Nocera/Krugman Let Bloomberg Off Hook on Fannie/Freddie

Nocera and Krugman expose the fallacy and open lies the right and Republicans engage in with their making excuses for the corporate greed in pushing sub-prime mortgages by placing the blame in Fannie/Freddie Mae. But guess who also adhere's to the same lie? No less than our esteemed mayor.

I left a comment about their ignoring Bloomberg at Krugman's blog hours ago but so far it hasn't appeared. Maybe it's just Xmas eve and the moderators at the Times are doing last minute shopping  - let's see -  if you call Republicans idiots and liars and Bloomberg says exactly the same thing are you  protecting Bloomberg's idiocy?

Thanks to Leonie Haimson for making this connection with this tweet:

Nocera refutes Big Lie that FMacs caused the ec collapse goo.gl/qJjIs omits @MikeBloomberg repeats same myth goo.gl/cs0MY

Nocera also wrote about the FMac distortions in a previous column.

Not only Nocera but one of my idols, Paul Krugman who in commenting on and complimenting Nocera on Nocera's  column in today's NY Times says on his blog:

Joe Nocera Gets MadAnd it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Today Joe once again goes after the Big Lie — the claim that Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis — and drives home the point that the people advancing this story aren’t just wrong but are acting with intent, engaged in deliberate deception:

Basically, Joe is arriving where I’ve been since 2000: what’s going on in the discussion of economic affairs (and other matters, like justifications for war) isn’t just a case where different people look at the same facts but reach different conclusions. Instead, we’re looking at a situation in which one side of the debate just isn’t interested in the truth, in which alleged scholarship is actually just propaganda.

Saying this, of course, gets you declared “shrill”, denounced as partisan; you’re supposed to pretend that we’re having a civilized discussion between people with good intentions. And you’re supposed to match each attack on Republicans with an attack on Democrats, as if the mendacity were equal on both sides. Sorry, but it isn’t. Democrats aren’t angels; they’re human and sometimes corrupt — but they don’t operate a lie machine 24/7 the way modern Republicans do.

Ooops Paul. Not JUST Republicans operate a lie machine 24/7. We can name a whole lot of big city mayors who are so-called independents like Bloomberg and even Dems like Rahmbo Emanuel in Chicago who operate a lie machine 24/7.

Bloomberg: 'Plain and simple,' Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks
Nov. 1, 2011

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 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. 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."

Read the entire Bloomberg piece: http://goo.gl/cs0MY
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