Enron, Jamie Gorelick, the GOP and the Financial Meltdown

During President George W. Bush's first term, you can find no other story with the exception of 9/11 that matches the scrutiny placed on the Enron collapse and his alleged association with that firm. Every Republican who even took a dollar was politically lynched (of course a certain NY Times writer [we'll call him Kaul Prugman] who actually sat on their board was never discussed by the MSM) and company management was skewered while being compelled to answer to Congress under oath.

Fast-forward to the present and we have a situation that makes Enron seem like pocket change in comparison. Bear-Stearns plummets, Merril Lynch is sold for pennies on the dollar, Lehman Brothers dissolves and the federally-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get bailed out by the government. Yet I've not heard one call for the executives of these firms to be hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves. Their collective mismanagement has led to a tsunami in world financial markets and threaten to send the entire planet into a massive economic downturn. With Enron, some people lost money in stocks but the effect was minimal and generally hurt a small amount of investors. With all these financial firms currently crashing, we'll see thousands of pension plans losing billions and millions of 401K plans losing amounts never seen in history.

So how come we aren't seeing these people in front of the Senate or House? Because the companies involved predominantly support the Democrats and it was Democrats such as Andrew Cuomo who allowed the industry to offer no-down, subprime loans that should never have been approved to those who have no means to pay them. They accepted money for their backing of legislation allowing mortgage firms to rapidly improve the bottom line and are now calling the GOP on the carpet for the situation. Barack Obama even went so far as to blame the GOP today. The media won't report that he received $126K from Fannie Mae though.

What of former Clinton crony Jamie Gorelick? The woman who single-handedly hobbled American national security so badly it contributed greatly to 9/11 was rewarded for her incompetence with a plum job at Fannie Mae for which she was paid millions while allowing the government backed corporation to disintegrate while simultaneously allowing serious cooking of the books that benefited her. Furthermore, when the GOP raised questions in 2002 about the wisdom of the federal government backing two corporations she went on the offensive and said:

In terms of concentration, the largest banks have greater concentration than we do and are growing at a faster rate. The critical questions are whether we are managed safely, and would the kind of credit and interest rate risk that we manage be managed better elsewhere?

We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions.

Also, we are very highly regulated. We have auditors. We have examiners here on premises every day. And we have consistently exceeded every standard that the examiners have set for us.

Yeah, I would imagine those examiners were as shady as anyone else associated with Gorelick and the tax thieves at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This is an issue the GOP can beat the hell out of not only Barack Obama but all Democrats. Pound it home day and night in ad after ad and on talk show after talk show. Brand them with this scandal like the GOP was branded with Enron and do it quickly. They tried to take the initiative today, we have to parade Gorelick and every former Clinton consigliere in front of Congress and make everyone aware that it was they who gave us this mess to deal with.