Let's see. Elitist Phil "Americans are whiners" Gramm helped write the deregulation legislation that helped get us into this catastrophic mess. McCain has mentioned Gramm as a strong possibility to head up Treasury, should McCain take office. And now the Bush plan to save the exploding failure of the Reaganomics experiment includes a provision giving one person at Treasury (picture Phil Gramm here) the legal ability to spend nearly a trillion dollars in taxpayer money on corporate welfare with no oversight, not even by a court?
Phil Gramm, who architected the 1999 and 2000 deregulation legislation that McCain voted for and that led directly to this current financial catastrophe, is McCain's key economic advisor (previously officially, and now informally after the conflict of interest became too extreme) and has been mentioned frequently as a likely McCain pick to head up Treasury, if McCain were to take office. Carly Fiorina is another possible McCain pick and is also a key advisor, and yet she received nearly $50 million in golden parachute money after being fired from Hewlett-Packard for incompetence, and yet McCain says he's a reformer and gets cheers at stump speeches from railing against high CEO pay while taking one of the worst examples of it into his fold as an important team player.
Now they are asking you, the taxpayer, to borrow generational debt from China in order to pay Wall Street for their failed experiment in "free" market economics and are resisting attempts to impose CEO pay caps and other reforms. I see no reason why CEO's that ran our economy into the ground and come begging for corporate welfare should have any more protection than a steel worker who is laid off because the corporations dismantle the American manufacturing base and move it overseas, just like they move their financial assets offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. If anything, their crime is much worse, and their landing should be that much harder. If a laid off factory worker with a family living below the poverty level has to meet extensive oversight requirements to qualify for a welfare check, then a towering financial corporation that has screwed it all up so badly in the deregulated market that they actually need the conservative nanny state to come save them with corporate welfare paid for by taxpayers, then they ought to be subject to a few requirements as well.
This morning, many of the same corporations and consultants that wrecked Wall Street in the deregulated frenzy are already lining up at the trough, jockeying to get their greedy little mitts on some of the unprecedented nearly one trillion dollars that the Bush administration and John McCain want you, the taxpayer, to sign off on, so they can clean up twice in their grand theft before a possible Democratic administration and Democratic Congress pairing could clamp down and stop the theft. This bailout is being rushed through to get a final round of theft in before the barn door closes on what will be an empty barn. Actually, the barn will contain an IOU note to China and other foreign investors that your grandkids will be paying on, and to add insult to injury, Bush is now asking you to include foreign banks in your bail out, including Swiss giant UBS - a bank for the ultra-elite that is infamous as the bank where the richest of the rich across the world do banking.
It is similar to what we heard during the period of pressure to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq despite the lack of any real evidence that we needed to. It's similar to the "Patriot" Act (which guts our constitution) and similar to the unconstitutional FISA act. In all cases, you have the administration (with Republican rubber-stamping support) suddenly announcing that because they've managed us into yet another crisis, Congress needs to act quickly to sign off on some ridiculous power grab worthy of Napolean or worse and that there's no time to stop and think about it or to build in any oversight. Yet as soon as the Democrats attempt to include any oversight or make it constitutional, suddenly there's all the time in the world to drag it out, veto it, and have the Republicans endlessly filibuster in the Senate. This bailout includes a provision that says that one man in the Treasury can spend this massive sum of taxpayer money however he wants with no oversight, and no court can ever review the decision. Yet McCain says he supports the administration's plan and that Congress should get behind it.
Obama is right - let's slow down and get it right. And that we need to be clear about McCain's consistent record of voting in a manner which helped usher us directly to this moment of crisis. Let's recall that McCain even recently wanted to put Social Security and Medicare and indeed a big chunk of the health care system into these very firms on Wall Street that have now toppled and gone under. It also turns out that the man he's picked to lead his transition team if he were to be elected earned more than a quarter of a million dollars just this year alone representing Freddie Mac, even though McCain blames Freddie Mac on the campaign trail to get audience response. It's time to ignore party ideology and get this right. And that involves keeping McCain as far from the White House as possible. The stakes are simply way too high.