The senator from hypocrisy
Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
WE THOUGHT we’d heard it all
when it comes to self-serving,
self-righteous, self-parodying moral indignation out of Congress. But that was before we read the opening sentence of The Hon. Mark Pryor’s statement on the country’s continuing crackup: “Corporate greed has undercut the health of our economy, and now each one of us is being asked to pay for it....” We didn’t need to read any further. Somehow we knew that nowhere in this press release and general pile of blather would the distinguished junior senator from Arkansas mention the political greed that makes the corporate kind all the grabbier—or his own role in it. Sure enough, Senator Pryor saw no need to bring up the $ 4. 8 million that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had invested in members of Congress, including himself. By now Gentle Reader will be all too familiar with Fannie and Freddie, the twin public-private corporations whose bad subprime loans got this whole mess, crisis, and general trainwreck off to a rolling start.
And of all the members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation, Mark Pryor collected the most in those political donations: $ 9, 500 from their PACs and another $ 2, 150 from assorted individuals connected to Fannie and Freddie. If he ever tried to stop their raid on the Treasury, we must have missed it.
It’s an old pattern with Mark Pryor; we still remember how he collected all that dough from the payday lenders in political contributions and let them continue their nefarious operations in this state for a disgracefully long time. Surely that was his signal disservice to the state as Arkansas’ attorney general.
The last sentence of Senator Pryor’s latest statement isn’t any more assuring than the first: “ I plan to continue working with my colleagues to fix the system and prevent a repeat failure. ’’ As effectively as he and his colleagues prevented this one ? There’s a frightening thought.
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