Republican Philosophy of Deregulation to Blame for Runaway Greed, Crashes, Bailouts

Another down day on Wall Street. Another day of distracting tactics, lies, and extremist rhetoric from Republicans. In all honesty, though none of it is excusable, it is at least understandable why. When the foundation of Republican thinking is that anarchy in the financial system results in wealth, that wealth concentrated at the top does, eventually trickle down, and that all the world's ills can be solved by free market capitalism and when that foundation cracks and crumbles more with each passing day, what is there for a political ideologue to do?

Lie, lie, accuse.

And so we have seen it. We have seen it with each day bringing desperate new campaign tactics. We have seen it with the blatant attempt to identify political opponents as terrorists and we have seen it in a massive campaign to deny anything looking even vaguely like responsibility.

Fannie, Freddie and the Great Deregulation Denial
A typical Republican, Karl Rove, tactic is to take a political enemy's strength and use it to beat that enemy about the head. In this election it is Republicans claiming Democrats were to blame for the very financial crisis they engineered, all while pointing to a false target -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This lie is a blatant attempt to hide the fact that the true culprit in this whole financial fiasco was Republican-pushed deregulatory legislation and Bush administration failure to monitor financial markets with anything resembling vigilance.

Phil Gramm, John McCain's chief economic advisor, sponsored legislation that allowed the toxic lending vehicles that precipitated much of the crisis to exist in the first place. And as Fannie and Freddie fell victim to these economic bombs unleashed by the Republican 'no rules are good rules' crash machine, the Republicans, needing a scapegoat, began to blame the victim firms for the problems they legislated to begin with. It's like the guy with the ax blaming the tree he cut down for falling.

According to Michael Greenberger, former director of the CFTC's division of trading and markets, unregulated swaps were at "the heart of the subprime meltdown. I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don't think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause."

But the zero integrity Republican arguments go much further. Now that they have a scapegoat, no matter how false, in Fannie and Freddie, they are happy to, in every fallacious way possible, link Obama with that scapegoat. Recently, they pointed to Obama's Freddie and Fannie contributions -- totalling a mere 120,000 dollars. What they failed to mention was that McCain, over the past seven years received over 12.6 million in campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie and that key McCain advisors were lobbyists for Fannie and Freddie for years.

It's not too hard to connect the dots. First republican policies allow for risky lending practices creating a vast pot of financial capital. Second, greedy investors and executives exploit these lending practices to transfer vast amounts of wealth into their coffers. Third, when the system is sucked dry, cut and run. In short, it's pretty obvious why Fannie Executives wanted so much influence over McCain. It wasn't because Fannie and Freddie were greedy institutions. It was because a bunch of looters ended up running them and personally profiting from driving them to the dirt.

It's pretty nice when you get to blame your opponents for the trouble you caused, isn't it? The reason the tale becomes so twisted and convoluted is that the McCain campaign and all its vicious Republican cohorts keep telling lies to cover up past lies or repeating the old lies in hopes that, at some point, people will begin to believe them. In the end, the result is just an unprecedented level of mind-fogging.

Greed was Seen as a Virtue
But is it any wonder that a philosophy that protected financial crooks and gave justification for their very existence would transfer so much wealth away from the middle class that society itself became insolvent? FDR once said that concentrations of wealth stink. I wonder what he would say about the upper class of our society with its culture of vast and vacant homes resulting in whole areas of beach property being ghost-towns except on vacation days. I wonder what he would say about a health-care system that holds as its central virtue the profits of insurance companies and not the lives of those insured or losing their insurance. I wonder what he would say about a middle class whose wages have dropped as their expenses increased. I wonder what he would say about all the lost and foreclosed homes.

Would he say that these are the virtues of Greed? That in the end what greed means is more for only a few people now and less for everyone in the future, at this point, the very near future?

Past Crashes Ignored
FDR is relevant because something very similar to what is happening now last happened at the time of the Great Depression. When laissez faire ran rampant, when those with the wealth and power to manipulate markets did so in order to transfer to themselves even greater wealth and power, while the very force that enriches economies -- a healthy middle class -- was choked off.

When the grass roots die, the grass will soon die as well. Such is the relationship between the middle class and the wealthy, despite the wealthy's resentment of it. They cannot benefit from an economic system they took so much from it could no longer effectively exist. Once the machinery meant to serve the needs of millions is absconded for the delight of hundreds, that system, inevitably crashes. And though this has happened before in our history, the Republicans ignored it. Some Democrats, swayed by the rhetoric, the intimidation, and the fear tactics went along too. But make no mistake where it came from -- Republican Laissez Faire ideology.

There is No Responsibility, No Lessons Learned Only a Reptilian Survivability
And yet there is no shame. No shame at all. No remorse. No speck of humanity. Only a reptilian efficiency that shifts from one threat to the next and sees everything through the lens of its own survival.

There is a creature in mythology that acts in such a way. That will heartlessly kill or intimidate its enemies. That will feast on their bodies and gather all their wealth together in a great, useless, pile and then make it little more than a glorified bed for itself to lie in. That creature is a dragon and this is the way in which the Republican party now behaves. For them, victory itself is proof of moral superiority and in this battle any means will justify that end. For, to them, it has become a matter of survival -- of us against them. And to the victor go all the spoils.