Dick Cheney tried to re-write history this week. Surprised? Well, no. But the subject he tried to revise and the way he did it gives a snapshot of the mindset of the ultra right and its disastrous policies.
Cheney told a reporter this past week that no one could have predicted the financial crisis. Then he compared the inability to predict the financial collapse to the inability to predict the September 11th terrorist attacks.
After denying personal responsibility for forecasting the crisis, this is what he said, according to an AP story: “On the other hand I wouldn’t have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis.' Of the financial crisis, he went on to say, 'what my point is that I don’t think anybody saw it coming.'
Without detailing the numerous warnings the US intelligence community offered to Bush about Al Qaeda's efforts to attack inside the US or reports from some top counter-terrorism experts and former administration officials who felt the Bush White House was single-mindedly focused on Iraq (yes, Iraq) throughout the first nine months of 2001, Cheney's comment on the difficulty of predicting the financial crisis is plain wrong.
As ThinkProgress, the blog of the Center for American Progress Action Fund reported this week, the White House press office, just a few hours after Cheney's claim was printed, suggested that Bush 'saw those [financial] problems on the horizon.'
Even this slight admission is a sort of denial of history, especially since the Bush administration spent the first nine months of 2008 talking about the soundness of the fundamentals of the economy, and only stopped in mid-September when the biggest banks began to fail left and right.
Following its hardline free-market fundamentalism, the Bush administration, in fact, resisted warnings in 2005 from within the financial industries community and from experts who sought new federal guidelines to eliminate the most egregious practices endangering the financial markets.
The truth is that economists have been warning for a long time about the looming financial crisis. One financial system expert, making the rounds since 2006 of the major cable talk shows, repeatedly warned about the unsound practices causing the housing bubble and was frequently laughed off the set. In response to his warnings, pundits, usually of the right-wing variety, dismissed him and insisted that the housing bubble could go on forever.
Here at Political Affairs, we've published numerous interviews with experts since 2007 about the housing crisis and economic collapse. (See here, here, and here.) Of course, we expect that Cheney would ignore the advice offered here.
No less a prestigious personage than Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, however, warned as early as 2005 about the Federal Reserve's failure to reign in the excesses that led to the housing bubble. (Dick Cheney apparently only reads the New York Times when he is able to plant false stories about WMD in Iraq or illegally leak the names of CIA agents.)
Out front of them all was progressive economist Dean Baker, who in 2002 warned that the collapse of the housing bubble could worsen the recession that then had barely begun to recover.
Cheney's remarks this week reveal some dangerous truths about the Bush administration specifically and about ultra-right ideology generally. First, that while a real danger was brewing at home – a financial crisis that would shake the global capitalist system to its core and directly harm millions of lives – the Bush administration preferred to force the country into an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq and to distract the public from real problems at home.
Second, ideologically speaking, the free-market fundamentalism of the Bush administration and ultra right caused the grand delusion that the market would right itself by itself, and that whoever got hurt in the process mattered little. It was the core idea of the 'ownership society': no matter what happens, you're on your own.
Third is the refusal to accept responsibility. In Cheney's mind, there is always someone else to blame – the liberals, the media, the terrorists – for their failed policies based in their disastrous world view.
While America voted for change on November 4th, 2008, real change in 2009 will be a struggle. Discarding ultra-right politicians and the policies they embraced is only the first step.