Re: Obama 9 -- Its Been a Whole Year Now
Best post you've made but I think you miss one major thing that happened. The lobbying dollars that went into deregulating were huge. The amount of time and effort that were spent by the banks or anyone else (media?) sounding the alarm of the impending doom was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Who was protecting us from this? No one. Not the lenders, not the government. A lot of people in the banks were getting rich off vapor. Some speculators got rich off vapor. Folks like me that knew that the doubled value in my home was vapor stood pat and hoped that the incoming mess wouldn't affect things so much that it would get us. Unfortunately, it did. Everyone got screwed on this mess.
All the while the leader of the country at the time spent a lot of time touting his "ownership" society. More people owned homes under his administration then any other. Of course it was all vapor and anyone with half a mind could see that. But no one cared to protect us the people. No one cared.
So, when you say privatization works I say BS. Why? Cause they didn't sound the alarm. They didn't care. They knew, but they didn't give a crap about anything but profit.
Agreed, to a certain extent. You're making the assertion that banks are the only private industry out there, when they only make up a small percentage of businesses operating in the U.S. Without the private sector being the driving force behind our economy, the United States doesn't exist as a free country.
With regards to Bush and his touting homeownership: To be fair, his administration tried over a dozen times to rein in the lending by Fannie/Freddie, which write the vast majority of mortgages in this country. Those efforts were repeatedly turned away by his opponents. Should he have done more? Yes, but he's not the only one to blame--especially since the trend toward boosting homeownership started during the Clinton years.
The other parties that should be faulted for this debacle:
* Politicians pushing for looser lending guidelines to expand homeownership
* Mortgage "brokerages" (middlemen) that perpetrated the vast majority of fraudulent lending (even though this makes up a very small percentage of defaults)
* Advocacy groups and non-profits that took taxpayer money to get underqualified borrowers into homes
* HGTV for making it look really easy to flip a house
* The fiscal irresponsibility of Americans that continually (until recently) borrowed more than they could afford to pay back
Essentially, everyone was having a big orgy over getting people into homeownership while turning a blind eye to the results. Throw Fair Lending Laws and non-profit advocacy groups into the mix with two massive GSEs willing to buy up any crap that came around the bend, and the things sped out of control like a Prius on recall. I'm not saying that the alarm shouldn't have been sounded--just that no one wanted to hear it.
