Michael Johns  

In remarks yesterday in Golden, Colorado, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama passed around plenty of blame for America's unfolding banking crisis: He blamed American corporations. He blamed Washington lobbyists. And he even blamed Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

But the core of political blame for America's banking crisis, conservative writer Michael Johns argues, lies with a Democratic-led Congress that actually mandated much of the very sub-standard mortgage lending that is now setting off a snowballing liquidity crisis at some of America's largest financial institutions. Meanwhile, Johns says, Congress and Washington regulators failed in their responsibility to ensure appropriate regulatory oversight of high-risk leveraged borrowing that now threatens the solvency of these financial institutions.

In seeking to assign political blame for this crisis, and especially in assigning the blame wrongly, Johns says that Obama has revealed the hypocrisy of his pledge to work in bipartisan ways, which he has rarely done throughout his political career and is not doing now. While pointing blame in politically convenient directions, Obama also has been an advocate of many of the exact policies that created this crisis, and is now proposing even worse policy prescriptions that could deepen it even further.

"I've spent my career taking on lobbyists and their money, and I’ve won," Obama said yesterday in Colorado. In reality, however, the exact opposite is true: Among all 535 members of the United States Congress, only U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, has taken more in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions since 1989, and Obama has only been in the Senate since January 2005.

The reality: Obama has welcomed close connections with the precise lobbyists and corporations he now contends that he has been "taking on." And as Obama has set about seeking and receiving this support, he has brazenly and shamelessly violated his September 2007 pledge to forego private funding in this year's Presidential election.

In his weekly interview with The Warren Michaels show this evening from 9pm EDT/6pm PDT to 10:30pm EDT/7:30pm PDT, Johns will discuss the origins and policy remedies to the crisis currently confronting American financial institutions. The broadcast is available globally, both live and by archived replay, at: The Warren Michaels show.