Worst Socialist Ever!

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson reviews Obama‘s record and finds his socialist credentials wanting:

President Obama: History’s Worst Socialist?

Thompson lays out the weak case for socialism likely to be raised by the likes of Newt Gingrich (and any right-wing knuckle-dragger with access to cable news, the internet or a radio):

To be very fair to Gingrich, the president’s agenda is not entirely devoid of socialism. No, really! After all, he defends Social Security, which is a forced savings program. He nationalized the troubled automakers in his first months as president — totally socialist. He signed a law expanding the health care regulations and requiring Americans to buy medical insurance, which I suppose you could classify as socialism-lite; although public decency and child abuse laws already require families to buy clothes and food, and nobody complains much about those.

The evidence against:

But when it comes to tax policy and redistribution, a not-insignificant part of modern democratic socialism, it’s fair to say that President Obama is in the running for worst socialist in history. Rather than raise taxes, he has inherited the lowest tax rates in a generation … and lowered them repeatedly while presiding over a period of exacerbating income inequality and a stupendous wealth comeback on Wall Street.

Facts:

• Federal tax receipts, as a share of the economy, are at their lowest since the early 1950s
• Marginal income tax rates are at their lowest since the 1930s, save for a brief period in the last 1980s

Thompson’s post is illustrated with great graphs from Business Insider.

The Business Insider link has a number of great graphs that to any sensible person would show incontrovertible evidence that tax policies have increasingly favored the very wealthy while leading to calamity for the rest of us.

I have repeatedly made the case that Obama is as far from being socialist as Christopher Hitchens was from being the Pope.

But facts have never been important to the idea-bankrupt Republican horde.

-Chris

Countrywide Whistleblower Details Systemic Fraud

Image by sabeth718 via Flickr

Via The Business Insider.

60 Minutes had a nice segment reported by Steve Kroft this Sunday.

The reporting makes clear that the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) caused the subprime mortgage debacle is getting more and more ridiculous.

Eileen Foster was a senior executive at Countrywide Financial before the bubble burst.

On the program, Foster, who was in charge of finding and investigating fraud at Countrywide, said, “from what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was — it appeared systemic. It, it wasn’t just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals.”

It appears there was a gold rush on for selling as much “product” up the chain in the casino that was the deregulated derivatives market.

In overstuffed recycling bins she says she found signatures that had obviously been cut and pasted from old paperwork onto new mortgage documents — an obviously fraudulent practice.

Describing an environment in which employees were encouraged to process bad loans, she provides motive for what drove the systemic corruption:

“The loan officers received bonuses, commissions. They were compensated regardless of the quality of the loan. There’s no incentive for quality. The incentive was to fund the loan. And that’s — that’s gonna drive that type of behavior.”

Yeah. No mention of the poor people and minorities forcing them to make bad loans.

-Chris

Related articles

• Prosecuting Wall Street (cbsnews.com)
• Ex-Countrywide Financial Executive: Mortgage Fraud Was ‘Systemic’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• CBS 60 Minutes, 12-4-11: Prosecuting Wall Street (2012indyinfo.com)
• At Countrywide, protecting mortgage fraud involved firing whistleblowers (dailykos.com)