At what was described as a midtown business breakfast, Mayor Bloomberg noted that Congress should take blame for the mortgage crisis and mentioned that complaints at protests don't do anything for the future, Capital New York reported. "I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said in the video embedded below. "Some of them are totally unfounded. 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." The deflecting remarks echo previous comments, like when he chided protesters in early October for trying to drive job-creating banks out of the city. Still, having said that he heard the complaints at the Tuesday breakfast, Bloomberg also described them as not particularly forward-looking (transcribed by Politico):

"It's fun and it's cathartic, it's, I don't know, it's entertaining to go and to blame people and look to the past, but it doesn't do anything for the future. And most of the protesters down there are complaining — I think they should be out there trying to change the world and make it better."

Of course, Occupy Wall Streeters might say that is what they're doing by protesting.

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Erik Hayden