The recent financial crises have shown in the harsh light of reality exactly why McCain/Plain can’t be trusted with the economy: They don’t understand the economy’s broken, much less how to fix it.
We saw the federal government take over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and then Lehman Brothers when they failed. Then, Merrill Lynch sold itself in a fire sale to avoid bankruptcy. The government then organised a federal bailout of AIG because it was too big to be allowed to fail. McCain opposed the AIG bailout, but when the government did it, McCain flip-flopped and said that the bailout was okay.
Amid all the turmoil, John McCain declared, echoing his disgraced economic adviser, Phil Gramm, that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”. And his running mate? She declared there was some “fixin’ and changin’” needed in Washington. These people don’t have a clue.
McCain cannot claim to be a reformer on banking when he helped create this mess by strongly backing his buddy Phil Gramm’s bill to remove regulations keeping banking, insurance and investment companies completely separate, regulations put in during the Great Depression to prevent the sort of thing we’re seeing right now. McCain has admitted he doesn’t understand economics and turned to Gramm as an adviser. Gramm of course had to step down—officially, at least—as a McCain adviser after he said America was a “nation of whiners” and implied that ordinary Americans who were hurting from the Bush-Cheney regime’s economic policies were crazy. That stupidity didn’t play well, and I commented on it, too.
The economic news will get much worse. Right now, I could easily name a dozen Americans I know who are facing “downsizing” or who have already lost their jobs. Given a little time, I could probably come up with a few dozen more in the same situation. More that 600,000 jobs have been lost in America, and foreclosures are running at 9,800 per day. The US economy is in a dire situation and all John McCain offers is more of the same failed policies that got the country into this mess in the first place.
“The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” John McCain? How can you fix it if you don’t understand it’s broken?
3 comments:
I found it interesting on the news tonight McCain ran a commercial about how he'd solve the current problem. By cracking down on those Wall Street firms.
In a news story McCain talked about the greed on Wall Street.
That would be because of the deregulation sponsored by McCain and Phil Gramm. AIG got into the mess by using the very laws that McCain helped pass.
The problem was not and is not the greed on Wall Street it is the fact the government didn't do its job in keeping tabs on what was going on.
Your basic closing the gate after the horses got out, I'd say, and Johnny Mac propped the door open.
Jason: I agree with everything you said, apart from one thing: The situation was caused by greed (though not just on Wall Street). Those regulations that McCain helped remove would've prevented this from happening, as they had for decades after the Depression. And, if the Bush-Cheney regime and/or the Republican Congress had exercised even a tiny bit of oversight, they may have been able to stop it before it went too far.
However, greed was at the root of it all: The Republicans who don't want any kind of barriers to making money, and the companies that took advantage of the opportunities that Bush-Cheney, McCain, Gramm and the other Republicans handed to them to let their greed run riot.
Now it's all collapsing and once again ordinary people are paying the price for Republicans' rewarding and encouraging greed. Ordinary people will either face direct losses (of their jobs and/or homes), or indirect losses by tax money being diverted from other needs and the national debt going up by perhaps $300-$500 billion because of the past couple weeks alone—and we're not out of the woods yet.
All of which is a broader topic than this post was about, but it's related. And it clearly shows that we can't trust McCain to fix a system he helped break.
Roger: I think you're right. Like I said above, it'll be ordinary people who have to clean up this mess—again. It won't be fixed until the new Democratic Congress and a President Obama put back in place the regulations that Bush-Cheney and McCain and the Republicans removed. Too late for many, but it will prevent this happening in the future.
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