If Child Pornography Was Hugely Profitable..

..then Republicans would be lining up to defend the kiddie porn industry. They would be blaming child exploitation on "excessive government regulation." And they would be engaging in sustained attacks on those whose sought to combat child pornography.

How else, then, does one explain the sustained attacks by the GOP on Elizbeth Warren?

This recession[1] and the housing bubble were not caused by "excessive government regulation." If anything, the cause was government regulators, predominantly Alan Greenspan, who looked the other way.[2] The Republicans and yes, a fair number of Democrats, methodically stripped away the regulations imposed after the Crash of 1929 worsened into the Great Depression.[3]

If it wasn't for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who bucked the ideologues of their party. the banking system would have melted down and we would be in another depression. We came goddamn close to it anyway. Recovery has been painfully slow because Republicans have obstructed and delayed and diffused actions to turn the economy around.

But facts mean nothing to Republicans. All they have to cling to is their ideology that says, in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary, that the bankers and the corporations will do whatever maximizes short term profits with no regard to the long-term ramifications. The banksters, in particular, will do whatever it takes to maximize their bonus for any given year and if the economy is wrecked and their clients are ruined, hell, even if their own bank goes under, they won't care. They got theirs.

Much of that is human nature. Avarice and greed run deep. And it's not only naked greed, it is pride, for the accumulation of wealth is also how they keep score.

Government regulation can keep those greedy fuckers from doing extremely serious damage. There was nothing about the recession that was unforeseeable to those who should have been watching the financial thieves.

But they weren't watching. The politicians and the ideologues made it a decades' long project to neuter meaningful regulation. The politicians took bank regulation from the states and gave the job of regulating banks to an agency that could not have been more ineffective if they were staffed entirely with toddlers.[4]

All of this is now pretty obvious history. The desire of the banksters to escape regulation and the consequences of them doing so were behind the Crash of 1929, the S&L Crisis of the 1980s and this recession. But Republicans are immune to learning from history. All they have is their ideology, which they stubbornly cling to like a bunch of ivory-towered Marxists.

Only unlike the Marxists, who are now consigned to the shitcan of history, the Republicans are still with us, spouting the same failed mantra over and over again.

We are so screwed.
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[1] Which would have become a depression if ideological conservatives had had their way about it.
[2] Because that was what Randisim Theory demanded.
[3] The Depression took hold because, rather than try to do anything for the legions of unemployed, the Hoover Administration slashed Federal spending to balance the budget. About the only meaningful thing they did was to send troops against protesting veterans.
[4] The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which seemed to only concern itself with the location of bank branches.