Fannie Mae and the Vast Bipartisan Conspiracy
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Fannie and Freddie Become Penny Stocks - Part V
press box: Media criticism.A list of villains in boldface.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008, at 5:41 PM ET
Jamie Gorelick
The blowup and bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by taxpayers was foretold so many times in the last three decades by critics of the two federally chartered and subsidized mortgage giants that not even the data-searching powers of Nexis, Factiva, and Google combined can total them.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page deserves a special commendation for hammering these two outposts of corporate socialism, not that the page's many warnings over the years helped avert disaster. Mae and Mac-especially Mae-were just too nurtured by the Washington establishment for any mere pressman to dislodge them from the government's teat. In 1997, the New York Times' Richard W. Stevenson pinpointed Fannie Mae's strength when he wrote of the firm's "influential network that extends from the highest reaches of the Clinton Administration to the ranks of conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill."
The bipartisan network provided the essential cover Fannie Mae needed to run its scam, which the news pages of the Washington Post ably described this week as:
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