Republicrat consensus builds

Obama had a few red-meat phrases last night—borrowed from the Republicans who hate his guts—about regulations that ‘put an unnecessary burden on businesses’, to go with his call last week to eliminate ‘outmoded, ineffective, insufficient or excessively burdensome’ ones.

Curiously enough, the very same day early leaks from the report of his Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) pointed to—guess what?—as the underlying cause of the 2008 bank panic and subsequent mega-recession: WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE REGULATION of the financial industry.

How perfect: the experts blame the banks and the banker-captured regulatory system while our president, who appointed them, ignores all that and insists that banks and businesses should be freed from ‘government overregulation and higher taxes’.

This is clearly a dangerous Stalinist about to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The litany of accusations against top-level bank executives and virtually the entire financial governance system of the nation in the FCIC report is breathtaking:
-Greenspan failed to perform his regulatory duties as Fed chief and enabled the housing bubble, allowed his ideological blinders to trump the data sitting on his lap;
-Clinton ceded to the banker wishlist and deregulated the dangerous derivatives markets (for which Larry Summers was chief cheerleader before going to work for Obama);
-Geithner had no idea that Citigroup and Lehman were teetering even though his job was to oversee them;
-the SEC did nothing while huge banks went over the edge on borrowed cash;
-Paulson and Bernanke napped throughout (why even mention Bush?);
-two Federal bank regulatory agencies blocked states from reining in excessive and abusive lending practices;
-AIG executives didn’t know what the fuck was happening in their own company.

And on and on. Basically, the report says that all those geniuses educated at Harvard and MIT and who belong to the elite clubs featured in The Social Network turned out to be a herd of clueless dufuses. This doesn’t say much for Obama’s clarion call to improve ‘education’ (whatever that means nowadays) as a way to remain competitive in the world.