The Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama character assassinations...

[JDPriestly]

62. Approach was a lot of the problem with our response to the banking crisis and the bail-out.

You really need to read Elizabeth Warren's book if you haven't already. It is probably available from the library by this time. She describes how her oversight commission was kind of shoved aside and ignored but kept working anyway.

It is not a personal criticism of Obama. It is a criticism of his appointments which, I would guess, were the picks of the very bankers that were to be overseen.

Apparently, Warren was picked for her post by the leadership of the Senate. Harry Reid called her if I remember correctly what she wrote in her book.

The president cannot control every detail, every action by every person in his cabinet. But he or she does need to seek advice on appointments from a variety of different sources and interests. I don't think that has been the custom when it has come to appointments to posts that deal with financial issues. And therein lies the problem.

On the other hand, Hilda Solis for labor was a very good pick for Secretary of Labor in my opinion.

Hillary for Secretary of State was politically savvy, probably unavoidable. Sometimes you do what you have to do.

But the Geithner, Summers and Bernanke picks meant that the recovery was focused on bank recovery and not on the recovery of ordinary Americans or even Europeans for that matter.

The crisis was viewed as a banking crisis. It was much more than that.

A lot of financially illiterate, hard-working people were taken. (Some lost everything.) The ignorance about how mortgages work, how interest rates work, etc. was just unbelievable when you started talking to ordinary people as I did about the crisis. It is the responsibility of the lender to make sure the person to whom they are lending money will be able to repay it or at least will be likely to be able to repay it. The banks and mortgage lenders did not do due diligence on borrowers.

And on top of that the banks and mortgage lenders violated laws and rules that were designed to protect their own investments. Yet we bailed out the banks and mortgage lenders. They committed fraud in a number of ways, but they are still managing the banks.

Had they imported a relatively small quantity of some forbidden drug and brought down someone's life in that way, they would be in prison for a long time. This is justice gone awry, and it goes back to the appointments that were made at the very top.

The appointment to the post of Attorney General was in my opinion mixed, good and bad. There are things about Holder that I liked very much, but others that were very bad for the country.