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More on AIG

March 24th, 2009

The Rank Hypocrisy Continues Unabated

Wow. I watched the 60 Minutes interview with President Obama regarding the AIG bonuses that came as such a surprise to the Administration and to Congress. The prevarication and obfuscation continues.

The President lays this entire mess at the feet of Wall Street, completely ignoring the laws and regulations that the financial industry has been operating under, not to mention what has been happening to our money for the last 96 years.

And, it is no great surprise that the “news” program that has provided us with such journalistic dreck as the fake National Guard memos is now providing us with this current line of swine manure. The best policy I have found when listening to these “journalists” is to assume everything that they say is a colossal lie, and then do my best to logically destroy my own argument. So far, I am failing miserably at destroying most of my arguments.

As I have mentioned previously, this particular financial crisis was precipitated by changes in lending laws that were intended to increase minority home ownership, legislation proposed by the Clinton Administration and passed by a very unconservative Republican Congress in the late 90s. This was policy direction was continued by the Bush Administration. Before that time, the banks were frequently accused of red-lining (mostly by rabble-rousing leftist ideologues) to deny loans to minority applicants. All of a sudden, “money” was made available to them, even if they could not legitimately qualify for the loans or if they could not demonstrate an ability to repay the loans. Next thing you know, the bankers are accused (after the fact, of course) of making “predatory” loans to this same statistical population that they supposedly red-lined until 10 or 12 years ago. Jesse Jackson led the way with this business as far back as 1989. Read this from then in The New York Times. Then read what he said in Feb of 2008 in the ABA Journal.

This is positively Orwellian. If you haven’t read Animal Farm by George Orwell, I recommend that you do. It’s only a couple hundred pages, but the ideas that it conveys fill volumes.

I’m so angry over this affair that I could spit 20-penny forming nails. I’d write more, but frankly, I have found myself at a loss for words at the audacity of these people. I sit here, literally, dumbfounded.

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: AIG, economy, Obama
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

4 Responses to “More on AIG”

Tom | March 25th, 2009 at 8:29 pm

Beginning with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, banks and other mortgage lenders came under pressure to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them. From then until now, to one degree or another, every administration and Congress has supported the CRA, amended it, and conceived and enforced legislation and policies to that effect. I won’t question the ethical goals of those who thought this was a good idea; I do question their intelligence if they think we should keep doing it.

Lenders didn’t make loans to people who couldn’t pay before they were forced to. So that part of the problem can be chalked up to ill-conceived social engineering on the part of the government. But businesses, financiers, and others (in the U.S. and other countries) took advantage of this absurd situation, creating a huge house of cards built around this ticking time bomb.

So, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and it falls on both political parties. Time to stop pointing fingers and fix the problem, to include putting mechanisms in place to help prevent a problem this serious from happening again.

doris | March 26th, 2009 at 7:51 am

If Brian is dumbfounded, imagine how the rest of us ignorant, uninformed, feel???? It is ridiculous to think that this all started with equal opportunities! Now, we are all equally broke. Sometimes, I think that if you can’t afford something, maybe you shouldn’t buy it, no one should have to tell you this. What’s happened to common sense? Hey, we are selling our business, any suggestions as to what to do with the money, and what to do to make a living afterwards? My husband just keeps walking around in a fog, saying, what are we gonna do now? I’m too old to get a job in this economy. I’m thinking, a tin can in the back yard, for the money?

Brian | March 26th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

Doris, it was never really about equal opportunity, though it was certainly colored as such. It was about equality of outcome. What this thinking ignores is the reality that we all have different abilities, desires, and motivations.

Do you think that a 40 year old high school dropout, 20-year journeyman plumber (could have had his master plumber’s license probably 15 years ago) that still smokes marijuana has the same abilities and motivations as your brother or sister, or my sisters and brothers-in-law (older sister and husband are doctors, younger sister and husband are pharmacists)?

My father (whose father was an abusive alcoholic) was reared essentially as a share-cropper in rural northwest Louisiana. He fought and scraped to get his PhD, and retired as a Vice Chancellor from LSU. My fiance’s step-father (whose father was a paraplegic after an accident) was reared in similar poverty, yet he has a successful tree service business up in East Texas. I don’t think either one of these men has ever worked a 40 hour week. My father is a man of letters, my fiance’s step-father is not, but they both achieved success.

doris | March 26th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

No, I certainly do not, marijuana kills too many brain cells! I didn’t partake, yet I fear brain cells are rapidly expiring from lack of use. I just don’t have that much ambition, anymore. What all equal opportunity programs seem to not ever take into account are the differences in all people, and we should embrace those. Those with the ability and drive should always get the job, or schooling, what it was meant to do in the beginning was give the same oppertunities to those with the same abilities and skills, but what we got is color and sex is all that counts, as can be seen each time you go to an auto parts place. A girl who has to ask a guy every time…. I am a woman, but I always ask rudely for a man…. Some things just don’t need infiltration by the opposite sex and etc. I do not consider myself sexist or racist, although all of us are a tiny bit, human nature, but please, use some intelligence in hiring, not gov. interference. Enough is enough, know your own limits. This man graduated college and became a teacher, a realtor and wrote a book about it, he was illiterate. He delegated, lied, made excuses, he finagled, he was a great b.s.er, but he is most certainly the exception, not the rule.