0:02 the great recession began with the
0:03 bursting of a speculative bubble
0:06 throughout the 1990s and 2000s home
0:07 prices climbed
0:09 and financial service firms looked to
0:11 cash in and mortgage companies began
0:13 writing increasingly risky loans to
0:15 people who could not afford mortgages
0:17 but why loan people money for mortgages
0:18 that you know they're not going to be
0:19 able to pay back
0:21 well easy you then bundle those
0:23 mortgages together and sell them to
0:24 somebody else
0:25 as mortgage-backed securities and
0:27 because people really don't want to
0:29 default on a mortgage and lose their
0:31 home those are generally considered
0:32 pretty safe investments
0:34 except this time because they're selling
0:36 them to people who can't afford them
0:38 so they sold and resold these things so
0:39 quickly it actually became difficult to
0:41 turn to determine exactly who owned the
0:44 mortgages who owned those homes
0:46 and those risky mortgages had adjustable
0:48 interest rates meaning poor people were
0:50 able to afford them at first
0:52 but once those interest rates rapidly
0:54 increased they couldn't
0:56 when american homeowners began to
0:58 default on the loans the whole
1:00 system collapsed major financial service
1:02 firms like bear stearns and lehman
1:04 brothers disappeared overnight
1:06 in order to prevent the crisis from
1:07 spreading the federal government poured
1:09 billions of dollars into the industry
1:12 propping up hobbled banks massive
1:14 giveaways to bankers created resentment
1:15 throughout the rest of the nation and
1:17 yet much like the great depression with
1:19 the 1920s the great recession only magnified
1:20 magnified
1:22 already rising income and wealth
1:24 inequities in the united states
1:26 according to the chief investment
1:28 officer at jpmorgan chase the largest
1:29 bank in the nation
1:31 quote profit margins have reached levels
1:33 not seen in decades and reductions in
1:36 wages and benefits explain the majority
1:36 of the net
1:39 improvement so basically banks and
1:40 really wealthy people
1:41 are making lots and lots of money and
1:43 the way they're doing it is by making
1:45 the workers have even less and less and less
1:46 less
1:47 a study from the congressional budget
1:49 office found that since the late 1970s
1:51 after tax benefits of the wealthiest one
1:54 percent grew by over 300 percent
1:56 while the average americans had grown 35 percent
1:57 percent
1:59 so as we've said before in class most
2:01 americans generally do not care how much
2:02 the top 1
2:04 or 5 percent are making as long as
2:06 people who are willing to work are able
2:08 to put a roof over their heads and
2:09 send their kids to school and put food
2:11 on the table and afford health care and
2:12 all those things
2:14 and yet in this economy increasingly
2:16 working class people weren't able to do that
2:17 that
2:20 while the wealthy still accumulated a
2:21 lot more wealth than they had had previously
2:22 previously
2:24 that's when working class and middle
2:26 class americans start to get
2:28 upset at this economic trends had
2:30 disproportionately and objectively
2:32 benefited the wealthiest americans and
2:33 while american banks quickly recovered
2:35 after the great recession and recaptured
2:36 their steady profits
2:38 and the stock market climbed again to
2:40 new heights workers continued to lag behind
2:41 behind
2:43 job growth remained minuscule and
2:45 unemployment rates
2:48 remained stubbornly high wages froze and
2:50 well-paying full-time jobs that were
2:51 lost were too often replaced by
2:53 low-paying part-time work
2:55 which is also why a majority of college
2:57 classes are now taught by adjuncts
2:59 part-time labor
3:00 a generation of workers coming of age
3:02 within the crisis was savaged by this
3:04 economic collapse
3:05 and unemployment among young americans
3:08 hovered for years at rates nearly double
3:12 the national average by the 2008
3:14 election with iraq still in chaos
3:17 democrats embraced the anti-war position
3:18 and they nominated a candidate who
3:21 consistently opposed military action in iraq
3:22 iraq
3:24 senator barack obama of illinois had
3:26 been a member of the state senate in 03
3:28 but he had publicly denounced the war
3:30 and he predicted the sectarian violence
3:31 that ensued
3:33 he remained critical of the invasion
3:35 through his 2004 campaign for the u.s senate
3:35 senate
3:37 a former law professor and community
3:39 activist obama became the first black
3:41 candidate to capture the nomination of a
3:43 major political party
3:45 during the election obama won the
3:47 support of an increasingly anti-war electorate
3:48 electorate
3:50 when the fragile economy collapsed in
3:53 2007 and 2008 ahead of the election
3:55 bush's policies were widely blamed and
3:57 obama's opponent the republican
4:00 john mccain was tied to those policies
4:02 obama won a convincing victory in the
4:04 fall and came into office as the economy
4:06 continued to deteriorate
4:08 in the great recession he managed the
4:10 bank bailout that had begun under
4:11 president bush
4:13 and he launched a limited economic
4:14 stimulus plan to provide
4:16 counter-cyclical government spending to
4:18 spare the country from the worst
4:19 of the downturn similar to the
4:21 counter-cyclical government spending
4:23 during the new deal
4:25 and in recent months that congress has
4:27 passed in our time
4:29 i also noted that this was a limited
4:30 economic stimulus plan because even
4:32 after putting the war in iraq basically
4:34 on the credit card
4:37 republicans organized to argue against
4:38 any kind of spending that would add to
4:40 the deficit now that a democrat was in
4:42 office and now that it was
4:44 spending to get out of this downturn and
4:48 not military spending
4:49 so there you have it briefly explain the
4:51 history of american interventions in
4:53 afghanistan and iraq respectively
4:55 definitely needed to take notes on that
4:56 make sure you've kind of got those two things
4:57 things
4:58 separate in your brain and aren't
5:00 confusing them what reasons did the bush
5:02 administration give for going to war
5:03 with iraq
5:04 and what were the administration's
5:06 policies and the main events that occurred
5:06 occurred
5:10 during the bush administration if you've
5:11 got that hit the next button at the
5:12 bottom of the page and take the bush's
Chrome Extension