IL congressman shrieks at voter, 'Don't blame banks!'

Just watch Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh go batshit crazy when a constituent says banks shouldn't be allowed to bet against their own customers (the way they almost drove YRC into bankruptcy).

Walsh went berserk and screamed, "Don't blame the banks ... that pisses me off." Then he shrieked at the placid constituent that he would ask him to leave if he didn't stop talking.

Hat tip to Think Progress for first posting this video.

There are a few things you should know about Joe Walsh. Americans for Prosperity, the creature of the Benedict Arnold Koch brothers, supports him. And he's a deadbeat dad who owes his ex-wife more than $100,000 in child support for their three children.

The peerless Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone explains why Walsh's argument about the government's housing policy is complete baloney (though he suggests Walsh might be stupid enough to actually believe it). Read the whole thing here.

This whole notion that the financial crisis was caused by government attempts to create an "ownership society" and make mortgages more available to low-income (and particularly minority) borrowers has been pushed for some time by dingbats like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who often point to laws like the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act as signature events in the crash drama....

...nobody who actually understands anything about banking, or has spent more than ten minutes inside a Wall Street office, believes any of that crap. In the financial world, the fairy tales about the CRA causing the crash inspire a sort of chuckling bemusement, as though they were tribal bugaboos explaining bad rainfall or an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth, ghost stories and legends good for scaring the masses.

But nobody actually believes them. Did government efforts to ease lending standards put a lot of iffy borrowers into homes? Absolutely. Were there a lot of people who wouldn’t have gotten homes twenty or thirty years ago who are now in foreclosure thanks to government efforts to make mortgages more available? Sure – no question.

But did any of that have anything at all to do with the explosion of subprime home lending that caused the gigantic speculative bubble of the mid-2000s, or the crash that followed?

Not even slightly. The whole premise is preposterous.

Plus Walsh is rude to the server.