Reply #1: What is he talking about? I have no idea

[gratuitous]

But it has become an article of Faith amongst the Free Marketeers that when Congress began the process of outlawing Redlining in the 1970s, it opened the door to all the financial excesses now seen today. Yes, the nefarious 35 Year Plan has worked, comrades! All hail Marx and Lenin!

In the fact-free land in which Mr. Sanders operates, poor people without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of have become the new Bulliez of the Market, forcing big banks and lending houses to write loans so they can purchase overpriced McMansions. Naturally, these laughable assertions don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny, so a veritable forest of code words has to be employed: regulation, government, mandates and so forth.

Mr. Sanders also overlooks completely the actual facts of the latest Goldman Sachs peccadillo. Goldman worked with one of its clients to put together an investment vehicle (Timberwolf, the famous “shitty deal”) of their crappiest loans. They connived with one of the bonding companies to get Timberwolf certified AAA. Then they sold Timberwolf to their customers, all the while knowing it was going to tank, skimming their commission (never forget the commission, that’s the good part) and actually betting through short sales that Timberwolf was going to tank. Not a government regulator or poor person in sight through any of this.

Well, that’s not exactly true. There were plenty of poor people (and government agencies and pension funds) left holding the bag as Goldman Sachs pocketed a hefty profit. All because Goldman Sachs and other investment firms prevailed on Congress not to regulate these investment vehicles or the market for them. With nobody looking over their shoulder, Goldman Sachs felt free to fleece investors with impunity, putting together shitty investments, getting bogus ratings, and then betting against their own investors to grab as much dough as they could.

But why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good fairy tale spun by Mr. Sanders? More to the point, why does the Plain Dealer feel compelled to publish such nonsense?