The How & Why of America's Political Failure

When big name, powerful politicians like Michael Bloomberg show that they are completely uninformed about how & why the US economy collapsed in 2008, then you can understand why the US is in its current mess. Big powerful people have "drunk the Kool-Aid". Bloomberg has ignorantly swallowed the lies of the political right. And he runs the premier US city. Tragic!

Here's the relevant post from Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

Michael Bloomberg, Ignoramus

Via David Dayen, the favored candidate of those who believe we need a smart centrist to solve our nation’s problems reveals himself to be completely ignorant about the causes of our economic crisis, someone who just swallows right-wing propaganda whole:

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.

“But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.

You can read lots about how wrong this is; Mike Konczal has done it at great length, for example here. The fact is that for any public figure to go with the Congress-did-it argument at this stage is for him to reveal both that he is grossly ignorant about the central policy issue of the day and that he gets his “analysis” from right-wing flacks.

Some centrist hero.

There is no hope for the bottom 99% when the so-called "moderate" leaders are as clueless and misinformed as Bloomberg. This is a disaster of monumental proportions!