The Entitlement Society 0
Paul Krugman in the Guardian makes the case for financial consumer protection. Short version: “You can’t trust the banksters”:
(snip)
The main moral you should draw from the financial crisis, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong – and not just because no such promise would be credible.
The fact is that, however the Goldman Sachs case is resolved, much of the financial industry has become a racket – a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on
The Booman, in a separate post on the same general topic, dissects yet another Republican misdirection play:
How soon these Republicans and their conservative disinformation machine want you to forget The Resolution Trust Company created up by Bush Sr. in 1989 to resolve the S & L crisis.
More recently, how quickly they want you to forget Hank Paulson and George Bush and the complete lack of oversight over TARP program that those GOP stalwarts created to bail out the banks that were “too big to fail.”
How quickly they want you to forget Paulson’s behind closed doors threats to Congress that if they didn’t pass the TARP legislation in precisely the manner the Bush administration demanded “that within 24 hours, the entire political structure of the United States would collapse.”
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Add to the list another fantastic lie:
“I’m a Republican. I care about the little guy.”
