Excellent advice, you have great knowledge of what started this economic down fall!
Please keep posting to make these protesters understand, what is happening, and try and refocus them on what really needs to happen, to get the change that this country needs!!!!

Stop making sense. These OWS idiots will never understand, because they *choose* not to understand. The government people you mention, who are the real authors of our current malaise, are the heroes of the morons in this movement.

These are spoiled children playing at being activists. In fact, they are useful idiots being manipulated by a few career anarchists working behind the scenes. However, don't underestimate the strategic intelligence of these anarchists. After all, they have managed to mobilize an undiscerning army of children and psychopaths, without a defined cause, to do their bidding, haven't they?

You can't reason with unreasonable people. Don't waste your breath (or bandwidth) trying. Just wait for the shit to hit the fan or the petulant children to go home, because they got bored. Either way, this will end. The only question is how it will end and whether or not those of who are not a part of their "99%" will need to get involved, or just wait for the "movement" itself to implode and go away.

"This recession was brought to you by Fannie, Freddie and the CRA" is a right-wing "Big Lie," nothing more.

From the article: " The first thing to point out is that the both the subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent crash are very much concentrated in the private market."

"...from 2002-2005, [Fannie and Freddie] saw a fairly precipitous drop in market share, going from about 50% to just under 30% of all mortgage originations. Conversely, private label securitization [PLS] shot up from about 10% to about 40% over the same period. This is, to state the obvious, a very radical shift in mortgage originations that overlapped neatly with the origination of the most toxic home loans."

"The CRA wasn’t big enough to remotely cause these problems."

Moreover, conservatives spent the early half of the 2000's blaming Fannie and Freddie for being too tight with their credit. "Peter Wallison, 2004: 'In recent years, study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.'”

Fannie and Freddie weren't the problem. Fannie Mae didn't come up with the securitized investment vehicles that laundered crappy subprime loans into AAA-rated investment gold. Freddie Mac wasn't out there selling these "investments" to its marks-I-mean-customers while betting on their failure in house. The CRA didn't cover most of the private lending institutions that were making subprime loans, and you'd have a tough time convincing me that Bush-era regulators were rigorously enforcing the CRA against the institutions that it did cover. After all, the only thing Bush ever did with the CRA personally was reduce the number of institutions that it covered.

Next topic:

The problem isn't that "government is picking winners and losers." To some extent, government needs to pick winners and losers. The factory that's polluting your town's water needs to be picked as a loser. The bright kid who can't afford to go to college ought to be picked as a winner. The question then becomes, "what is the philosophy driving the decision that X should win and Y should lose?" And right now, the driving philosophy is "X is funding my re-election campaign," not "society overall would be better off if X won." Government corruption is the problem, not government power per se.