Needlenose

Now that the dust has settled over the bad financial waves that Emperor Shrubya vainly tried to whip back (at least until after the election), more information is now filtering out about the architects of the junk mortgage disaster – starting with the Freddie Mac’s “enablers.”

As you might presume, Freddie’s ‘bad government’ partners include some of the usual suspects, like Newt Gingrich, who pulled in $300,000 to lobby his good buddies in Congress and the misAdministration about “the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model” – i.e. against moves to break up Freddie Mac’s business and spread it among other companies such as commercial banks.

But the Grinchster wasn’t alone – here is the current Repug list of shameful enablers:

•Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York, at Park Strategies, $240,000
•Rep. Vin Weber of Minnesota, at Clark and Weinstock, $360,297
•Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, at Washington Group, $300,062
•Susan Hirschmann at Williams and Jensen, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, $240,790
•Viet Dinh, $300K

Just don’t expect any of these ‘Grinches’ to return any of the misbegotten dough.

Pondering the Federal Reserve’s acquisition of controlling interest in AIG, the mega-insurer, close on the heels of the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Matt Yglesias opines:

I hadn’t really ever thought that the Bush administration was going to wind up giving us the large scale nationalization of industry, but I’m not sure what else you call it. . . . With the auto industry also clamoring for bailouts, we’re perhaps moving in the direction of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, in which a market economy exists on small scales while the state controls the “commanding heights” of heavy industry and finance.