Here’s New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a self-styled independent who has always been careful to suck up to the liberal establishment, reminding us he’s a blood brother of the vampires whose world-class scamming drained the life out of the housing market and left millions of people deep in debt:

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.

To Matt Taibbi, this statement at a business breakfast on Tuesday amounted to Bloomberg’s “Marie Antoinette moment,” and proved the mayor would rather tell bald-faced lies than badmouth the real villains:

In fact, just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could.

And now the word on the street in New York City is that Bloomberg might seriously crack down on OWS protesters, possibly because their continued presence near the citadels of power is beginning to make the country’s biggest crooks very nervous:

Mike Bloomberg has started to publicly lose patience with the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. Yesterday, he told the Observer that recent reports of crime and sexual assault in the park were “a very high priority” for the administration and that any withholding of information from the police by protesters “is despicable, and I think it is outrageous and it really allows the criminal to strike again making all of us less safe.”

Today during his weekly appearance on John Gambling’s radio show, Bloomberg said that “we’re not going to tolerate” some of the behavior at Zuccotti. “If you see what happened like in Oakland, we are not gonna have that here,” he said. “That’s not gonna happen here.”

The story gets better with each new day of occupation. How long will this smooth-talking, well-groomed little monster allow the Zuccotti Park protest to persist like a shadow on the people who wrecked the economy, who are a few blocks away, not even under indictment, still making billions? And to remind Americans that he, the “independent” Mike Bloomberg, condones and defends what they did?