Financial and Energy Woes. Who is to blame?
About the Author: Born in Boston, I lived and worked in the D.C. area for a time, but have spent most of my life in Tennessee, where I graduated from the University of Tennessee. My political philosophy could best be described as eclectic, though mostly right of center. Read more from this authorDemocrats rejoice. The news is all bad lately, and they know that this bodes well for their prospects in November. A measure of just how excited Democrats and their media allies are at America’s failings can be seen in the opportunistic use of yesterday’s financial sector crisis as a happy campaign hammer. Both Obama and Biden have barely spoken of anything else in the last 24 hours. CNN and USA Today joyfully hammer out story after story. So are Democrats really the answer, the blameless rays of hope and change that can lead American to a new tomorrow?
Not hardly.
The various sectors of the economy - now world economy - are intimately linked together in a complex environment that makes climate science look like straight addition. It is impossible to demolish one floor of a building and expect the floors above not to fall and the floors below not to receive serious damage, and in this century, the bottom floor is energy, impacting everything from food prices to building prices to people’s abilities to pay their mortgages or to take out new ones. When you are paying an extra few hundred dollars a month for gas and for home energy consumption, you hurt.
The destruction of American energy production by the Democrats is well documented. Beholden to the environmental lobby, Democrats have stifled one attempt after another to encourage and enable new energy exploration. And when faced with a serious crisis as we have now, what do they do? They propose an energy reform package that the API’s Red Cavaney says will do nothing but remove incentives from oil companies while “(denying) Americans access to some of our nation’s most promising energy resources.”
In a crisis, the Democrats still can’t divest themselves from the environmental lobbyists and set a course that is good for America. Instead they offer to worsen the situation under the guise of being helpful in order to improve their election standing.
So we have a wobbly financial sector that is having the floor beneath it knocked away - but is acting as though it doesn’t realize it is happening. No one is evacuating or screaming out the window at the guy in the bulldozer. They’re still just in it for the financial sector. After all, it’s not their job to pay attention to the energy sector, right?
But someone was paying attention to the financial sector and tried to fix this problem years ago. As noted on Hot Air, the Republicans and the Bush administration tried to push through sweeping changes by creating an oversight agency for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
According to the New York Times,
The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.
”There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,” Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.
But the ranking Democrat on the committee, Barney Frank, summarized the Democratic Party’s position:
”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis…’The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
Democrats were in this for the populist position, seeking votes by hammering away at lending standards and requiring lenders to open up their wallets for customers who could not afford a home and should never have been trying to buy one. Lest this seem harsh, let me point out that I lived in an apartment for twelve years until I could afford a house.
And here, again, Democrats are involved with lobbyists. In fact, Obama, Chris Dodd and John Kerry are the top three congressional recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money. Pelosi and Reed are not far behind.
If there is any truth left in the media at all, the weight of this near calamity will be hoisted upon the shoulders of the Democrats. Unfortunately we already know how this is going to continue to play: Republicans, who have ever been for energy and tighter credit controls, are the scapegoats.
After all, it’s an election year and the most important thing is not America, it’s Democrats.
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You’re right on target making this connection. However, what’s caught me in your post is the tangent you’re also throwing some light upon.
It fascinates me the way Pelosi and company try to separate issues and treat each problem as if it did not influence, and were not influenced by, other problems. The obvious goal, of course, is to keep big issues simple so the ’simple folk’ can better understand them.
The more subtle purpose, though, is propaganda. It is easier to manipulate simple concepts or dissociated entities. If you can keep someone from thinking about how environmental decisions affect home ownership, or how easy mortgages affect the stock market, you can better control his or her thought process.
It’s observing my mother-in-law that has me thinking about this. She receives all of her information about politics and the world from TV. (Yikes!) As a result, she is quite capable of holding mutually contradictory notions on related topics, because she only thinks of them individually. On those couple of occasions when I have pointed out a linkage and shown her the inherent contradiction, she defaults to a more emotional, “Well, I still think…” But, of course, thinking isn’t really a part of her default positions. She dresses her emotions in a thin robe of rationale based upon superficial attributes.
Interestingly, she calls herself an ‘independent,’ but spouts CNN political and social views. Indeed, if I listen to CNN’s or CBS’s take on a controversial person or issue (take, Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate, for example) I can tell her what she thinks. I’ve done it. She says, “that’s right,” with a slightly vague, slightly embarrassed aire, as if wondering for a moment how she can be so predictable and yet be an independent.
It doesn’t last long, however. And I can almost watch that slight stretching of her mental rubber band relax, pulling her thoughts back into place, as she puts the little conundrum aside in favor of her reflexive, pre-programmed conviction.
Exercising reason is, in the end, not her primary concern. Appearing reasonable is the name of the game; and the best way to do that is to think what everyone else who claims the mantle ‘reasonable American’ appears to be thinking. (Perhaps that should be a new hyphenated American category: “I’m a Reasonable-American. What are you?”)
Mass media is a great way to control the mass mind. Modern Democrats are the group-think people who cannot tolerate non-group thinking. Thus Sarah Palin must be destroyed for straying from the women-as-group mental straightjacket. And Clarence Thomas had to be discredited for refusing to wear the black-as-group mental wardrobe.
“Modern Democrats are the group-think people who cannot tolerate non-group thinking.”
I’ve been trying to get that poing across on our other site regarding the Retarted Babies, the bounty on Bristol’s baby, the jokes about 9/11, but no one gets it. They accuse me of lumping them all together unfairly. As far as I can tell, though, there’s no reason not to lump them together.
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