Robert Scheer: Obama Hires a Hustler

It is refreshing to see HONEST APPRAISAL . In my previous posts about potential Presidential Candidates I wonder how many of the 6 million affected will be changing votes based on this MAJOR piece of the economic puzzle. Remember the political phrase "Its the Economy, Stupid! " ???? I hope that people will not be so willing to vote charisma and appearances and get into the issues this next election. Thanks HUFFINGTON for a great piece.

Robert Scheer: Obama Hires a Hustler: "Paulson's admission in his memoir that he, at the time he was advising the president, still did not know that home mortgages were at the heart of those troubling securities that his former company had marketed to others with such wild abandon.

Were President Barack Obama to ask that question about the origins of this crisis of Tom Donilon, one of his closest aides whom he recently appointed to the critical job of national security adviser, Donilon would find it even more awkward to invoke the defense of ignorance. As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation. Indeed, had Congress endorsed the barest semblance of regulation of the Fannie Mae-led housing scam, it would have been stillborn instead of being a very much alive Frankenstein creation.

Fannie Mae paid Donilon, a longtime Democratic Party operative, $15 million to lobby Congress to gut the power of government regulators to check the scandalous behavior in what would have been judged a crime until a majority of pro-Wall Street Republicans and Democrats in Congress rewrote the laws. He was also a top executive at Fannie"