Thursday, May 14, 2009

149 - Cutting Through Right-Wing Spin About Who's To Blame For The Financial Crisis

[from the transcript]

Imagine you're the ultimate right-winger, one of Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. You've made make huge profits by engaging in reckless financial behavior. Your irresponsible actions have brought the world's financial system to the brink of collapse. You then grab hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars more, as the government tries to stabilize and repair the system.

Finally, to top it all off, you largely succeed in blaming the entire mess on a liberal gay congressman and a federal law designed to help the poor.

Liberals, gays, the poor. Three right-wing bugaboos.

This is a right-winger's fantasy dream.

And it seems like it's coming true for them.

In order to counter all the right-wing spin and outright lies about the causes of the global financial crisis and the best remedies for it, you have to see the entire picture. Put everything in context.

Let me sketch for you an overall framework, and then afterwards, I'll detail each of its pieces.

The framework has two major parts.

There's what I call the trigger, and what I call the ultimate cause.

The trigger part was the bursting of the housing bubble and countless mortgages, many subprime, going bust.

The ultimate cause was the so-called securitization of those mortgages through complex financial instruments called derivatives.

The securitization through derivatives was what made the housing collapse system-threatening and global in scope.

The right likes to focus only on the housing-mortgage element. And even for that, they mis-assign blame.

As you'll see, with both the housing-mortgage trigger, and the securitization-derivatives ultimate cause, the villain is the right-wing deregulation frenzy during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

[Please listen to the podcast for the details, and to hear choice clips from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Morris and Pat Buchanan...]

(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief preview above. Thanks!!)


#149 Transcript
#149 Transcript as a Word document
#149 Sources

Jack Clark 7:57 PM [+]   0 comments
Post #4079463825803150136

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