Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke

Regulation: As the financial crisis spreads, denials on Capitol Hill grow more shrill. Blame an aloof President Bush, greedy Wall Street, risky capitalism — anybody but those in Congress who wrote the banking rules.

Such denials won't hold against the angry facts banging on their doors. The only question is whether the guilty party can keep up the barricade until Election Day.

A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats are to blame for the meltdown. "No," she snapped at reporters who dared ask.

Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.

"The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions," she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.

Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity...

[our current mess required our 'captains of industry' to match Washington's corruption and so multiply the problem to its current biblical proportions - but the original sin of temptation placed before them was, once again, government involvement which made it more profitable to game the system than to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, this will be spun by the simple (or vested interests) as a need for more {vs. better} regulation - proving the method behind the Democrats' seeming madness: if we insert government we can break it, then we can demand more government to fix it... ]

BTW: The FBI is now investigating 24 large mortgage lenders for alleged abuses. But who will investigate the pols and the lobbyists and the community agitators who made the bad decisions that ultimately forced businesses to make their bad decisions?

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