There’s an old joke about the cat as a power source. A cat will always land on it’s seet when falling, tis said. 
[1]However, it’s also said that a slice of toast always falls butter side down. So, therefore, tape a bit of buttered toast to a cat’s back and flip him toward the floor, and you’ll have an inexhaustible source of power.
So we find Boortz, yesterday [2], commenting on the supposed sub-prime crisis:
While walking through a Hispanic neighborhood in Las Vegas last week Clinton said that unscrupulous lending leads to bad mortgages which, in thru, lead to foreclosures which lead to people with nowhere to go.
Do you notice how the left is trying to paint this mortgage crisis on the lenders? It’s all about crooked or unscrupulous or greedy mortgage lenders and brokers.
It happens that when many of these substandard loans were being made by these “unscrupulous” lenders I wasn’t that far away from making my living practicing law and was doing quite a few real estate closings. I can remember a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about redlining and all of the horrible, racist things evil mortgage lenders do to avoid making loans to blacks and low income people. The pressure was clearly on. Either the mortgage lenders start to do something creative to bring more low income types and minorities into the realm of home ownership, or the government was going to step in and make them do it. What did we get? Substandard mortgages. The left was out there whining that the mortgage companies weren’t doing enough … so here come the loans who otherwise couldn’t have qualified … and now we haver the mortgage crunch and record foreclosures.
When the marketplace gets screwed up, always look for the hand of government somewhere.
True enough. But here we go. Blame the banks. Anything but blame the original culprit… government… particularly, a liberal headed government, which put leftist dogma into practice. But looking to the banks we find former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Ruben, who now heads Citibank, taking an 18.1 billion dollar writedown, with an estimated 24,000 losing their jobs.
CNBC: [3]
Citigroup plans to announce a writedown of as much as $24 billion and layoffs that could total as much as 24,000 due to subprime and credit-related losses, CNBC has learned.
The plans will be unveiled Tuesday by Citigroup’s new CEO, Vikram S. Pandit, after the banking giant reports fourth-quarter earnings. At the same time, Citigroup could also announce that it is cutting its dividend payment by as much as 50 percent.
Citigroup is likely to cut between 17,000 and 24,000 positions over the course of the year through a combination of layoffs, attrition and selling off businesses as part of Pandit’s cost-cutting plan, sources said. Previously, it was estimated that the layoffs could reach 20,000.
The problem? Sub prime loans. The reason Citi got so heavily into Sub-Prime marketing? Robert Ruben, and his ties to the leftist world, his leftist convictions, and his putting the Clinton policies into action. All in the name of ‘Equal opportunity” of course.
Interesting; Will the banker get the blame in this case? Apparently not. Damned few of the stories tracking this business even mention Ruben. So the usual ‘blame business’ trick won’t be applied here because a full-goose bozo liberal was running the place. Can’t blame government either. And so we see that cat flipping and turning at supersonic speed.
More interesting yet; What apparently pushed Citi into making this very public move was China and their government owned banks deciding not to buy up Citi Capital, thus bailing Citi out. Funny, how a Clintonite goes to China. Something about Karma, here that they turned him down.
Watch; we’ll see an effort on the part of the left to blame the whole thing of GWB. It’s the only trick they’ve got left for this one.