Mike Bloomberg deploys aristocratic fantasy to smear OWS - Taibbi rips him a new one

[nashville_brook]

God I love Matt Taibbi. We all knew Mike Bloomberg was a massive tool of Wall Street, and could care less about anyone south of the 1%...but his most recent foray into public philosophizing really takes the cake. As in Marie Antoinette's cake.

This goes with a post I did earlier to DU a poll at the Orlando Sentinel which uses Bloomberg's amazingly condescending and ill-informed quote as grist for the mill -- here it is:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said the "Occupy" movement should blame Congress, not Wall Street, for the nation's economic problems. "It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress," the mayor said. Bloomberg argued that Congress had pressured banks to give mortgages to people who couldn't repay them, leading to the crash in the housing market and the recession.

It's magical thinking, actually, garden variety blame-shifting, to say the financial crisis was caused by poor people buying into the "ownership society," when Taibbi says, "just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could."

They created as many loans as they could b/c they were selling the crap debt as Triple-A rated "mortgage=backed securities" to our pensions and municipal governments. The banks were making money on both ends of this deal, and they NEEDED the poor schmucks to take our mortgages in order to get the REALLY big payday on the securities end.

We all know this.

Except Bloomberg...who continues...

"But were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."

Bloomberg went on to say it's "cathartic" and "entertaining" to blame people, but the important thing now is to fix the problem.

Says Taibbi, "Jesus … I mean, for one thing, Fannie and Freddie don’t even make loans. ...And the condescension levels here are unbelievable, his air of aristocratic superiority almost breathtaking to behold. Listen to Bloomberg paternally conceding in one breath that it is certainly nice that some struggling people now have homes ("I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that"), just before chiding us with the next that there are sometimes negative consequences to doing something that sounds like goodness, like giving people a place of their own to live.

"And then there’s this whole line in which he professes to indulgently understand the need for the "catharsis" and "entertainment" of protest, again almost like a Dad who tells his idiot teenage son that he understands the need to sow a wild oat or two, but please don’t wreck the family Mercedes next time.

"Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are."

Here's a link to Taibbi's whole blog piece -->
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-marie-antoinette-moment-20111103

[DonCoquixote]

1. Ya should be mad at washington...

Look GOP, we know where the real center of power is, and it is NOT Washington. Wall Street makes the decisions, Washington obeys.

[nashville_brook]

2. Wall Street sycophancy is not just the GOP anymore

[Vinca]

24. I couldn't believe Bloomberg made such a stupid statement - he knows better.

If he owned a bank and the mortage people were giving loans to unqualified people, he'd fire them. No bank was ever forced to give a mortgage to anyone.

[nashville_brook]

26. i think that indicates "bad faith" on his part RE this statement. he does know better...

and still he chooses to frame it using language so disingenuous that could only be cooked up in a Morgan/Chase boardroom.

[CoffeeCat]

3. The banks OWN our government...

They have purchased our politicians -- and probably blackmailed them too -- and now our government works for the banks.

That is what we are against!

I could give one whit about "the one percent". I don't care if someone has money. What I care about is when they use
that money to purchase our democracy and leave "We The People" vulnerable, poor and shit out of luck!

Keep your grubby money out of our democracy!

And yes, Congress is to blame--because they're the ones who allowed this to happen. However, the housing crisis
wasn't caused by Congress, as condescending Bloomberg suggests.

This whole, "Congress forced the banks to loan money to poor people who couldn't afford the mortgages" meme is
routinely spread on right-wing radio. Beck, in particular, has convinced his stupid, lemming contingent that
that action alone--caused the entire mortgage meltdown.

What a crock. People do not understand that the banks NEEDED more and more mortgages to create those mortgage-backed
securities that they sold on the secondary market. This is why they lobbied for relaxed regulations on mortgage lending.
And they got those relaxed regulations--and they went to town on us!

The banks needed the supply of mortgages. Holy crap, I get so tired of the false memes being spread about the poor tanking
the economy. Do people even ask why people with low incomes or no money down were borrowing in the first place?

So sick of dumb asses not getting it--and Bloomberg is the biggest dumb ass of them all!

[nashville_brook]

18. you got it exactly right -- Wall Street BOUGHT the ability to crash the economy (from GOP and DEMs)

This false meme is grotesque in the truest sense of the word.

