Joe Klein absolutely nails it in his Time blog post, today:
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008 10:36
Their Brand is Collapse
by Joe Klein
(...)McCain has been a happily orthodox Republican when it comes to financial regulation these past 26 years. He's against it...
This has been the long-standing Republican bait and switch--scaring small businesses with the threat of new regulations if the Democrats win, commiserating with larger businesses about the evils of environmental and plant safety rules, while lifting as many regulations as possible governing the financial titans whose credit should be at the heart of new economic development.
Money and creativity have been redirected during the Reagan-Bush era (...) into a Ponzi scheme of borrowing by investment bankers, so they could engage in the most irresponsible, if lucrative (for them) speculative lending imaginable...In this sense, the mortgage crisis was a perfect metaphor for Republican financial governance: Investment banks like Lehman--R.I.P.--took loans to invest money in...bad loans. In this case, the loans were bad mortgages. This is called throwing good money after bad.
Actually, John McCain has excellent experience--a ringside seat--in the vagaries of this experiment in greed and anarchy. He was a member of the Keating Five. This was the signature scandal of the Savings and Loan crisis, twenty years ago. It concerned the insider help that five Senators gave Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan, in return for contributions and gifts. The deregulation of S&Ls--community banks dedicated to local mortgages (like George Bailey's bank in "It's A Wonderful Life")--enabled slick operators like Keating to make reckless loans in new areas where they had no expertise. The final tab to the taxpayers was $165 billion.
(...)
What we are seeing on Wall Street today is the result of an ideology gone amok. (...) Banks are failing, markets dropping. We are in the midst of a slow-motion economic crash. What happens next is an economic contraction: loans aren't available, so businesses can't expand. A crash comes at the beginning of a period of economic trouble.
John McCain, after his political near-death experience, could have made the responsible regulation of markets
Yup, Joe Klein, these days, is on a tear.
And as someone who started researching the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed since my Canadian Prime Minister, then Brian Mulroney, signed on to the Reagan-Thatcher philosophy of globalised economic laissez-faire, I've been waiting for the second Great Crash to happen.
Sure, it's unfolded in slow motion, over decades, rather than a few years, but that was thanks to the regulatory safeguards put in place by those who were elected to clean up the mess the Robber Barons and their political enablers had left behind.
And it's all happening again.
After plundering the People's treasury to recycle taxpayers' money into private hands (Iraq and Afghanistan "reconstruction", anyone? Katrina "reconstruction"? Monster bail-outs for Bear Stears. Freedie Mac and Fannie Mae? The entire U.S. Defense industry? to name just the tip of the iceberg that's melting faster than the polar ice caps?)
The most ironic of all was that "the economic fundamentals are strong" was the exact mantra repeated over and over through the back days of October 1929. Déjà Vu all over again, and just as then, the plunderers ae going to get off scott free and the taxpayers will be left with the disaster.