Last year I walked into a doctor's office. I had high blood pressure. I could feel it creeping up on me. My head hurt, I felt strained by everything around me. Work was hard, I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I had a family to take care of. I was worried about my future, the future of my kids, how I was just going to make it to the next day. The doctor told me about a great new medicine, it was new and unregulated, still very new to the market. He assured me that I would be able to pay for the medicine, that everything was going to be OK. He was the expert so I listened to what he said. Turns out I wasn't as well covered as the doctor said. Within a short time I started getting outrageous bills. I wanted to stop the drugs but stopping too fast was impossible. I had to stay on the drugs through the regimen, and somehow squeak by, or the ramifications would be disastrous. Turns out I could have been helped by something simpler. If the doctor hadn't given me more than I needed then I would have been fine. If he had acted as a trustworthy expert instead of someone skimming the extra money off the top I would have been fine.
Are you paying attention? Angry? I am. The above story is our mortgage crisis in a nutshell. If you are a hard worker and walk into an office to see if your life savings will put you in a home you trust the person on the other side of the table to do the right thing. Why would someone put your life and livelihood at risk? Who would do that sort of thing?
John McCain says he wanted to stop the crisis by taking credit for Chuck Hagel's bill from 2005. A bill he waited 16 months before signing onto. Another erratic example of last minute grandstanding by Mr. McCain. John McCain is trying to take credit full credit for something he gave a speech about.
Mr. McCain "never took on the role that some other Republicans did" to try to limit the companies, said a former Freddie Mac executive who later lobbied for the company until its failure.
This is classic McCain, suspending everything to give a speech, on something he didn't real want, for political purposes.
If someone walked into a doctor's office and came out with more than they needed, putting their life, the future of their family, and their financial future at risk only so the doctor could make a few extra bucks no one would blame the patient. Working and middle-class people walked into lender's offices with no more knowledge than a patient in a doctor's office and John McCain just doesn't care. If John McCain cared he wouldn't have helped foreclosure Phil rip down the barriers between our financial institutions so that one sector of the economy failing brought everything down like a house of cards. McCain is the loyal foot soldier in the army of deregulation.
"If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."
If John McCain really cared about Chuck Hagel's bill then why didn't he back it in 2007 when it came back up? If it wasn't just more political grandstanding then why didn't he co-sponsor that bill? I'll tell you why, because there wasn't a news story that week, unlike in 2005, so John McCain had better things to do than sign on to a bill that he now says was so important. No big speech, no big story, so John McCain was busy taking care of John McCain.
** On a personal note I'm fine. I actually had a good doctor who told me to eat better and walk more. I dropped 20 lbs and lived to see my brother come back from a war. But I might not have been so lucky, but its OK after all John McCain says less regulation is the answer.
Doctors paid millions by Amgen and Johnson & Johnson to push anemia drugs