Ex-president Carter slams Bush on market crisis

[dkf]

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the "atrocious economic policies" of the Bush administration had caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Carter told reporters on a stopover in Brussels that "profligate spending," massive borrowing and dramatic tax cuts since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 were behind the market turmoil and economic crisis.

"I think it's because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration," said the 84-year-old Democrat, who served in the White House from 1977-1981 during a period of high inflation and energy crisis.

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Geez. When Carter says you suck you must be really bad. The guy is a nice man, but his Presidency didn't go so well. However, Bush makes Carter look terrific!

[Submariner]

1. Tell it like it is Jimmy

Wish he could have been re-elected so we could have avoided that ahole Raygun who started this whole deregulation mess.

[MindMatter]

2. The simple truth nobody wants to speak

This is all the inevitable consequence of the Reagan ascendancy. Reagan brought in an attitude that you could do any amount of:
- sucking money out of the Treasury for private gain
- Cutting taxes to facilitate reelection
- creating any amount of national debt
- exporting of good jobs to other countries
without any consequences. It was a Ponzi scheme. It only worked by matching last year's excesses and doubling down on them. It was absolutely unsustainable.

What we didn't know was how long the game could go on, exactly when and exactly how it would end. But it was a Ponzi scheme, and so it had to end up badly. I never could have believed they could play it out for 28 years, but they found a way to keep it together that long.

Of course, the longer the Ponzi scheme goes on, the more people get hurt and hurt badly.

So that's where we are. This is not about the mortgage defaults in California or Florida. It is not about interbank lending. At least those aren't the core issues. The core issue is a premise that America could ride a debt spiral forever.

What made it much longer and much worse than it might have been is that the "Reagan Revolution" involved eliminating regulation that would have forced much of this to be self-correcting. In the past, if a bank wrote bad loans, it didn't take too long before those decisions caught up with them. But in absence of regulation, the system was free to do all sorts of Enron-style tricks to hide all those bad decisions under layers and layers of paper.

And there we are, with all that paper going up in flames before our eyes. But make no mistake, it was all a very direct consequence of what Reagan and his fascist friend brought to America.

That is the simple truth that cannot be stated. And why not? Because there are millions of people who are going to vote for Obama, but have been conditioned for 25 years to have a knee jerk defense reaction to any criticism of Reagan.

So there we go. The truth cannot be spoken. Not for another month anyway.