Krugman: Invincible Ignorance
So Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are going to issue their own report, placing primary blame on the government — because it’s always the government’s fault.
And according to reporting at the Huffington Post, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.
Yep. It was all Fannie and Freddie, which somehow managed to cause housing bubbles in Ireland, Iceland, Latvia, and Spain as well as the United States; and the repo market had nothing to do with it.
And bear in mind that this wasn’t one Republican; it was all of them.
I really do wonder how this country can remain governable, when one party insists on creating its own reality. Next thing you know they’re going to reject the theory of evolution. Oh, wait …
"... The same thing happened with Social Security privatization. There was a long effort by conservative groups to promote privatization, a term they themselves devised. ... But then, when it turned out that the term polled badly, they began rewriting old records in an attempt to cover up the fact that they had ever talked about it. ..."
"... The right has always understood that the perceptions game is a long game, that you have to rewrite history on a sustained basis to shape the assumptions that govern politics. Work at it steadily, and you have even a liberal Democratic president believing that Social Security only covered widows and orphans at first, that Medicare started small, and that the Clinton-era productivity boom began under Reagan... So of course they’re working hard, right now, to expunge deregulation and shadow banking from the story of the 2008 crisis."
17 December 2010
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