the problem - but their application is.

JMK said...

“Subprime loans are not the problem. When used responsibly, they can effectively open the mortgage market to an otherwise excluded group (of white people as well - minorities were not the only people given an opportunity to buy a house for the first time). However, when there is no regulation, perverse incentives to create originations despite a likelihood of default, and a fraudulent securitization process, subprime mortgages are certainly troubling. Subprime mortgages are not the problem - but their application is.” (Cody)


Your “facts” are wrong and so your conclusions are also absolutely, utterly wrong.

The government’s role in the erosion of traditional lending criteria via BOTH regulation AND litigation) IS what caused the mortgage meltdown ad the subsequent global credit crisis.

Further, nowhere in this post did I imply that the subprime loans were targeted ethnically/racially.

A fact that most liberals seem unaware is that 71% of the poor in America are...white.

The term “affirmative action” (used by Andy Cuomo to accurately define the government’s regulating and litigating “subprime” loans) also does not necessarily imply race as a factor. Perhaps you’re unaware that almost 70% of the subprime loans written between 2000 and 2008 (a period in which $4 TRILLION in subprime loans were doled out) went to whites, so I do not understand your obsession with race.

If you believe that “traditional lending criteria” (a minimum of 10% with PMI, at least 20% down to avoid PMI costs, proof of continual and steady employment with one’s most recent three years of tax returns, limiting loans to 2½X the combined family income, credit to income ratio, etc.) have a negative and disparate income on low income people and thus a profoundly negative and disparate impact on blacks, since a larger percentage of that group is “low income”...that is indeed true.

So what?

Proof of such a negative disparity is NOT, in and of itself, proof of ANY actual or verifiable discrimination, just as widely disparate test scores on written exams (ie. SATs, GREs, various Civil Service Entrance Exams and the various professional exams – the Law Boards, the CPA Exams, etc.) do not prove any intentional/deliberate discrimination...and yes, across the board on ALL such exams, there exists a 1-standard deviation disparity between the test scores of whites/Asians and blacks/Hispanics, with smaller disparities between whites and Asians and blacks and Hispanics, as well as between various ethnicities within both the black and white communities, but that persistent 1 full standard deviation on all such exams between white and black test scores does NOT prove intentional discrimination, nor does it any way compromise, let alone invalidate the efficacy of such exams.

Accepting that basic premise (“disparate impacts are not proof of any actionable or reversible discrimination”), there is nothing at all wrong with the disparities in lending rates between income groups and/or racial/ethnic groups. It would appear that the subsequent black/white homeownership gap is entirely a function of personal behavior, not institutional racial bias. While blacks with higher incomes did get loans at lower rates than many whites with lower incomes, the fact that the default rates for blacks and whites who DID get loans was exactly the SAME shows that no discrimination occurred.

JMK said...

But even still, the real aim of those in government was NOT to close any racial or low-income homeownership gap, not at all. The primary reason for government’s involvement in eroding those lending criteria was to remake America’s banking system into one more like Europe’s where governments exert far more direct control over all banking policies.

That’s part and parcel of what’s derided as “the political economy,” or “Corporatism” – an inane and misguided partnership between business and government.

In fact, THAT’S exactly the economy America has had since 1912, when Bernard Baruch and J P Morgan (admittedly, two great men) fundamentally remade the American economy by selling the “security” (for both owners/entrepreneurs AND workers) of Corporatism and introducing the Federal Reserve, paving the way for the 16 the Amendment and an ever deepening partnership between business and government, which was strengthened greatly by FDR’s ill-fated policies of the 1930s - the Great Depression deepened from 1933 through 1938 as FDR followed Hoover’s “progressive” policies (Hoover began the “alphabet soup” of federal programs) that FDR followed and expanded on - and that partnership was strengthened even more during WW II when the government took actual control of numerous companies. Since the end of WWII that partnership between business and government has become virtually set in stone.

The two best books on this subject are Meltdown by Thomas E Woods and Architects of Ruin by Peter Schweizer. Both outline both the widespread abuses of the Community Reinvestment Act, but also noted that the vast majority of those running today’s major Corporate entities are “infected with the same poisonous liberalism” as are many in the political class. Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, Jon Corzine (the failed Governor of NJ and former Goldman Sachs Exec),among many others easily criss-crossed between government and its “private sector” partners. Kerry Killinger (head of Washington Mutual) served as chairman of the Hogar (Spanish for “hearth”) advisory committee, set up by Congressional Hispanic Caucus specifically to “increase Hispanic homeownership.” Killinger’s fervent social liberalism led him to seek to transform WaMu into “the WalMart of banking” by catering to low income and high risk (those with poor credit histories) that other banks deemed too risky. In fact, in Killinger’s case, he set up an internal quota system for the bank’s lending policies. There existed “a company policy mandating that its performances within this demographic (low income, with a focus on minority applications) in a given market at least matches the bank’s overall position in the market.”

JMK said...

Why would so-called “private sector” financial leaders take such a high-risk stance, given their historically risk-averse natures?

Only one reason, they KNEW that government had already promised to bail them out for such excesses, just as it had bailed out Mexico in the mid-1990s to protect both Rubin’s CitiBank and Goldman’s positions there – both those firms had set up appx. 90% of the Mexican bonds at the time. Despite Bill Seidman (former head of the FDIC), Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow all presciently testifying how had an idea such a bailout was, in January of 1995 the Treasury Department announced a $20 BILLION line of credit to Mexico that saved those banks the losses their bad investments demanded.

