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Monday, September 29, 2008

God Bless Gridlock

Today the U.S. House of Representatives did something so unusual it scared Wall Street into a 700 point drop in the Dow.

It said 'no' to a bad idea.

The mortgage crisis is no doubt real. I'm one of the sub-prime borrowers in question, if you gotta know. I've managed to hold it together but I don't know for how long. And I know first hand of people who borrowed more improbably than I.

But fixing the mortgage crisis does not mean giving god-like powers to the most ambitious Wall Street asshead to ever pretend to serve the public.

The Bush Administration has a long track record of making dire predictions about what the failure to approve their bold initiatives would mean. The result is the Patriot Act, illegal wiretaps, water-boarding at Gitmo, the Iraq war, and so on.

Did they create the mess? Well, easy lending on mortgages dates back at least to Clinton, and I can remember Alan Greenspan justifying low interest rates on the basis that real estate was the only thing holding our economy up after 9/11.

So this catastrophe is a true bipartisan effort. Since probably 97% of you won't vote Libertarian even though the Republocrats and Depublicans created the whole problem, I leave it to you to pretend that the status-quo parties have anything that looks like a solution.

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