Mayor 1% joins the Limbaugh chorus
by digby
Mayor 1% (and Unity 2012 dream boat) is starting to show his true spots:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it’s not the “big banks,” but Congress.
Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
“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 gave 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. 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.
Yeah. Let’s not play the blame game. (Well, except we do need to teach the silly serfs — who took loans from people who were offering them — a lesson they won’t soon forget.)
What he said is just an outright lie (a zombie lie, in fact) and he knows it. The key is to ensure that the dizzy bimbos of the press, who worship his alleged “moderation”, don’t see his endorsement of this toxic rightwing propaganda as if it came down from Mt. Sinai.
I think this is a signal that the 1%ers are getting agitated for real (as opposed to the crocodile tears they shed everyday about being called “fat cats” by their friends in the White House.) Bloomberg has always been one of them, of course, but he’s been the designated moderate, put out there to pretend that they give a damn about the peasants. He’s joined the Limbaugh crowd with this one.
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