Their Mistake Was Trusting the Government

A story about  Maxine Waters    [h/t Instapundit] and Barney Frank’s intervention on behalf of a minority owned bank on whose board Waters sat, has this little gem:

In January, Ms. Waters acknowledged she made a call to the Treasury on OneUnited’s behalf. The bank’s capital, which was heavily invested in shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was all but wiped out with the federal takeover of the two mortgage giants, and the bank was seeking help from regulators. [emp added]

For leftists, OneUnited should represent the perfect bank. It’s small. It’s minority owned. The “socially responsible” Maxine Water’s invested in the bank and sat on its board. There’s no evidence it made predatory loans.  

Yet, it failed.

It failed not due to any short-sighted greedy  decisions  that the bank’s  management  made but rather because the bank’s management, including board members like Waters, trusted that the mortgage-backed securities issued by the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fanny  Mae and Freddie Mac were worth the paper they were written on.  

OneUnited is a microcosm of the entire financial collapse. Over the past 40 years the GSEs have piled up a vast store of toxic assets created by the attempt to get something for nothing by fooling the market about the risk of residential mortgages. Ratings firms gave the GSEs top ratings because of their implied government  guarantee  and oversight. Banks like OneUnited bought into the political myth and now they and everyone else are paying for it.  

Leftists need to explain why we shouldn’t regard the failure of OneUnited and other institutions as the results of government action. They won’t, of course.  
 

Going to the Movies has Become a Political Act

I went to see The Watchmen over the weekend. I did like it overall. The movie successfully captured the visual style and overall atmosphere of the comic, which is no trivial feat.  

I read the comic back in college when I was still a lefty and enjoyed it, so I went into the movie understanding that my evolved and matured world-view would make me appreciate the original story less. However, the movie’s needless deviation from the book merely to make contemporary political points showcased just how profoundly leftism contaminates modern film and art.   Increasingly, this makes going to the movies a political act in support of leftism.  

Read more

Why Don’t We Just Cut China a Check?

The really stupid thing about Obama’s carbon cap-and-trade system  [h/t Instapundit] is that it will simply relocate more manufacturing to countries that don’t give a damn about global warming.

The growing economies of China, India, and other parts of the world still have people living the lives of preindustrial  subsistence  farmers.  Right now, today, they have people in dire need of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, transportation and every other facet of modern life we take for granted.  They don’t give a crap about hypothetical dangers that will hypothetically manifest a century from now.

Such areas will use dense, rich, reliable sources of energy like coal and nuclear to power their factories while we try to smelt iron with windmills. We will be poor and eventually powerless in the face of such competition. Worse, if global warming is a problem, it will happen anyway. Our sacrifices will simply mean we have fewer resources to deal with the problems posed by global warming.  

Obama plans to shut down our carbon-emitting power sources today, decades before we bring their hypothetical  replacements online. If the technology doesn’t work as predicted, where will we be then?

Obama’s plan will be a massive wealth transfer from America to China and India. We will simply be handing them our current and future economic productivity on a platter.  

Quote of the Day

The left wing of the Democratic Party is in power now and it looks like they will pass their budget and their agenda for the next year or two or four. There’s every reason to think it will be a disaster for the country. It’s not looking so great so far and the disaster may arrive ahead of schedule. I’d say there’s a nontrivial chance the country will be irreparably harmed by our American mid-life crisis. It’s going to suck, big time. All Republicans can do is be the party that says, this is a bad idea and we should return to what we really believe in. We should wear the label the Party of No as a badge of honor. No to higher taxes. No to soaking the rich. No to nationalizing health care. No to abadoning Israel (just wait — that’s coming). There will be a lot to say no to. No to tyranny. This whole country is founded on a No.
 
Obama’s ideas are a mushy rehash of tired ideas from the 1930’s and 1960’s packaged for an era of twitter users. We don’t have to hope they will fail. They can do that all on their own. Conservatives as they are called in this country remain attached to ideas that date back to our founding, ideas of limited government, virtuous citizenship and the worthiness of commerce. We don’t have to wait for anybody because they already got here some 200 years ago. We should say No to the revolution Obama wants to lead. We can certainly hope that enough people wake up soon enough that the country is not ruined first. But our job is not to find more sellable ideas. There’s nothing wrong with the ideas.

Tom Smith

Quote of the Day

The spirit of the Obama-Pelosi “stimulus”, and the conscious atmosphere of corruption and payoff that surrounds it, is consistent with today’s negative, if not sour, leftist worldview. The New Dealers believed they were building a more “scientific” and much more prosperous world. There was a great deal of genuine idealism among them. Today’s triumphant political class does not seriously imagine that it will promote economic growth and prosperity. The political class is, at best, ambivalent about whether it even wants such things. What today’s political class wants is a massive transfer of power and money to itself. This is what the “stimulus”, and much else that will follow, is openly intended to do. If there were a spirit of optimism and generosity and idealism about it, as there was among the New Dealers, there would at least be reason to hope that things wouldn’t quickly degenerate into corruption. It seems to me that there is little such spirit, or none at all, today.

Maimon Schwarzschild