As low information voters and average news consumers scratch their heads about the Wall Street debacle, they are wondering how this all happened.

 

What an great opportunity for the Obama campaign to educate American voters. 

 

First, stop saying that McSame is not responsible for this financial debacle.

 

From the NYTimes: "But his record [McCain's] on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.

 

As Bob Herbert reports, "McSame's health plan which would tax employees for employer based health care coverage, "In a refrain we've heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these 'needless and costly' insurance regulations. 

 

 

Bush regime deregulation is what helped create this financial crisis; and McCain wants Band-Aid solutions only for the current disaster so that deregulation can proceed unimpeded. 

 

The Times states: "He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain's largest contributor, collectively."

 

These two wealthy hypocrites.

 

I've written about Bush flunky and the "Don't take any financial advice, especially on mortagages, from this man," Alan Greenspan here, here, and here.

 

For example: And as for his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, self-centered, Republican brown noser extraordinaire, the following, from a 2004 article, "Don't take mortgage advice from Alan Greenspan" by Bill Fleckenstein, captures the asinine former Fed chairman perfectly, 

".....a Federal Reserve chairman who has demonstrated that he couldn't identify reckless behavior if it ran him over...

"...March 6, 2000....he waxed on about the wonders of technology and how it had brought us a new era and all that other stuff. Folks may not remember that date, but it was four days before the Nasdaq Composite (COMPX) hit its all-time high of 5,048.62. Despite the recovery over the past year ago, the composite is still down nearly 60% from the March 2000 peak. 

"This is not the first time Easy Al has been way off. On March 7, 2000, I wrote a column called Alan Greenspan: Friend or Foe that chronicled some of his prior quotes, speeches and the like. It includes his Jan. 7, 1973, utterance (right before the recession that ranks as our worst, at least until we get through the one we're in but haven't completed): 'It is very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can be now.' 

"And, there are other examples.....For instance, in 1984, he wrote a letter to Edwin Gray, then-chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, advising the regulator to exempt Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, a Greenspan client, from harsh federal regulations about its investments. He told Gray he should 'stop worrying so much' about such things as junk bonds, and that 'deregulation (of the savings & loan industry) was working just as planned.' "

"As Baker says of Greenspan, "In fairness to Bernanke, most of the blame for the housing bubble rests on the shoulders of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan. However, Mr. Greenspan has fled the scene of the crime. (Actually he is still there, busily trying to rationalize his failures, but Greenspan is no longer accountable to Congress.)"

 

As for Phil Gramm, McSame's economic adviser, ThinkProgress wraps it up in a nutshell:  "McCain's "Econ Brain," who called America "a nation of whiners" in a "mental recession," former Senator Gramm was behind the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The former made legal "themortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector," while the latter "destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies." As The Nation wrote, "those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community."

 

Paul Krugman, economist and professor at Princeton University, in an interview on Countdown last night said that the two officials most responsible for the current mess are 1) Alan Greenspan and 2) Phil Gramm.  You can watch it here.  (h/t) Cursor.org

 

Krugman also stated that if McSame made Phil Gramm Treasury Secretary, he would lead us into another Great Depression. 

 

Via ThinkProgress:  "Last night on MSNBC's Countdown, New York Times columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman pinpointed Phil Gramm as one of the architects of the current financial crisis, and the "odds-on favorite to be the Treasury Secretary" in a McCain administration. Asked by Olbermann what Gramm's nomination would mean for the economy, Krugman suggested it could lead to another Great Depression:

Watch that here.

 

This is a golden opportunity for the Obama campaign and the Democrats to keep communicating to American voters an ongoing, hardhitting message that puts the blame for this financial catastrophe (which will affect voters pension plans, for example) where it rightfully belongs on Bushite Republicans and John Sidney McCain, who as Dubya's clone, proves he is the Herbert Hoover of the early 21st century.