Catastrophe - Dick Morris [2]
But that’s not all. It’s also time to take back our country from the Wall Street masters of the universe, whose insatiable greed led them to create a dangerously unstable environment for American businesses and investors—until their house of cards crashed, taking the wealth of millions of shareholders, investors, and average Americans with them…and they turned to the government for a bailout.
The AIGs, the Citibanks, the Lehmans, and the rest of the unfortunately familiar Wall Street roster of shame created an unprecedented catastrophe—with the help of many in Congress, who contributed to that catastrophe by recklessly deregulating banks and financial institutions and ignoring the growing signs of economic catastrophe because they did not want to offend their patrons.
Those same institutions that are now broke poured millions into the campaign coffers of those in Congress who should have been watching out for the investors who needed protection instead of watching out for their donors. Is it any coincidence that the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, was the number one recipient of AIG money and that company executives aggressively urged top-level employees to contribute to him as soon as it was clear he would be the next chairman of the committee? Within three days, the group had raised $160,000. Now questions have been raised about whether Dodd returned the favor when he agreed to insert language into an amendment to the stimulus bill to permit the retention of bonuses that had already been awarded. It’s a legitimate question: at first Dodd vehemently denied that he had had anything to do with the language that was so favorable to AIG, but he later admitted that he had reluctantly agreed to the change after the Treasury Department asked him to do so.
That’s the way things work in Washington, and that’s why we have to take it back.
It’s our country. It’s our Congress. It’s our government. We can’t simply cede them to the people who want to destroy our values or follow instructions from their corporate patrons.
We’ve seen what happens when greedy companies like Countrywide Financial lure customers into unconscionable mortgages that they know they can’t afford. Many believe that Countrywide’s unscrupulous practices—the writing of hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages that were doomed to end in default and the baiting of customers with initially low interest rates that eventually ballooned into unaffordable notes—was the detonator that triggered the financial meltdown that we are now witnessing. Now those unfortunate people are lining up in foreclosure court and losing their homes by the thousands. Meanwhile, the Countrywide executives, who walked out with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, have found a new business. Many of the former top executives at Countrywide (except for CEO Angelo Mozilo) have started a new company. Guess what it does? Buys up notes from failed financial institutions and then sells them again.
Having profited in the glory days of the subprime mortgages, these scoundrels are now buying many of them out—and exploiting the failure of the mortgage market for their own profit.
We need to take our country away from these predators, who have caused so much emotional and financial pain. They should be banned from having anything to do with mortgages. Forever.
When we take our country back, that should be high on our agenda.
Now is the time, as we reclaim our country, our Congress, and our right to determine our system of government, for us to join together to prevent an Obama-inspired class war. Because that’s where we’re headed.
It is the cruelest of ironies that, at this time and place in our history—when America desperately needs a president committed to reigniting economic growth—instead we’ve elected one who is more interested in dividing us by class and redistributing our wealth than he is in creating more of it.
Because now is not the time to govern by ideology. Not in the middle of an unprecedented