Early in the debate, Obama asked rhetorically: “The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did we get into this situation in the first place?” Instead of talking abstractly about greed, McCain might have said: “Senator Obama wants to know how the trouble started. He might ask his close adviser Jim Johnson, who headed Fannie Mae and got an exorbitant pay package.”
Hello world!
7 years ago
3 comments:
Heh, except John McCain spent the night before the debate prepping for the debate with Rob Portman. In fact, McCain didn't spend any more time in Washington than Barack Obama did.
As for Jim Johnson, besides being asked to run a VP-search committee (and then removing himself shortly thereafter), is there any record of him being an economic adviser? As opposed to McCain's campaign manager who headed up a lobbying group created for Fannie Mae?
I can't believe Obama didn't hammer McCain on this.
As the WSJ said of McCain that you’d find the cause of what when wrong on Wall Street “by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus.”
Review your history. It was McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm who in 1999, pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania. This was done by the Republican controlled Congress.
On December 15, 2000, an especially tense time in Washington, when only two days earlier, SCOTUS had handed Bush the presidency, Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was Gramm's time to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.
The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the SEC nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating financial products called swaps and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."
THIS IS THE CAUSE OF THE PRESENT US ECONOMIC SITUATION. Get it?
Naahh, you check your history. And Thomas Frank isn't exactly "The WSJ."
The facts.
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