The HUGE part that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played, was that in leading the charge on providing loans to low income applicants with poor credit histories, as all their “investments” were backed up by government, a/k.a TAXPAYER funds (despite the fact that easily upwards of 70% of Americans oppose the idea of any kind of “affirmative action in lending” to ANY group, for ANY reason...as 75% of Americans oppose race/gender-based preferences in any context) and were able to buy/GUARANTEE the bad loans made by banks and mortgage companies.

In 2000 Fannie Mae “owned” a whopping 24% of all U.S. mortgages, a sum virtually ALL economists declared “dangerously high.” By 2007 that number had risen to an astounding 51% of all mortgages and by 2009 had risen further to over 70%!

JMK said...

As promised, Fannie & Freddie had “bought up” (guaranteed) all the bad loans made by government’s “private sector” partners and indemnified them from risk by shifting that risk onto the American taxpayer.

In his 1999 speech at Harvard, Angelo Mozillo (the son of a Bronx butcher turned home loan guru) thanked Fannie, noting that without the financial support of Fannie Mae he couldn’t have done what he did...help trigger the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent global credit crisis. Mozillo said, “I specifically and especially recognize Franklin Raines and his entire team at Fannie Mae for providing a great deal of the resources that have made possible for us to achieve our House America objectives.”

In 2000 the NY Times reported on how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had propelled Mozillo to the top, “By buying up his mortgages and thus freeing up his capital to solicit even more business (high-risk loans), Fannie and Freddie are a big reason Mr. Mozillo has driven Countrywide past the CitiGroups and the Wells Fargos to the top of the mortgage heap.”

On Mozillo’s Countrywide board the notoriously and reliably left-wing Goldman Sachs’ Executive Kathleen Brown (sister of the equally notoriously and reliably liberal former CA Governor, Jerry Brown) and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, who along with Janet Reno sued banks AND lending companies over “unfair lending practices,” using data that actually SUPPORTED the bank’s defense, ALL the data showed that under traditional lending criteria, blacks and whites granted loans had the SAME default rates. If banks were discriminating against blacks the data would have showed that more undeserving whites were getting loans, resulting in a higher default rate among whites. That was NOT the case.

None-the-less, the Cisneros-Reno team sued . While the CRA only applied to Charter banks, the Cisneros-Reno team “went after EVRYBODY,” noting “We’re not eliminating anyone from the mix here. Lending discrimination will be challenged regardless of where it is occurring.”

With that legal war on banks the Cisneros-Reno team “changed the way American banks did business.”

As a result, today, blacks and Hispanics have a far higher default rate than whites and Asians.

JMK said...

The primary and most vital cause of the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent global credit crisis was a toxic and corrosive liberalism, which has fostered a hideous partnership between government and business, driving American businesses to accept a “greater social responsibility” at the expense of business’s first and ONLY reason for being – to make money for its shareholders.

The original charge by Housing Activists like Gail Cincotta and the Rathke’s that “banks and businesses had an affirmative obligation to the poor,” is unfounded, untrue and intentionally harmful to business interests.

The fact that community banks, that had, at that time, invested 89% of their lending funds outside those communities was NOT proof of those banks doing anything wrong, quite the reverse! Those banks owe their customers do not owe their customers, depositors jobs, or a specified share of the loans and investments they make, they merely owe them what any business owes it customers, “good business” in the form of things like lower fees, free checking with a set amount in one’s saving account, convenient hours, the best loan rates (for those that meet the traditional lending criteria). They owe their SHAREHOLDERS (their real owners) far more. Those businesses owe their shareholders their full efforts to make the most money they can. That’s how their shareholders (pensioners, pension funds, 401-Ks, 457s, etc) make their money.

What the CRA did, in effect, was to mandate that these banks become de facto arms of the government’s social services outreach at the direct expense of their shareholder/owners.

In that regard, it turned American banking on its head, by reversing the fundamental purpose of business – to make money.

The late Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) in defending and pursuing the CRA even said, “Government through tax revenues and public debt cannot and should not provide more than a limited part of the capital required for local housing and economic development needs...The banks and savings and loans have the funds...If we are to rebuild our cities, it will have to be done with the private institutions.”

That is a disgusting statement. One that lauds a partnership between business and government with government as the lead/directing partner.

In the intervening years, government has increasingly resorted to bailing out businesses and industries for the unfunded mandates foisted upon them by government. As a result, many, if not most in business have come to embrace this partnership and ostensibly support the perverted goals of the “social justice” platform.

So, yes, “private” enterprise played a part in all this via its acceptance (surrender) to this misguided government/business partnership, many in the GOP are also guilty of signing onto “the Ownership Society” of Jack Kemp. G W Bush, like Bill Clinton made a major issue of “reducing the black/white homeownership gap,” BUT the primary, fundamental...even FOUNDATIONAL cause of all this remains a toxic, corrosive social liberalism that has deeply infected the political class and their partners in corporate America and its largely corporate media and government sponsored education system.

JMK said...

This self-serving, toxic liberalism views “rule by an (allegedly) enlightened elite,” preferable to the chaos of a free-for-all market and Keynesian economic policy (which supposes that government spending, even government-run industries can operate as effectively as privately run ones) exists to benefit solely the political class and by extension, their partners in business, the corporate media and the government sponsored educational establishment.

The American “Capitalist” system has been increasingly regulated and controlled by the government starting in 1912. We haven’t had “free market capitalism in the U.S. since 1912.

The government DID NOT EVER “fail to regulate capitalism” and certainly NOT over the past decade! The G W Bush administration reliably produced over 1,000 new pages of business and fiscal regulation every year, including the most expensive and far-reaching pieces of financial regulation ever to come down the pike in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley!

There is ONLY ONE singular cause of the current crisis and that’s the failure of Corporatism – the oppressive and anti-American partnership between American business and American government.

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