The Real Axis of Evil: Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street

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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Tags: american capitalism, bailout, Ben Bernanke, Charlie Gasparino, discount window
Posted Nov 12th 2009 at 8:03 am in Economics, Politics, Uncategorized | 2947430 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/cgrey/2009/11/12/the-real-axis-of-evil-washington-the-fed-and-wall-street/The+Real+Axis+of+Evil%3A+Washington%2C+the+Fed%2C+and+Wall+Street2009-11-12+15%3A03%3A49Christopher+Grey

Gasparino Skewers Government Policy As a Major Contributor to the Financial Crisis

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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Tags: Andrew Cuomo, Charlie Gasparino, Fannie Mae, Financial Crisis, Freddie Mac
Posted Oct 29th 2009 at 12:57 pm in Congress, Economics, Politics | 2260225 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/arandazzo/2009/10/29/gasparino-skewers-government-policy-as-a-major-contributor-to-the-financial-crisis/Gasparino+Skewers+Government+Policy+As+a+Major+Contributor+to+the+Financial+Crisis2009-10-29+19%3A57%3A13Anthony+Randazzo