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GOP Sen. refuses to admit Bush, not Obama, was president during Epstein’s plea deal
(www.rollingstone.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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A few weeks ago I had to correct someone on Lemmy who was blaming Obama for the "great recession". The comment even had a bunch of up votes.
Other people proceeded to also argue with me that Obama, who was sworn in on Jan 20th 2009, was responsible for the Great recession that started December 2007.
Though Obama did team up with Bush to ensure the banks that caused it were bailed out quickly. This happened sometime around nov or dec 2008, after Obama had been elected but before he was sworn in.
And it was changes made during the Clinton presidency that allowed so many high risk mortgages to exist in the first place.
Not sure if the approval to bundle them together and call them lower risk was a Bush era thing or came from before that.
But even if the timing of the recession had started in 2009, it would have been something Obama inherited from Bush and Clinton. He only controlled his response to it (which wasn't great, as that money was used to allow banks to pay bonuses and buy up foreclosed properties while people laid off for no fault of their own lost their homes).
That 'not great' response prevented the complete and imminent collapse of the entire global economy. I'm not sure what the phenomenon of discounting the much worse outcome is once it is avoided, but I'm pretty sure it has a name.
It's the same phenomenon that has people say that the covid crisis was overblown and vaccination was unnecessary because it subsided on its own, ignoring the impact that billions of people getting vaccinated had.
That's a bit hyperbolic. Certainly a lot of big players in the financial industry would not exist anymore and a lot of rich people would have gone bankrupt, but for the majority of people, it would not have looked much different than doing nothing.
What should have happened is, instead of giving free money to the banks, the bad loans should have been paid off through a forgiveness program. That would have saved both the banks and regular people and wouldn't have given the banks cover to make up fraudulent liens to steal people's homes.
Though it was one of the least responsible ways to save it: handing a blank check to the ones that made the bad gambles in the first place. They didn't even have anyone go and look at what was being done with it. It might have been one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. Plus it set a precedent that the government will step in to limit risk, which encourages more of this shit.
Though at least they didn't do the same to bail out the shortsellers that were getting squeezed for GME and those other meme stocks a few years back (which could have also broken the economy). There was fuckery, but it wasn't "the taxpayers will pay your bills when you lose big while you proportionally pay less than most of them when you do win".
They should have made any bank bailout contingent on nationalization. That was the big mistake.
Is your bank insolvent to the point that it needs emergency federal assistance? Is it so grand that letting your Tower of Babel collapse endangers the entire nation? Do we the taxpayers have a guns to ours heads here, forcing us to give out these bailouts? All to clean up the mess left behind by overpaid, overconfident, completely incompetent bank executives?
If so? Fine. A bailout will be given to protect the customers and the nation, but the existing shareholders are completely wiped out. The feds take ownership of the bank. They divide the accounts and remaining assets of the megabank up amongst a dozen smaller new banks it creates as a replacement for the failed giant. The Federal Reserve provides credit to the new banks as they get started. Eventually, when they stabilize, the government holds IPOs for the new banks and completely divests ownership of them.
THAT is how bank bailouts should work. This way, moral hazard is avoided, the government isn't fleeced, and market consolidation is reversed all in one go.
I honestly don't believe a lot of the anti-DNC content is organic. Like, yeah, we DO have lemmy users who don't like the DNC, in no short supply. But more than that I think their representation and vote power is just botnets by Chinese and Russian trolls/psyops trying to create situations beneficial to their masters.
Generally, people in the USA are tribalistic between the two sides or simply uninformed. To think more than half of a niche but open platform like Lemmy would be against both sides is just improbable.
Lemmy has a much higher than average population of actual socialists, communists, and anarchists. It doesn't blow my mind that they would oppose a neoliberal party that works exclusively for the rich.
There's opposing the neo liberals and then there's blatant fascist propaganda.
Like the fact that Obama used the double tap drone strike, which is unarguably a war crime because it almost always hits first responders.
That's a true and valid criticism.
Making believe that Obama had anything to do with Epstein or that he started Bush's recession is just shifting blame away from the fascist party and helps no one but the fascists.
communists and anarchists have very, very little in common.
They have least one thing in common that's relevant to this conversation - they're not big fans of neoliberala
But a Tankie can pretend to be an Anarchist with no issue at all. They just have to advocate destroying the governing institutions in the west.
Except for the fact that the only party who have taxed or regulated the rich in the last 40 years are those human rights advocates you despise so much, and the very very very few minor parties who caucus with them.
There may be some bots, but honestly based on some conversations I've had with tankies and fake "leftist" many are some of the stupidest people I've talked to even compared to some brain dead Republicans.
Those bots have to play stupid, otherwise their propaganda isn't consistent enough and they will be found out easily.
I'm not saying there are no bots, but some of them are definitely just that dumb.
I think you mean children. A whole lot of people commenting are literal children with no idea how the world works yet, or at the least very little.
Same folks like to say that all KKK members are Democrats.
Maybe a hundred years ago, but today we have one party with a black president and another party who want to put him in jail because he was black.
You are almost correct. The shift began with Nixon's Southern Strategy. The transition of Southern Democrats who are also KKK members/racists to the Republican party began about 60 years ago.
Pretty sure Democrat President Lindon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act predates that, but yes roughly 60 years ago.