Big Government Contributor, Charlie Gasparino gives his take on the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs at the Daily Beast:

John Paulson is an interesting guy: He was one of a handful of hedge-fund managers who bet the mortgage-bond market would decline beginning in late 2006, and made billions from that bet. Here is where the SEC charges get interesting: Goldman allowed Paulson to help create the bond and to put some of the most risky mortgages in the portfolio, or mortgages that were most likely to default and tank the investment.

The SEC’s problem with all of this is not that Paulson went to Goldman to create the bond (Paulson wasn’t charged) or even that Goldman even sold the same instruments to investors, but that Goldman didn’t tell investors of Paulson’s involvement. Remember, because of his short position he had every incentive to pack the bonds with the crummiest mortgages that would later default, which they did.

Goldman’s excuse for all this is that it somehow lost money on the whole sordid affair (not sure how that happened) and that the SEC’s case is completely unfounded in law and fact. It left out, of course, that in 2007 Goldman also shorted the housing market like Paulson, and that contributed to its massive earnings that year, not to mention Blankfein’s paycheck which nearly reached $70 million.

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As Washington extends its reach farther into our lives and limits our freedoms, the Fed destroys the value of the dollar and our savings, and Wall Street continues to make billions of dollars using taxpayer money without creating any sustainable growth for the economy, Americans should begin to ask ourselves who our enemies really are. Sure, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are evil. I would love to see their regimes destroyed, but they haven’t really done anything to interfere with my life as far as I know. On the other hand, I can identify exactly the many ways that Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street are destroying our freedoms and our economy and stealing our and our children’s future.

Let’s begin with Washington. They want to take a broken health care system and make it worse by further injecting government. They’re going to raise taxes even though people are struggling with the worst economy in decades. They’ve started a job-killing trade war with China–our largest trading partner and our largest lender–to pacify Big Labor. They’ve given hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to insolvent and poorly managed, but politically connected, Wall Street banks and Detroit car companies in the name of saving our economy. We’ve continued to lose millions of jobs anyway. They’ve spent additional hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a stimulus that was supposed to create jobs. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says there will be jobs some day, but should we really believe him? This is the same guy who thought subprime lending wasn’t a problem. The same guy who thought it made sense to give billions to lender CIT. How did that work? Oh, right, they’re bankrupt now.

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One of the last people you’d expect to be a catalyst for the near collapse of history’s most advanced financial system is the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Though not the masterminds of the nation’s economic woes, Andrew Cuomo and Mel Martinez were willing musclemen for the Congressional and White House driven mandates that housing be made more affordable to all through government subsidy.

Those mandates, policy stemming back to the 1960s, were driven by compassion, but have turned out to be the chief cause for the current rampant rates of default, foreclosure, and economic pain striking particularly hard at low-income families.

Such is the story Charlie Gasparino tells in his new book, The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System. Gasparino notes that Cuomo as much as boasted in the late 1990s about forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to expand their subprime mortgage portfolios. Not slowing down, the George W. Bush appointed Martinez carried the ball forward with great speed, presiding over a period of time where Fannie and Freddie grew to hold a combined $1 trillion in subprime mortgages.

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