Deleveraging has been the biggest problem. Logic says "leverage" was therefore the (a) root cause of the problems. Was it not Bush/ Paulson/ Cox who took leverage for investment banks from 7:1 to 40:1? And did the very Hank Paulson invent and trade heavily in CDS, MBS, etc.?
There's speculation that Hank Paulson crafter his plan to get Congress to issue de facto pardons in approving the measures. The whole thing has Congress' blessings; how could anyone have done anything wrong? At the same time it bails out his alumni and co-conspirators.
My view is that Bush was just "jumping onboard" the Affirmative Action Lending program initiated by the DemoCraps in 1999. All efforts to reign-in or regulate FNM had been vehemently opposed. So, I believe Bush simply piled on.... "if you can't throttle it, might as well say you support it and take some of the credit".. sort of thing. All very wrong, of course. Bush has plenty of black marks, but I don't charge that one to him...
The majority of work being done by the Bush admin between now and Jan. is the shredding, burning, and deleting of evidence. How about Cheny trying to declare that the office of Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch !!! He's making this claim so that he's not required to keep his papers under the Historical Documents act. Secrecy, fraud, and lies are the best words to characterize this adminstration. I wish there was a Hell so that they could go there.
Personally, I think that Bush has done more than enough: Nobel Prize to Arch-Critic Krugman Is Blow to Bush (Update1) By Holly Rosenkrantz Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush, whose approval ratings are at historic lows as the U.S. veers toward a recession or worse, got yet another thumb in the eye when one of his most vociferous critics was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. While Princeton University Professor Paul Krugman was honored today for ``analysis of trade patterns of and locations of economic activity,'' he's more widely known for twice-weekly columns in the New York Times and appearances on television, in which he regularly attacks the president on the war in Iraq, his tax cuts and other issues. Krugman, 55, doesn't mince words. He has accused Bush of leading the country into ``strategic disaster and moral squalor,'' and his columns and Times blog entries carry headlines with such blunt entreaties as ``Please Go Away.'' Even though Krugman's award was for his economic theories and not his criticism of Bush, the prize elevates the profile of an already-prominent Bush critic, said Jim Davis, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. ``People will just see that a well-informed economist who has been critical of the Bush administration got the Nobel Prize, that's the take-away here,'' Davis said. Of the more than 800 Krugman pieces listed on the Times Web site since he became a columnist in 1999, almost 600 of them mention ``Bush,'' a search of the site shows. `Takes the Food' On Feb. 11, 2005, he referred to Bush as ``someone who takes food from the mouth of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends.'' On Jan. 22, 2007, Bush, with his plan to use tax credits to buy health insurance, is ``not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of the less- fortunate,'' Krugman wrote. Krugman is a fierce critic of Bush's foreign policy and was an early opponent of the war in Iraq. Of the president's case for removing Saddam Hussein, Krugman wrote on Feb. 11, 2003, ``Mr. Bush's America does not look like a regime whose promises you can trust.'' ``People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration's general incompetence,'' Krugman wrote on Oct. 8 last year. ``But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism.'' Krugman is not the first Bush critic to win a Nobel Prize. Former President Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 ``was more of a slap in the face,'' said Stephen Hess, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Krugman's award could bring Bush face-to-face with his antagonist. The president typically invites Nobel Prize winners to the White House in November or December. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment on the award. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aajJvdNTpNtc&refer=us
Quote from SWhiting: The majority of work being done by the Bush admin between now and Jan. is the shredding, burning, and deleting of evidence. . LOL Good luck to you guys in USA!!!!
This is in line with Neo-conservativism and elitism... With them - the censorship, surveillance and policing increases rapidly - as they start to control and legislate all of society. They see their "mission" as one derived from "leadership" , "insight" or "logic" from their building up support from a single ideology. The sad thing is that having such an absolute root, makes the ideology unfit for application to most of society and reality. Therefore it is akin to the "false premise" fallacy or the "principle of explosion". I am going to make a more extensive post on political radicalism later. The thing is that they are totalitarian just like communism, but use legislation rather than "public commissions". Surveillance and policing is similar to communism. They are authoritarian rather than "collectivist," so they believe in the abilities of the few of the elite - rather than the "inherent good of/for all" as in communism. They are however both rooted in political radicalism - saturating society and forcing their beliefs on every aspect of humanity. You can compare it to Abrahamic religions - they all are monotheistic and believe in a supreme being etc - but they are mortal enemies within - because of infighting and polarization - rooted in their beliefs of "universally absolute truth," which the all claim to possess. Neo-conservatism, Objectivism and Communism - they are all radical from a single belief system extrapolated to everything in society - and built up through the use of supporting "logic" and sciences ... only that it's useless to analyse it mid-in ... you need to see the roots, and few people are that educated in epistemology and philosophy - therefore the "fights" are mostly revolved around things in "the middle" of the ideologies, but there is strong logic and science supporting those parts - so it's a difficult challenge. You need to understand the whole, and see how it is erroneously applied and evolved. People don't become Neo-conservatives, Objectivists or Communists by lying in bed pondering - they read articles by ideologists and debate to "educate themselves" into the idiosyncrasies of the belief systems and learn the logics, evidence supporting some legs of the theories -- what has been applied to "flesh out" the ideologies. Unless you go much deeper and actually understand the whole and the roots of the ideologies, you can never "disprove them." That makes it difficult to debate them - since they are most often not even aware of the foundations of their ideologies - just being aware of the "evident cohesive logics" of the middle - and that is what attracts them by accident in the first place. This is what happens when I debate with my Objectivist friends - they are simply unable to understand the roots, or comprehend that there might be something else than their epistemological axiom. But they are experts at understanding the full body of Objectivism - the innards of the philosophy and the "evidence and logics." That is the same for Neo-conservatism, which uses a similar structure for it's ideology and a lot of supporting "science" from AEI, RAND Corporation etc to flesh out their innards and grow outwards to extrapolate their beliefs. I get more than a little "annoyed" when e.g Anderson Cooper and others on CNN call William Kristol a "leading conservative" when he certainly is NOT representative for generally conservatives.