Posted by
John Caile on Thursday, September 25, 2008 11:38:00 AM
Turning to Barak Obama and the Democrats to "fix" the economy is like asking Al Capone and his friends to clean up crime. In either case, you'd be looking for a solution from the very people who helped create the problem.
True, there are some "moderate" go-along Republicans who certainly share some of the blame, but there is simply no denying that Democrats are overwhelmingly at the center of the current mortgage mess.
Democrat Senator Chris Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and he is at the top of the list of recipients of "donations" from Freddie Mac and Fannie May. Democrat John Kerry is number two. And who is number three?
Barak Obama.
In fact, the top five money grabbers are ALL Democrats.
And this isn't just a case of guilt by association, or the unethical behaviors of financial executives - and there are plenty of them (most of whom just happen to be highly-connected Democrats, by the way).
No, it's more than that. When you dig into the root causes of the financial crisis, you find a mountain of bad policies - almost all of them put into place by Democrats going back to Franklin Roosevelt. Contrary to the absurd statement by Obama that the problem is too little "control" or "government oversight," the reality is that American financial markets are among the most highly regulated industries in existence. If anything, we have had far too much government interference in what should be matters of private sector commerce.
Take the Community Reinvestment Act, one of the chief culprits in the increase in foreclosures. This ridiculous piece of governmental meddling basically forced lenders to give loans to people whose credit ratings did not measure up. All in the name of "compassion" or "fairness" of course. The result? We have millions of people buying homes because they obtained loans they could not legitimately qualify for, and then, lo and behold, they can't make their payments. And we're supposed to be surprised?
Democrats are notoriously ignorant of basic economics, let alone the intricate workings of the real estate financial business. That's because they have always viewed economic policy, just as they do the tax code, not as as an instrument of fiscal policy, but as a way to implement liberal SOCIAL policy - a vehicle for taking money from successful people and give it to, well, losers. In this case, people who are clearly potential deadbeats.
Yet despite Democrats' miserable track record on all things economic, the polls indicate that the financial meltdown has caused a slight shift toward Democrats in the upcoming election. Since not a single pollster has bothered to ask these people WHY they would expect Democrats to do a better job than Republicans, I conducted a very unscientific survey of my own. I asked dozens of people about the current situation and who or what they thought was the cause.
You probably won't be surprised to find that most of them, while nice people, sounded disturbingly like Jay Leno's "man on the street" interviews - they were clueless. Most had no idea who Fannie May and Freddie Mac are, or what they do. Their comments as to who was to blame ranged from "big business" to "greedy lenders" to "the government." Thankfully, there was one woman who said "people borrowing more than they could afford" - but alas, she was the only one.
Another very disturbing fact that came out of my little survey was this: more than a third of the people I questioned thought that Republicans "controlled Congress" - they had no idea that Democrats were in the majority.
But then, with a mainstream media falling all over themselves to void telling the truth to the American people about Democrat hanky-panky, this should not come as a shock. After all, they are much too busy to be doing any real investigative reporting, such as looking into the top Democrats and their cozy relationships both inside and outside of these financial institutions.
However, these same overworked media types have somehow found enough spare time to seek out a friend of an employee of a firm who once worked for someone who maybe knew John McCain and might have gotten a few thousand dollars ten years ago for something but we're not sure what...but hey, THAT's a story! Welcome to 21st Century "journalism."
My concern is that the media just might get their wish. And if they do, the policies likely enacted under a Democratic President with a Democratic legislative majority would almost certainly bring about an economic debacle the likes of which we have not seen since the Jimmy Carter days.
Or worse...