Joshua Holland lambasts John Carney

But before digging into what passes for an “argument” on CNBC's blog, let me again restate that it was not home-mortgages that caused the world-wide recession. Even if Carney weren't completely wrong about regulators forcing lenders to adopt ridiculously lax standards, it would still be the case that the global meltdown was caused by an array of “innovative” financial instruments that were cooked up in the by-then-largely-deregulated financial sector. I wrote:

"The entire subprime mortgage market was worth only $1.4 trillion in the fall of 2007, and that includes loans that were up-to-date. As former Goldman Sachs trader Nomi Prins noted in her book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, the federal government could have bought up every single residential mortgage in the country – good, bad and in between – and it would have cost a trillion less than the bailouts.

"What brought down the global economy was as much as $140 trillion worth of financial gimmickery built on top of the mortgage industry. It was the alphabet soup of the credit meltdown – the CDOs, default swaps and other derivatives that made less than a trillion dollars of foreclosed loans into an economic weapon of mass destruction that would cost the American economy alone $14 trillion in lost wealth."

In other words, it was the massive pile of paper and heavy “leverage” built on top of those home loans that caused the financial crash. Ignoring a central argument that one can't refute is a sure a sign of intellectual dishonesty, and despite the fact that I begin my piece with this simple reality, Carney doesn't touch it at all in his rant.

Instead, he devotes his post to advancing, yet again, the frequently and decisively debunked fable about how the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) mandated that banks loosen their standards – a narrative disassembled not only by myself and Nomi Prins, but also by Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and many, many others. I called it a “zombie lie” because no matter how frequently it's stabbed by factual reality, there is always someone like Carney ready to dig up its remains and bring it back to life to divert attention for Big Finance. 

Read it at AlterNet
CNBC Editor Launches Sloppy, Dishonest Attack on AlterNet in Defense of Wall Street

by Joshua Holland

Hollands initial post and Carney's response are linked to in the post above.

Looks like the CRA kerfuffle is going to be with us at least through the '12 general. The left holds it is a "zombie lie," while the right holds it to be obvious fact.

The country is deeply divided over the facts. So what else is new.

Naomi Wolf picks up where Naomi Klein left off

Naomi Wolf on the next iteration of Naomi's Klein's exposé of disaster capitalism. Now it's on steroids as it comes home to roost in the US after having been tested and improved abroad. What did you think that the Patriot Act, DHS, and militarizing the police were for anyway? Fighting terrorists in Peoria?

Read the whole post at The Guardian (UK)
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

by Naomi Wolf
(h/t  wilwon32 in the comments)

It's clear from the comments at The Guardian that this suppression of first amendment rights is trashing US moral authority abroad and showing up the US as a hypocritical rogue state that doesn't practice what it preaches and violates its own ideals as it finds convenient. This is going to have international repercussions for a long while.

UPDATE: The other side of the story from an OWS supporter

Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Offers Anything but the Truth

When you don’t “connect” wholly disparate “dots,” what you get is far less dramatic. Mayors in a handful of cities, responding to local political pressures, decided to break up their local occupations — decisions that were announced to the press well in advance — and were advised as to how best to do so.

Update: Naomi responds to Joshua


Naomi Wolf Versus Joshua Holland: Was There a Coordinated Federal Crackdown on Occupy Wall Street?

Joshua responds to Naomi


Occupy Crackdowns: Naomi Wolf's Response to My Critique Largely Evades the Issue at Hand

Joshua Holland takes Standard and Poor's to the Woodshed

S and P's downgrade provides compelling evidence of the corruption eating away at the foundations of yet another key Wall Street institution.

Standard and Poor's decision to downgrade our public debt tells us absolutely nothing about the probability of the federal government meeting its future obligations. The move really only offers us some compelling evidence of the corruption eating away at the foundations of yet another key Wall Street institution.

I should say that it offers us additional evidence. According to a Senate investigation concluded earlier this year — a probe that was greeted with a collective "ho-hum" by the corporate media — S&P and Moody's, another leading agency, “issued the AAA ratings that made ... mortgage backed securities ... seem like safe investments, helped build an active market for those securities, and then, beginning in July 2007, downgraded the vast majority of those AAA ratings to junk status.” And when they did, it “precipitated the collapse of the [mortgage-backed securities] markets and, perhaps more than any other single event, triggered the financial crisis. (PDF)”

According to the Senate investigation, in the years leading up to crash, “warnings about the massive problems in the mortgage industry” — including internal warnings from their own analysts — had been ignored because of the “the inherent conflict of interest arising from the system used to pay for credit ratings” — the big “rating agencies were paid by the Wall Street firms” that were making a fortune selling that glossed-up garbage to credulous investors.

The almost surreal irony here is that it was the economic crisis that the ratings agencies facilitated which led to a massive drop in tax revenues, and it was that, more than any other single factor, which caused the large deficits the federal government has been running in recent years. In other words, the agencies themselves played a pivotal role in driving up the national debt. Yet, rather than doing the honorable thing and throwing themselves out of their high-rise windows in the wake of the crash, S&P's management had the nerve to start playing politics with that very same debt....

Read the rest of Joshua Holland's post at Alternet, Standard and Poor's: Just More Corrupt Wall Street Insiders Waging Class War on America

Clear, crisp, trenchant analysis, and Joshua is pretty much in paradigm, too.