Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Is your life better than it was 8 years ago?

It's peculiar that McCain and Palin aren't familiar with the Bush doctrine because they're platform is essentially based on it. If you want corporate CEO's to keep getting richer while the average person gets unemployed, un-insured and un-housed, vote McCain/Palin. It's your conscience that has to deal with it.



(BTW, if you voted for Bush in the past 2 elections, how'd that work out for you? Is your life better now than 8 years ago? This is the question people should be asking themselves.)

In the two most recent domestic financial crises in our generation (the S&L crisis in 1989, and today's), both were caused by banking deregulation. Both wrecked the housing market. Surprise, surprise: guess who's knee deep in prompting deregulation for his silver spoon buddies? McCain backed deregulation both times. He was "Mr. Deregulation" for CEO's and banks right up until August 2008.

Check it out here: McCain: good for war, bad for economy!

In addition to McCain's close kickback ties with Charles Keating in the Savings & Loan scandal, McCain's campaign co-chair lobbied for the latest deregulating that prompted today's financial crisis:

The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law.

Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there. A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled [merged with] up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006. During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.


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