Each week, Fairness and Accuracy in Media provides a mini-critique of some important news and the media's treatment of it.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Three Times is Enemy Action:
James Bond's wealthy nemesis may have had an obsession with gold, but he judged, quite correctly, that if people keep putting your plans awry, that was likely their intent.
In 1982, the same year John McCain entered the Senate, a bill was put forward that would substantially deregulate the Savings and Loan industry. The Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act was an initiative of the Reagan administration, and was largely authored by lobbyists for the S&L industry—including John McCain's warm-up speaker at the convention, Fred Thompson. The official description of the bill was "An act to revitalize the housing industry by strengthening the financial stability of home mortgage lending institutions and ensuring the availability of home mortgage loans." Considering where things stand in 2008, that may sound dubious. It should.
Seven years later, the S&L industry was collapsing. What was the cause? Garn-St. Germain handed the S&Ls a greatly expanded range of capabilities, allowing them to go head to head with full service banks, but it didn't give them the bank's regulations. Left to operate in an anarchistic gray area, S&Ls chased profits, indulged in amazing extravagances, and cranked out enough cheap mortgages to fuel a real estate boom. They also experimented with lots of complex, creative—and risky—investments, even though they didn't have the economic models to really determine the worth of the things they were buying. The result was a mountain of bad debts and worthless "assets." Does any of that sound eerily (or nauseatingly) familiar?
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Tweet of the Day
Although counts went as high as 400,000 for the People's Climate March in New York City Sunday, organizers themselves, with the assistance of 35 crowd spotters and a mathematician put the numbers at 311,000. Either way, it was the largest demonstration in the city since the anti-nuclear weapons protest in 1982 when, even by notoriously low police estimates, the crowd exceeded one million.
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