Capitalism

[Kirkland Laing]

Kirk normally your research trumps Lyle's conservative dogma, but he has a point. Sooner or later there is a statute of limitations on blaming Bush. And even on right wing talk radio it is getting harder and harder to find hardy Bush supporters. Even my really conservative friends will agree that the guy made a lot of mistakes. So the constant comparing of the two doesn't really earn points. From our discussions I don't get the feeling that you are completely sold on Obama either. I think your utter hatred for Bush much like Lyle's for Obama might be keeping you from being objective. Of course its the free for all forum on the internet so who is really keeping score?

So the crisis caused by a bunch of decisions between 2001 and 2005 deregulating and ending regulatory oversight of the financial industry, a period of time when the GOP controlled all three branches of government and the Bush administration/Bush appointees made all the crucial (disastrous) decisions to let the financial industry go wild is now Obama's fault after two months of office? How does that work exactly?

I'm only "comparing" the two to show that Bush created the current problems while Obama is trying to clear up the mess, clearing up inaccuracies and general wrongness in Lyle's previous posts, etc.

[VictorCharlie]

Kirk normally your research trumps Lyle's conservative dogma, but he has a point. Sooner or later there is a statute of limitations on blaming Bush. And even on right wing talk radio it is getting harder and harder to find hardy Bush supporters. Even my really conservative friends will agree that the guy made a lot of mistakes. So the constant comparing of the two doesn't really earn points. From our discussions I don't get the feeling that you are completely sold on Obama either. I think your utter hatred for Bush much like Lyle's for Obama might be keeping you from being objective. Of course its the free for all forum on the internet so who is really keeping score?

So the crisis caused by a bunch of decisions between 2001 and 2005 deregulating and ending regulatory oversight of the financial industry, a period of time when the GOP controlled all three branches of government and the Bush administration/Bush appointees made all the crucial (disastrous) decisions to let the financial industry go wild is now Obama's fault after two months of office? How does that work exactly?

I'm only "comparing" the two to show that Bush created the current problems while Obama is trying to clear up the mess, clearing up inaccuracies and general wrongness in Lyle's previous posts, etc.

As I've said before I'm no economic specialist but Clinton's repealing (I know it was authored by Gramm) of Glass/Steagal set the stage for all of this mess. Both parties can share a some blame. Where was the JEC, Committe on Energy/Commerce or the Commitee for Financial Services? The "its all Bush's fault" tag line is just getting old. He is the President. Once he got swore in they are his problems and he better have a solution. If in a year from now we are not any better will you still be putting the whole thing on Bush and the GOP? I want to hear ideas and solutions from my President not how he got dealt a crappy hand from the last guy. There is no ONE right answer to our crisis and while Lyle's responses can sometimes be likened to rhetoric I think his questioning of our President's plan is very justified. On a side note I didn't like his speech either nor do I care for the celebrity persona but thats just my opinion.

[Kirkland Laing]

Kirk normally your research trumps Lyle's conservative dogma, but he has a point. Sooner or later there is a statute of limitations on blaming Bush. And even on right wing talk radio it is getting harder and harder to find hardy Bush supporters. Even my really conservative friends will agree that the guy made a lot of mistakes. So the constant comparing of the two doesn't really earn points. From our discussions I don't get the feeling that you are completely sold on Obama either. I think your utter hatred for Bush much like Lyle's for Obama might be keeping you from being objective. Of course its the free for all forum on the internet so who is really keeping score?

So the crisis caused by a bunch of decisions between 2001 and 2005 deregulating and ending regulatory oversight of the financial industry, a period of time when the GOP controlled all three branches of government and the Bush administration/Bush appointees made all the crucial (disastrous) decisions to let the financial industry go wild is now Obama's fault after two months of office? How does that work exactly?

I'm only "comparing" the two to show that Bush created the current problems while Obama is trying to clear up the mess, clearing up inaccuracies and general wrongness in Lyle's previous posts, etc.

As I've said before I'm no economic specialist but Clinton's repealing (I know it was authored by Gramm) of Glass/Steagal set the stage for all of this mess. Both parties can share a some blame. Where was the JEC, Committe on Energy/Commerce or the Commitee for Financial Services? The "its all Bush's fault" tag line is just getting old. He is the President. Once he got swore in they are his problems and he better have a solution. If in a year from now we are not any better will you still be putting the whole thing on Bush and the GOP? I want to hear ideas and solutions from my President not how he got dealt a crappy hand from the last guy. There is no ONE right answer to our crisis and while Lyle's responses can sometimes be likened to rhetoric I think his questioning of our President's plan is very justified. On a side note I didn't like his speech either nor do I care for the celebrity persona but thats just my opinion.

Clinton repealing Glass Steagal didn't help as it let more players into the market for the securities which blew up the system, but all those securities would have been created, traded and then done exactly the same damage without the big commercial banks having been involved. The only real damage done by Clinton was when he wanted to regulate derivatives with the same bill but Gramm insisted on no regulation of the derivatives market and inserted no-regulation legislation into the bill that he then wouldn't let through the Senate without it being accepted. But the deregulation of mortgage-related derivatives and other financial products from 2001-5 dwarfed the Gramm legislation in terms of the damage it eventually caused as far as the regulation or lack of with derivatives was concerned.

You can't blame Obama for a crisis that was created and that was in full swing when he took office. The problems we're facing now are Obama's to deal with but weren't created by him. We can blame Obama for how he deals with the crisis Bush created but not the crisis itself. And he's definitely making mistakes in how he's handling it! It looks like the choice Americans have is to have their country badly run by a Democrat or insanely badly run by a Republican. But Bush deserves all the blame for how it started, as I already showed in this thread by using facts and evidence :

http://www.saddoboxing.com/boxingfor...italism-5.html

That page shows part of the story. Interestingly, in the photograph, the Bush appointee holding the chainsaw over the stack of mortgage regulations was the guy entrusted with monitoring AIG, something he totally failed to even try to do. He just took their word everything was kosher. If I told you the story of the part AIG actually played in the meltdown you'd be reaching for a pitchfork, you just wouldn't believe it possible.

But page 5 only shows part of the story. It doesn't explain how the government ended regulation of the mortgage companies like Countrywide and Ameriquest in 2001, allowing them to write as many mortgages as they wanted then sell them to Wall Street who turned them into (now-toxic) securities. It doesn't explain how when the AGs of every State in the country used Depression-era laws to try and prevent predatory lending to bad debtors (laws brought in after the same shit helped cause the Depression) the Bush administration used the federal regulatory agency that was meant to prevent predatory lending to block the lawsuits and let the mortgage companies continue to make bad loans. It doesn't explain how the Bush administration allowed the banks in 2005 to lever up their debt:asset ratios from an historically safe 10:1 to 30 and 40:1, making the bad debt bubble (and eventual losses) dozens of times bigger overnight. And lots more besides. Too much to mention.

Here's one article about the predatory lending just to confirm some of the above stuff :

Eliot Spitzer - Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime - washingtonpost.com

But there's endless more stuff where this came from.