A Nice WMD

Fanniegate: Gamechanger For The GOP?

“ The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction —

That WMD is in the form of a book written by New York Times business analyst  Gretchen Morgenson and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner.  It's titled Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, and pulls no punches. “ The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.) Did I mention it's written by the New York Times business analyst?  I wonder if the Times will review it?  Walter Russell Mead  writes that the Morgenson/Rosner story is a simple and easily grasped one, even by people who don't know squat about the financial markets.    “ The Great Villain, the man who almost ruined America according to the book, is James Johnson, long one of the most important members of the Democratic establishment.  He ran Walter Mondale’s campaign.  He chaired John Kerry’s search for a vice-president — the brilliantly executed search that chose the revered anti-poverty warrior John Edwards. Anybody who opposed Jim Johnson’s get rich scheme was a racist who hated the poor.  Political correctness married Wall Street chicanery as Maxine Waters, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank led the band; crooked accountants and clueless rating agencies performed the ceremony; big government dowered the couple with a debt guarantee and bankers dressed as flower girls showered the happy pair in a confetti of junk mortgages and junk bonds. This is a story that most of you know;  a story that even Saturday Night Live grasped just days after the markets melted.  Still, seeing it in print is heady stuff.  Here's a few snippets  to wet your appetites. “ If the GOP can make this narrative mainstream, and put this picture into the heads of voters nationwide, the Democrats are toast. Fannie Mae would adopt the goal of increasing the percentage of Americans who owned their own homes, targeting the inner city poor who, allegedly, were blocked from home ownership by racial discrimination.  (A bogus study to this effect was widely circulated; devastating criticisms and rebuttals quietly ignored.) This is where such luminaries of the American political scene as ACORN and La Raza get into the act.  They served as cheerleaders for Johnson’s self-enrichment plan, camouflaging a Wall Street rip-off by hymning its benefits for the poor. The story illustrates everything the Tea Party thinks about the corrupt Washington establishment and the evils of big government.  It demonstrates the limits on the ability of government programs to help the poor.  It converts a complicated economic story into a simple morality play — with Dems as the villain. It links President Obama (through appointments, associations and friendships) with the worst elements of the Clinton legacy and it blunts some key Democratic talking points. There are many powerful Wall Street figures who are closely linked to the Democrats, however, and the James Johnson story puts a face on that alliance.  The American establishment does not have the necessary moral strength and intellectual acuity to run the affairs of this country; Tea Party believers will find much in this book that confirms their worst fears. Paul Krugman once told me that he thought that Enron would have a greater impact on American politics than 9/11.  He was wrong about that scandal, but if the GOP plays its cards right, Fanniegate could push this country into a new political era. [more] I happened to read this yesterday,  on a site called - The Union,Com “ The subprime crisis was caused primarily by the crash of real estate values and not by risky loans. ” This is not going to be easy,  and the Republican establishment is incapable.  I hope Tea Partiers still have some of that 2010 magic& moxie  left.