Common wisdom holds that the near collapse 0f 2008 snuck up on us, and that nobody saw it coming. Common wisdom is wrong. Lots of people saw it coming, and I was one of them, so it didn’t take rocket science to figure it out. In 2007 I was discussing how Republicans realized they were on the way out, and they were setting the US up for an economics crisis, so they could blame their successor, and present themselves as the solution. I was wrong about the timing. I expected it to come in the first quarter of 2009, but it did in the last quarter of 2008. I was also wrong about the scope. I did not expect it to be this severe. Republicans are now changing their lies and often saying that Obama is responsible, so I consider it imperative to clear the air so there can be no doubt that this is a Republican Recession.
American Public Media’s "Marketplace" had a recent segment focused on why it has taken so long to bring criminal prosecutions related to the financial crisis. Reporters observed that at the beginning of the crisis, the Obama administration wanted to calm the financial industry rather than impose accountability. They speculated, along with Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street participants, many of whom have been calling for prosecutions, that Obama’s creation of a new group to prosecute mortgage fraud led by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman was likely to be politically motivated. And they indicated that financial crimes are complex and prosecutors need time to develop their cases.
But here’s what they didn’t say: A major reason the prosecutions don’t exist is that President George W. Bush took the cops off the beat.
Think about street crime. Imagine, for example, a protection racket in which gangs extort payment from fearful shopkeepers. Prosecutors rarely initiate criminal prosecutions; indeed, they may not even know that the crime is occurring. The police pound the beats that keep them aware of the increase in crime, respond to complaints, investigate, determine that a crime may have occurred that warrants attention, create a file and send it to the prosecutor’s office. In routine cases, the prosecution proceeds on the basis of the police report alone. In more complex cases, the prosecutor may supplement the police investigation. But prosecutors rarely initiate cases. Even when a task force is appointed to target crime in a particular sector, it typically involves prosecutors working with the police. The prosecutors simply don’t have the skills or the manpower to detect crime, conduct investigations and make the record necessary to prosecute.
So where were the police in the current financial crisis? The FBI did investigate and warned in 2004 that an epidemic of mortgage fraud was underway. The Bush administration took the FBI’s white-collar experts, however, and reassigned them to terrorism cases. The inquiries under way in 2004 – and the public cries of alarms that accompanied them – largely disappeared. The cops were literally yanked off the beat.
In the early part of the increase in subprime lending, state attorneys general were bringing cases, and calling attention to predatory lending practices. Financial conglomerates complained to the Bush administration. In 2003, the Office of the Controller of the Currency (OCC) relied on a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to preempt all state predatory lending laws. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks… [emphasis added]
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If GW Bush, acting for the Republican Party and the criminal Banksters they represent, had not prevented the federal investigation of corporate criminals and outlawed state investigation of them, there would have been prosecutions long ago. This would have prevented Banksters from running hog wild, and that would have at least made the Republican Recession far less severe. Republicans continue to protect corporate criminals from prosecution, by starving the agencies that would investigate them for cash, so they cannot hire the beat cops to to the job.
17 Responses to “Why It’s a Republican Recession”
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Let’s not forget the democrat contribution to this fiscal fiasco – granted the GOP has motives similar to a rapist and are willing to destroy the country altogether – making them akin to traitors, the corporatists of the other party were by no means “babes in arms”!
Lee, I agree that Clinton should never have signed the act that did away with Glass-Steagal, but he never did anything specifically designed to enable corporate criminals to prey on Americans. It is the extent of that predation that pushed the economy over the edge.
Oh, what a tangled web…
…Republicans weave.
My initial reaction to this – and I admit that I have not finished reading the article as I write this – is that this is/was not perpetrated by the “Republican Party”, they were involved, certainly, but are/were merely the tools of the (for lack of a better term) Illuminati-type group of greedy, power-hungry criminals [libertines, if you will] that have been pounding the rest of us down since the Roman Empire. Not the least of these entities is the Catholic Church, which has exerted its influence over governments of every stripe for 1600+ years, and the Zionist/Israeli/Jewish machine which has been at work even longer than that. Do not underestimate the effect/influence that organized religion had had on cultural and political development throughout humankind’s history. By creating fear they have ALWAYS been able to manipulate the masses for their own sick purposes, whether they be a lust for power, a lust for torture or a lust for money. By pitting populations against each other they easily remain in control.
I so agree!
I have spent many hours over many years looking into such conspiracy theories and have found them to be heavily laden with assumptions but short on factual support. Mind you, I’m not saying you are wrong here. I just have no basis sufficient to believe it, so I act according to what I can know.
It will take many many years for this country to recover from what Bush in his administration did to this country , and what is continuing to be done by The GOP thugs –TC I didn’t know what was coming- but I sure as hell knew something was– I could see the economy out of control and getting worse—I think a lot of people knew something wrong was going on—-
In 2008, before Bush left office, my estimate to undo the damage he and the Republican party did was fifty years.
9/11 surely gave Baby Bush a platform from which to distract people for many years. And then shortly thereafter, an illegal war over WMD in Iraq really intensified the distraction away from more urgent matters on the homefront like mortgage fraud and the incidious effects on the economy.
From the article: The FBI did investigate and warned in 2004 that an epidemic of mortgage fraud was underway. The Bush administration took the FBI’s white-collar experts, however, and reassigned them to terrorism cases.
Financial conglomerates complained to the Bush administration. In 2003, the Office of the Controller of the Currency (OCC) relied on a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to preempt all state predatory lending laws. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks…
For pete’s sake, the 1863 National Bank Act! Was everybody asleep at the switch while Republican/Teabaggers were engineering the near collapse of the US economy? What a tangled web indeed!
This is one more reason why Baby Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al need to be prosecuted not only for crimes against humanity, but also economic crimes against the people of the US, and indeed the people of the world. Fat chance of that happening with the far reaching tentacles of the Republican?Teabagger party, and the powerful lobbying forces behind the Republican/Teabaggers like the Kochs and many, many others.
I know it is in every Americans DNA not to like regulation, or so it seems, but perhaps it is time for regulation of corporate America to rein in its corporate agenda and bring back some sanity. Isn’t that in essence what you do with kids or a wayward dog — grounding in the bedroom or off to the bad dog box. It will be no small short term task however since now many of the states are red, SCOTUS is red and some of the states will surely challenge each and every regulation. One can only wish.
There re three categories of regulation.
One is regulations that are outdated. They need to be removed.
The second is regulations enacted to benefit the super-rich by providing barriers to entry that keep others from competing with them. They need to be removed.
The third is regulations that protect citizens by requiting safety standards or preventing their victimization resulting from the side effects of corporate greed. They need to be increased.
It’s a Republican DEPRESSION.
Playing nice with words doesn’t change the facts.
I guess it depends on where you are. For banksters it lasted only a few days,
Touche 🙂
🙂
Agreed Lynn Squance. We do in fact regulate ouselves, i.e., we can’t steal, murder, harm (which includes a long list), and there’s all sorts of business fraud individuals are accountable for if they do it.Yet we’re all free to make money and live our lives in an almost infinite number of ways. Why in the world would we not regulate these giant banks and corporations that have the most potential to do harm. It truly is insanity.
Welcome Bryan. 🙂
I could not agree more.