Obama Slams Bush Response To Crisis

December 8. 2008

Barack Obama

President-elect Barack Obama has slammed President Bush’s slow response to the U.S. mortgage crisis, citing the escalating number of foreclosures.

Fight! fight! fight! 

In all seriousness, it is something I have stated online as well for almost two years, regarding Bush. He ignored the nation’s financial problems and only turned his attention to it when he had no choice but to acknowledge it during the last two months of his presidency, doing so with an appallingly slow response that made the crisis exponentially worse.

It’s the equivalent of a small fire breaking out in a house. If you attempt to out the fire during its early stages, you will most likely succeed in dousing the flames and saving the house.

George W. Bush

However, Bush was told there is a fire in the house that is the American economy and ignored it in favor of sitting on the front lawn with a beer and meddling in the yard of neighbor Iraq. While he did that, the house burned to the ground, to the point all that can be done is rebuild the property from the ground up.

This is currently what the U.S. government faces – rebuilding the economy, which is no small task.

Considering the levels to which the U.S. economy had grown, it is pure foolishness that something like this was allowed to happen, causing this massive regression…and recession.

Obama Warns Economy Will Worsen Before It Recovers

Obama also said in Chicago that his economic team is working on plans to address the housing crisis, noting that he hasn’t seen the “kind of aggressive steps in the housing market to stem foreclosures” that he wants to see from President George W. Bush. Obama’s transition team has spoken with the outgoing administration about the situation, he said.

“If it is not done during the transition, it will be done by me,” Obama said.

http://www.bloomberg.com

Obama vows strong new financial regulations

WASHINGTON, Dec 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said on Sunday he would put strong new financial regulation at the center of his economic recovery program to force more accountability on the banking industry.

Obama again warned that the U.S. economic crisis, which saw the country lose more than half a million jobs in November alone, would worsen before it gets better.

"As part of our economic recovery package what you will see coming out of my administration, right at the center, is a strong set of financial regulations," Obama said in a taped appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" television show.

"Banks, ratings agencies, mortgage brokers, a whole bunch of folks (will) start having to be much more accountable and behave much more responsibly.

"We've got to have transparency, openness, fair dealing in our financial markets and that's an area where I think over the last eight years we've fallen short."

http://www.reuters.com

Obama Offers First Look at Massive Plan To Create Jobs

Project Would Be the Largest Since the Interstate System

On the heels of more grim unemployment news, President-elect Barack Obama yesterday offered the first glimpse of what would be the largest public works program since President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the federal interstate system in the 1950s.

Obama said the massive government spending program he proposes to lift the country out of economic recession will include a renewed effort to make public buildings energy-efficient, rebuild the nation's highways, renovate aging schools and install computers in classrooms, extend high-speed Internet to underserved areas and modernize hospitals by giving them access to electronic medical records.

"We need to act with the urgency this moment demands to save or create at least 2 1/2 million jobs so that the nearly 2 million Americans who've lost them know that they have a future," Obama said in his weekly address, broadcast on the radio and the Internet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com