McCain's Sudden Conversion to Economic Populism

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 McCain has been a master of the special interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown.

Duh, 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, which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, 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, said he hadn't been speaking of the bankers but rather "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.

Barack Obama has been way ahead of McCain in grasping the severity of the problem and back in March offered a scorching criticism of the deregulation mania, in particular the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law that allowed the stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks to merge for the first time since the 1930s, ushering in this era of irresponsibility.

As recently as Jan. 31, Rubin, by then Citigroup's executive committee chair was, like McCain until Tuesday, still in denial on the meltdown, insisting it was merely "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption."

Fortunately at that time, he was an adviser to Hillary Clinton and remained so past March 27, when Obama delivered his main economic speech blaming the Gramm deregulation that Rubin had helped make law for the meltdown.

Referring to the repeal of the Depression-era regulations Obama stated all too correctly: "Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one — aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."

Not devastating for Rubin and Citigroup, where he went to work, which was a leader in that $300 million lobbying effort and the first huge beneficiary of the new law, which permitted a merger with Travelers Insurance that previously had been illegal.

So, yes, there is a world of difference between Obama and McCain on the main issue that now challenges the American way of life, where people's homes, retirement, kids' college education and all other dreams are threatened by a mindless deregulation led by the Republicans but which too many influential Democrats supported.

What Obama needs to do, both to win and to help save the country, is denounce the whole lot of those scoundrels from both parties and rediscover his populist voice.

Robert Scheer's new book is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America." E-mail Robert Scheer at rscheer@truthdig.com. To find out more about Robert Scheer, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Webpage at www.creators.com.

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