[dtexdem]

4. It's in large part Congress' fault because they toadied to Wall Street ...

and did away with needed regulations of financial crime families ... I mean enterprises.

[enough]

5. Taibbi gives an excellent clear brief summary of how it all worked:

snip>

They lent to anyone with a pulse and they didn’t need Barney Frank to give them a push. This was not social policy. This was greed. They created those loans not because they had to, but because it was profitable. Enormously, gigantically profitable -- profitable enough to create huge fortunes out of thin air, with a speed never seen before in Wall Street's history.

The typical profit-generating cycle of subprime lending took place without any real government involvement. Bank A (let’s say it’s Goldman, Sachs) lends criminal enterprise B (let’s say it’s Countrywide) a billion dollars. Countrywide then goes out and creates a billion dollars of shoddy home loans, committing any and all kinds of fraud along the way in an effort to produce as many loans as quickly as possible, very often putting people who shouldn’t have gotten homes into homes, faking their income levels, their credit scores, etc.

Goldman then buys back those loans from Countrywide, places them in an offshore trust, and chops them up into securities. Here they use fancy math to turn a billion dollars of subprime junk into different types of securities, some of them AAA-rated, some of them junk-rated, etc. They then go out on the open market and sell those securities to various big customers – pension funds, foreign trade unions, hedge funds, and so on.

The whole game was based on one new innovation: the derivative instruments like CDOs that allowed them to take junk-rated home loans and turn them into AAA-rated instruments. It was not Barney Frank who made it possible for Goldman, Sachs to sell the home loan of an occasionally-employed janitor in Oakland or Detroit as something just as safe as, and more profitable than, a United States Treasury Bill. This was something they cooked up entirely by themselves and developed solely with the aim of making more money.

snip>

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-marie-antoinette-moment-20111103#ixzz1cfQRdglW

[nashville_brook]

16. and derivatives remain unregulated.

[Hissyspit]

21. VIDEO Here: Taibbi on Tonight's Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x631795

[nashville_brook]

25. awesome!

[SemperEadem]

44. and they took bets on them to fail

It's collusion on the grandest scale ever in the history of humankind and someone's ass needs to be sitting in prison for it and their family stripped of any gains they enjoyed as a result of the crime. That money is not theirs to live off of.

[DirkGently]

6. Grotesque that Bloomberg would trot out this glib obfuscation. Boils down to "stupid poor people."

[ThomCat]

11. Bloomberg can always be trusted to try to blame poor people.

Especially poor working people. He truly seems to believe that only rich people can be trusted to be intelligent.

[nashville_brook]

12. kinda like having the "help" chip in for the boss' $300 cufflinks

[DirkGently]

15. Don't. Get. Me. Started!

:mad:

[Matariki]

7. Nailed it.

The condescension of politicians and financiers saying they "can understand peoples' frustrations" has really been irritating me. As if this was merely about people blowing off steam and not about a fundamental demand for change.

[myrna minx]

8. K&R - Thank you Matt for calling out that condescending, patronizing jerk.

[Douglas Carpenter]

9. knr GREAT article --- My favorite line

And then there’s this whole line in which he professes to indulgently understand the need for the "catharsis" and "entertainment" of protest, again almost like a Dad who tells his idiot teenage son that he understands the need to sow a wild oat or two, but please don’t wreck the family Mercedes next time.

Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-marie-antoinette-moment-20111103#ixzz1cfZXkpRX


,

[nashville_brook]

13. mine too!

[DirkGently]

35. Exactly.

[JDPriestly]

10. That phrase "ownership society" as in

This whole notion that the financial crisis was caused by government attempts to create an "ownership society" and make mortgages more available to low-income (and particularly minority) borrowers has been pushed for some time by dingbats like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who often point to laws like the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act as central villains in the crash drama.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-marie-antoinette-moment-20111103#ixzz1cfdfog8z


That was the "brain"-child of George W. Bush. Remember?

Ownership society is a slogan for a model of society promoted by former United States President George W. Bush

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership_society

The Ownership Society
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 20, 2003

. . . .

In his State of the Union address, the president will announce measures to foster job creation. In the meantime, he is talking about what he calls the Ownership Society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/opinion/the-ownership-society.html

The New York Times article explains that it became evident in 2003 that jobs were being lost to increased productivity. The response of the Democrats of the time was to advocate for fair trade and other such measures.

But Bush came up with the propaganda about the "ownership society." Apparently Bloomberg, that closet Republican, is trying to rewrite history to make the Democrats them author of that catch-phrase.

