"Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating - at immense cost to the nation - that those rules were necessary, after all.
But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn't find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn't find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets - and private rating agencies played along. We didn't find ourselves in a crisis because "shadow banks" like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.
No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor."
These are the economic royalists and plutocrats that wankers like Michael Gerson (see below) and his Rethuglican brethren are beholden to. They desperately don't want this counter-messaging to take hold in the public's mind. That's why they fear the Occupy Wall Street movement and find Obama's newfound "partisanship" so frightening.
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