No one has countered the argument in the pieces above. Anybody?
"The Great Recession had wiped out some $9 tillion in household wealth. But after forty years, the conservative non-profit ecosystem had grown quite adept at waging battles of ideas. The think tanks, advocacy groups, and talking heads on the right sprang into action, shaping a political narrative that staved off the kind of course correction that might otherwise have been expected.
A key skirmish in this battle was the reframing of the history of the 2008 economic crash. From an empirical standpoint, it was hard to see it as anything other than a wipeout for the proponents of free-market fundamentalism and an argument for stronger government regulations. Like the Great Depression, it might have been expected to produce a backlash against those seen as irresponsible profiteers, resulting in more government intervention and a fairer tax system.
Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal economist, described the 2008 financial meltdown as the equivalent for free-market advocates to the fall of the Berlin Wall for Communists. Even the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Washington's free-market wise man nonpareil, admitted that he'd been wrong in thinking Adam Smith's invisible hand would save business from its own self-destruction. Potentially, the disaster was a "teachable moment" from which the country's economic conservatives could learn. This is not what happened, however. They instead started with their preferred conclusion and worked backward to reach it.
In what the economic writer and asset manager Barry Ritholtz labeled Wall Street's "big lie," scholars at conservative think tanks argued that the problem had been too much government, not too little. The lead role in the revisionism was played by the American Enterprise Institute, whose board was stocked with financial industry titans, many of whom were free-market zealots and regulars at the Koch donor seminars.
Specifically, AEI argued that government programs that helped low-income home buyers get mortgages caused the collapse. Ritholtz noted that these theories "failed to withstand even casual scrutiny." There was plenty wrong with the government's quasi-private mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but numerous nonpartisan studies ranging from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies to the Government Accountability Office proved they were not a major cause of the 2008 crash. Yet by shifting the blame, Ritholtz noted, those "whose bad judgment and failed philosophy helped cause the crisis" could continue to champion the "false narrative" that free markets "require no adult supervision."
Self-serving research from corporate-backed conservative think tanks wasn't exactly news by 2011, but what was surprising, Ritholtz contended, was that "they are winning. Thanks to the endless repetition of the big lie." Phil Angelides, the chairman of the bipartisan commission that Congress set up to investigate the causes of the crash, was also taken aback by the revisionism. In an op-ed column, he tried to remind the public that it had been "the recklessness of the financial industry and the abject failures of policymakers and regulators that brought the economy to its knees." Instead, though, he said, "those at the top of the economic heap" were peddling "shopworn data" that had been "analyzed and debunked by the committee." He conceded that history was written by the winners and that by 2011, while much of the country lagged behind, most of the financial sector had bounced back and "the historical rewrite is in full swing."
Soon politicians backed by the same conservative donors who funded the think tanks were echoing the "big lie." Marco Rubio, a rising Republican star from Florida, for instance, who had defeated a moderate in the 2010 Republican Senate primary with the help of forty-nine donors from the June 2010 Koch seminar, soon proclaimed, "This idea-that our problems were caused by a government that was too small-it's just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies." p 359 360 Dark Money' Jane Mayer
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money
