Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Hutchinson Report
- The normally expansive Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was anything but that when she was asked if the Democrats should get some of the blame for the Wall Street financial mess. Pelosi answered with a terse “no.” But Pelosi quickly got expansive when she finger pointed Bush and the Republicans for creating the mess. This is the standard Pelosi line. Bush and the Republicans eagerly cut sweetheart deals with financial industry lobbyists to gut lending and stock trading regulations, winked and nodded at the banks and brokerage houses as they engaged in an orgy of dubious stock swapping, buys, and trading, conned millions of homeowners into taking out catastrophic sub prime loans, and watered down the oversight powers of government regulatory agencies.
But Pelosi’s Bush rap is disingenuous. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and Congressional Democrats kicked off the rush to deregulate in the late 1970s when they cajoled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax lending standards for banks and S&Ls to provide more home loans for home seekers. Their goal was noble. It was to get the financial industry to loosen the lending purse strings to lower income and minority home buyers.
