"But O'Reilly told me it was Barney Frank's fault"

George Bush has been the President of the United States and stood idle as America has plunged in to the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression. What amazes me is that there are still people who will scream at you and tell you this is all the fault of the Democrats and bring out their version of the big three to scare you, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and, as always, Barney Frank. It's especially easy to blame Barney because he is gay and talks with a lisp. As always we must look at the facts:

The Republican party had the control of the Presidency, the House and the Senate for six years. Let us take a look at what happened on the domestic front

"It is in our national interest that more people own their own home."
-Bush in 2003 at a speech promoting his view of an "ownership society"

In 2003 Bush creates the American Dream Downpayment Act with the stated goal of "creating 5.5 million new minority homeowners. As part of this act Bush wants to subsidize first-time home purchasers in low-income groups. In 2003 the Department of Housing Urban development (a Bush cabinet member) begins to pressure Fannie and Freddie to support the subprime market. (Gee Susan, I guess I do know what Fannie and Freddie do) During this time the shares of undocumented subprime contracts rose from 17 to 44 percent. The Bush administration was proud of this and Bush said, "we want everyone in America to own their own home.

Now the subprime lenders loved the Bush administration. They were given free reign to pocket fat commissions and resell the original loans to wall street banks, who in turn bundled these loans and sold them as securities to investors. I had friends who were making over thirty thousand a month! Remember, it was all legal. The greed spread and as more and more people became lenders and rubber stamped the approval process. There was no law, no standards, no regulating governing body, because the government is bad, remember! So without standards in the lending industry (thanks Bush) it was like pigs had the run of the slophouse.

Not once, not even once in the six years they had TOTAL power did Bush or the Republicans set out to regulate this house of cards. So what do Republicans do now that we are in this mess? They blame the minority's for taking on these bad loans! That is sort of like building a mouse-trap, dropping the mouse into it, and than blaming the mouse for getting caught in the mouse-trap.

Now people really do believe that we are in the mist of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression because some poor black folks missed their mortgage payment. As if these "minorities" missing payments could sink companies like AIG, Lehman and Bear Sterns.

We are in this crisis due to the Phil Grahm sponsered bill COMMODITIES FUTURES MODERNIZATION ACT. This was a 262 page bill, signed into law by Bush, that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps. This allowed a 900 billion market in 2000 to balloon to a 62 trillion dollar market. That is five times the worth of the NYSE. Now, these credit default swaps was just a classic ponzi/bubble scheme where traders built their wealth all on speculation. This deregulation allowed companies to leverage their assets, borrow, get constant revolving lines of credit, and go just plain nuts.

Has anyone spotted Bush playing his fiddle?