My toughest days are Wed to Thurs so I haven't had time for a comprehensive post (I will after I get out of work today)--especially because it entails digging through legalese. The circumstances around the bill are really murky and do suggest that people fell along party lines(I need to dig, because what happens in the House not what happens in the Senate, etc.) where lobbying and fear of making constituents angry was an issue. I will post links later with more details.
That said, the use of that argument to blame the Democrats for the entire financial crisis is as much an oversimplification as blaming deregulation exclusively. Factcheck weighs in:
Who Caused the Economic Crisis? So I was wrong in jumping to the conclusion that deregulation was to blame as the
end all (a partisan moment
). It's not. Neither is the Dems' opposition (more on that later) to the bill. That was a mistake, true, but not enough to pin the blame for the financial crisis on the Democrats on anything other than partisan grounds--especially considering White House opposition (more on that later as well). There is plenty of evidence that Fannie & Freddie were just the tip of the iceberg in a perfect storm.
Factcheck concludes:
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
Lastly, I don't feel comfortable posting without challenging the idea that minorities and the poor should get the brunt of the blame, which is unsettling to me on so many levels. But I'll let the lefties at
Newsweek respond.
Be back later,
alcyone