The ownership society was kind of a code for -- owners in the top 1% take all. Leave everyone else behind.

Republican free market economics apparently just doesn't work for lower the 99%.

And Mayor Bloomberg seems to like it that way.

Mayor Bloomberg, how many kids did you starve today?

[bongbong]

43. It gets even better

I don't have the link handy, but it's easy to find. There is Real Data for this fact:

The CRA loans were being paid back at a HIGHER rate than other subprime loans. I don't know if it's still true, but it was at one point.

[JDPriestly]

50. It would make sense if the CRA loans were, at least in the beginning,

paid back sooner. The amounts that the people could borrow were probably limited. That was true for us when we bought our house with a VA loan. The payments were and remained affordable even with our limited incomes.

I don't know but would expect that the amounts loaned under the CRA were also somewhat limited.

A lot of the problems arose with wealthier, definitely middle-class people who got their houses reappraised for more than they had originally paid and then borrowed against the imaginary increase in value. That happened to several friends of mine.

It's kind of lonely living in a small house in poor repair. You may not feel comfortable inviting people over, but you don't end up out on the streets homeless.

[Octafish]

14. Thank you, nashville_brook!

Every word, yours, an excellent essay and article -- from one so far to the south of 1-percent I can see penguins.

[nashville_brook]

17. thanky -- good to see you!

penguins are way better company than 1 percenters, tho!




:evilgrin:

[DirkGently]

19. KO's all over this tonight. He had Taibbi on -- great stuff.

[nashville_brook]

23. i love how Taibbi makes news by calling the bastards out.

[DirkGently]

45. He popped Bloomberg's casual, gigantic lie with eye-watering speed.

[louslobbs]

20. K&R n/t

Lou

[Douglas Carpenter]

22. knr

[FlyByNight]

27. Bloomberg lives in a bubble

A very comfy, aristocratic bubble.

Matt's right: FUCK YOU, Mike, you clueless asshole.

:thumbsup:

[nashville_brook]

29. ...it's "entertaining" & "cathartic" when they let their entitlement flags flap in the breeze

[DirkGently]

40. Good to know he finds peoples' deepest concerns so "entertaining."

[nashville_brook]

42. medical bankruptcies, alone, can keep him laughing for years

[DirkGently]

46. Revenge is entertaining & cathartic too, Mr. Bloomberg.

[DCKit]

28. Oh my Dog, he's not only my dad, but two of my sisters as well.

That sense of entitlement is contagious.

[catbyte]

30. Matt Taibbi deserves a Pulitzer for his Perry evisceration alone

In case anyone missed it, here's the link. Brutal!!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rick-perry-the-best-little-whore-in-texas-20111026

Diane
Anishinaabe in MI and One of the 99%

[aquamarina]

31. And who lobbied Congress??

[tcaudilllg]

32. Psycho ENTJs think that morality is a sin.

If it's not regulated, "anything goes".

[DallasNE]

33. Jumbo Loans (Those Over $500,000)

Were the toxic loans that brought down the housing market. They were set up with low payments for the first 2 years followed by a balloon payment that those buyers could not afford. Bloomberg didn't even mention jumbo loans. I wonder why?

[vssmith]

34. IMHO Wall Street and DC colluded to cause this problem

[OnyxCollie]

36. K&R. nt

[katty]

37. bloomberg lives in his out thought-bubbles-like all the rest he

is buffered by his immense wealth and his power. The middle class doesn't need to exist in their world...just 'the help' is all they need.

[katty]

38. bloomberg like his friends with lotsa $ lives in his own thought

bubbles

[bongbong]

39. Wow!

The Talking Points that Bloomberg uses in the quote from the OP are EXACTLY what the foot soldier Tools of the Republican Elite parrot!

You would think Bloomberg didn't listen to The Oxy King, but it looks like the Right is so bereft of ideas that even the billionaires resort to the same lies as the $10K per year drones.

:rofl:

[nashville_brook]

41. well said!

[DeSwiss]

47. It's Good To Be The Emperor.....

BEFORE FINAL WALL STREET CRASH


- K&R

[Uncle Joe]

48. This is an outstanding column, well worth the read! I only regret missing the recommend deadline.

But at least I can bookmark it.

Thanks for the thread, nashville_brook.:thumbsup:

[Kaleko]

49. Same here.