Quote Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit View Post
By forcing you must mean the government laws that say banks have to give out loans not just to the safest customers, and the laws that allow special interest groups to hold up bank mergers and the like if the special interest groups don't think the banks are helping out minorities enough by giving out subprime loans?
This is absolutely not true. Unscrupulous subprime lenders were frequently totally separate from regional banks. There is no overarching law saying thou must give bad loans to everyone who asks. The banks that didn't mess around with subprime are doing okay. Companies specifically set up for that ran out and did it to earn commission fees, NOT to follow some government mandate to "help minorities", but because they believed it was viable because of expected continuing inflation of the housing market. And most of them made a ton of money until the housing market caved in.


Oh, I'm sorry, do private corporations have huge lines of credit with the US treasury? Do private firms have the benefit of the Federal Reserve purchasing their debt? Are private firms exempt from local and state taxes?
How do you do a Federal intervention on something that was already Federal and not private?

Funny thing; McCain gave a speech in support of the tougher regulations on Fannie and Freddie. Obama was completely silent.
McCain has been in the Senate for 26 years and Palin "will have to get back to you" via Katie Couric as to whether any single instance can be found in his entire record of voting on the side of more regulations as opposed to less. I'm not interested in what McCain lip flapped about and then went and voted the opposite way on. (There's an awful lot of that, like veterans, torture, tax cuts..)

And my advice, CR.... if I were following my party's "talking points", I would be in support of this bailout. I'm not. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw around stones. This is nothing but a weak and ill-supported ideological attempt to insist there has been nothing wrong with the Reaganomics school of deregulated free market that has been consistently applied by the GOP for the last three decades, that the problem is Democrats hiding in the ricebowl here, or minorities trying to invade your gated community over there. More scare tactics, more smoke and mirrors, yes there were problems with the structure of the regulations and financial markets, most of that revolving around almost no regulation whatsoever. We wouldn't even be having this discussion if there was even a baseline-- not a socialist, not a strict, not an overly controlling, but even a COMMON SENSE level of regulation-- that for instance, a bank had to check on your reported income before stamping approved. So, if you want to run around swallowing every talking point and every right-wing spin on this whole situation, and your best answers are "banks were forced to do this cause of civil rights crap" and "McCain TALKED about regulation, while his campaign manager and twelve other members of his campaign staff are or were paid Fannie and Freddie deregulation lobbyists", then don't go around lobbing accusations of who is mindlessly swallowing their party's talking points.