Robert Scheer: Earth to McCain: It’s a Crisis

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from Truthdig:



Earth to McCain: It’s a Crisis

Posted on Sep 16, 2008
By Robert Scheer


Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising “tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways”? Just how dumb do they think we are?

Seriously, 20 minutes of Google searches should be sufficient to convince all but the dimwits among us that John McCain has been a master of the special-interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown. He voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat. The two main bills accomplishing that, bills which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, who was chair of the Senate Banking Committee when he acted as chief sponsor of both pieces of legislation. The same Gramm that McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign.

Gramm proved an embarrassment when he cavalierly insisted there was no real crisis but only the panic of “whiners,” but even on Monday as his “Crisis” ad ran, McCain, in person, was still denying that there was one. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer, as two more of the nation’s most venerable financial institutions crashed and the stock market shed more than 500 points. When a perplexed Lauer asked McCain to square his optimism with his own ad’s use of the crisis word, McCain came to his senses and, discovering his inner Karl Marx, insisted he hadn’t been speaking of the bankers but rather was saying “that the workers of America are the fundamentals of the economy.”

OK, but never heard that from him before, as he consistently carried water for the bankers going back to his supporting role in the savings and loan scandal, a harbinger of the consequences of a severely deregulated financial market that McCain still favors. Nor did he worry then about the workers who lost their savings while McCain’s wife made a million in profit from her deal with Charles Keating, the banker for whom McCain lobbied. Even on Tuesday, while McCain suddenly was thundering against the “unbridled corruption and greed that caused the crisis on Wall Street,” he still did not urge anything more stringent than convening a national commission. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080916_earth_to_mccain_its_a_crisis/