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The Left Is Still Lying About Wall Street and Deregulation

By Matthew Vadum on 3.18.09 @ 4:14PM

Lies, lies, and still more lies issue from the mouths of leftists as they continue beating the class-warfare drum and demonizing Wall Street and the capitalist system itself in order to promote President Obama's nakedly statist agenda.

Amidst all the vomit-inducing phony outrage in liberal circles about AIG's payment of retention bonuses to employees, left-wingers continue to faithfully parrot the lines written for them (perhaps by the intelligentsia at the secretive JournoList.)

In an orgy of sanctimony the Left continues to argue -despite all evidence to the contrary- that the Bush years were an era of regulatory relaxation. (Would that it were true.)

Take the case of Faiz Shakir of John Podesta's propaganda factory, the allegedly nonpartisan Center for American Progress.

Shakir, who appeared on MSNBC today and didn't object when identified as a "Democratic strategist," is just one of many liberals attempting to create this myth of Dubya-era laissez-faire that is designed to be lapped up by lazy journalists, the uninformed, and the plain old gullible:

"I think there's been a culture of greed in Wall Street and there's been a culture of tolerance in Washington but that was really largely over the past administration. For eight years we tolerated these obscene profits from Wall Street, deregulation was the norm here in Washington and that was handed over to [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner and the Obama administration," Shakir said.

If anything, the Bush years saw an explosion of regulatory activity.

As Scott S. Powell of the Hoover Institution notes, "The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades."

Powell is referring, of course, to Sarbanes-Oxley, which needlessly imposed tremendous costs on business.

Another culprit was ridiculous "mark-to-market" accounting standards that help strangle otherwise healthy companies.

Don't expect to hear any of these points raised by the Left. To liberals, government can do no wrong - unless it's the Bush administration.