God I love Matt Taibbi. We all knew Mike Bloomberg was a massive tool of Wall Street, and could care less about anyone south of the 1%...but his most recent foray into public philosophizing really takes the cake. As in Marie Antoinette's cake.
This goes with a post I did earlier to DU a
poll at the Orlando Sentinel which uses Bloomberg's amazingly condescending and ill-informed quote as grist for the mill -- here it is:
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said the "Occupy" movement should blame Congress, not Wall Street, for the nation's economic problems. "It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress," the mayor said. Bloomberg argued that Congress had pressured banks to give mortgages to people who couldn't repay them, leading to the crash in the housing market and the recession.
It's magical thinking, actually, garden variety blame-shifting, to say the financial crisis was caused by poor people buying into the "ownership society," when Taibbi says, "just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could."
They created as many loans as they could b/c they were selling the crap debt as Triple-A rated "mortgage=backed securities" to our pensions and municipal governments. The banks were making money on both ends of this deal, and they NEEDED the poor schmucks to take our mortgages in order to get the REALLY big payday on the securities end.
We all know this. Except Bloomberg...who continues...
"But 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. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."
Bloomberg went on to say it's "cathartic" and "entertaining" to blame people, but the important thing now is to fix the problem.
Says Taibbi, "Jesus … I mean, for one thing, Fannie and Freddie don’t even make loans. ...And the condescension levels here are unbelievable, his air of aristocratic superiority almost breathtaking to behold. Listen to Bloomberg paternally conceding in one breath that it is certainly nice that some struggling people now have homes ("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"), just before chiding us with the next that there are sometimes negative consequences to doing something that sounds like goodness, like giving people a place of their own to live.
"And then there’s this whole line in which
he professes to indulgently understand the need for the "catharsis" and "entertainment" of protest, again almost like a Dad who tells his idiot teenage son that he understands the need to sow a wild oat or two, but please don’t wreck the family Mercedes next time.
"Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are."
Here's a link to Taibbi's whole blog piece -->
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs... 
