By Robert Scheer | TruthDig | Posted on Feb 17, 2011
Editor’s note: The following excerpt from Robert Scheer’s book “The Great American Stickup” details the perversion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is especially relevant given news that the Obama administration is abandoning those institutions, as explained in Scheer’s column here.
Chapter 7: Poverty Pimps
It’s the same the whole world over
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?
That chorus of the nineteenth-century Cockney ditty “She Was Poor But She Was Honest,” detailing the travails of a poor lass whose life is ruined by the deflowering advances of a rich man, best captures the mainstream Republican response to the banking meltdown. Their defense has been to blame “bleeding-heart” liberals concerned for the poor for a debacle that occurred unmistakably on their watch, and in response to their antiregulatory ideology, but for which they shuddered to take responsibility.
