John McCain: Gambling With Your Future
John McCain is once again rolling the dice for a high-stakes win. Having demonstrated his capacity for self-contradiction at any turn and suffering in the polls as a result of his past positions and current confusion with the state of our economy, he’s ditching the issues in favor of a risky and flawed attempt to turn the conversation back to culture wars and personal attacks (something he swore he’d never do, of course, but what else is new?)
In the meantime, there are two issues which McCain cannot address adequately. The first is the economy, which he neither understands nor supports. I encourage you to watch the video below to see how McCain, in his own words, falters when he first tries to argue for the value of deregulated financial markets and then, when confronted with the product of those same unregulated markets, turns it around and says he supports regulations to protect citizens.
Here’s reality. Reality is that under a McCain/Palin presidency, any regulatory authority would largely be ignored anyway. McCain has deep ties to Freddie Mac, including large monthly payments to his campaign manager for his lobbying efforts on behalf of Freddie Mac through last month,
This is not new. In the 80′s McCain was one of the Keating Five, the man in the middle of the last financial/real estate scandal of our time — the Savings and Loan meltdown. And then, just as now, it was McCain’s agreement to push for little to no regulation of Savings and Loans that brought down many property owners and small community Savings and Loan Associations.
McCain also doesn’t understand health care and the current issues facing this country in that regard. His plan proposes that we all take a gamble with our health and our homes, a topic I will cover in a separate post.
Watch the video and ask yourself how willing you are to allow John McCain to gamble with what little you have left. On a personal note, I am fairly certain that my father was a compulsive gambler in his later years. When he died in August, he had next to nothing and was dependent upon others for everything. Is that the future we see for our country?
Sphere: Related ContentFrom the Sublime to the Absurd
This post by Hugh Hewitt, who claims McCain will close and win:
Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time.
A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed.
The world’s financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times.
The cost of energy has soared and will continue to climb. The entitlement trap has only grown worse in the three years since George Bush asked the Democrats to work with him on Social Security and they said no. The corrupt, self-dealing culture of the Beltway has poisoned the decision-making of many bureaucracies and in ways only the burdened know, and the credibility of the big media is shattered even as their audiences shrink and many of their news rooms come close to shuttering.
So, despite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years.
I feel the need to remind Hewitt that John McCain is the gambler, not Barack Obama. He gambled with Sarah Palin, he gambled with his grandstand non-play of the week last week when he said he was suspending (but not really) his campaign, and he wants to gamble with the lives of our sons and daughters in a zero-sum foreign policy game.
John McCain’s campaign has been an erratic array of ups and downs, mostly based on high-stakes grandstand plays like the Palin gambit. Those plays have resulted in lagging polls and lackluster response to his policies, his presence, and his candidacy.
The bottom line is that we are where we are because we elected Bush and handed him a firm majority in the Congress through 2006. Those chickens are coming home to roost, and now is no time to gamble what future we have on the shoulders of a man who chose a completely unqualified neocon as his running-mate. As a gamble for the women’s vote, I might add.
Sphere: Related ContentMortgage Bailout: Questions Without Answers
Here is the full text (PDF) of the proposed bailout of the mortgage industry. It isn’t very long, take the time to read it.
In essence, it permits the federal government to purchase mortgage and mortgage-related assets from any US financial institution.
The first question you should be asking is this: What are mortgage-related assets? That would be a good question. Mortgages are easy enough to define. They’re loans secured by the equity in a piece of real estate. But what are mortgage-related assets? Does that definition extend to the mortgage funds that have created the havoc in the marketplace that we already see?
And then this: What are the rights of the borrower? Note that the act grants the government the authority to designate financial institutions as government agents, acting on behalf of the government. Which financial institutions? What benefit will they derive? I’m thinking specifically about banks like Bank of America, which has made what I consider to be incredibly imprudent decisions to buy Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. To what end? If designated as an agent of the government, do they then become responsible for the servicing and collection of government-acquired mortgages?
And the best for last. Spending and debt caps: What are they and what do they mean? Under Section 6, the amount allocated to the purchase of mortgage-related securities is $700 billion. However, Section 10 increases the statutory limit on public debt (yes, that’s our National Debt) to 11.3 trillion from 8.2 trillion. That’s an increase of 3.1 TRILLION, even though the authorized limit for mortgage purchases is 700 billion.
Tired of numbers? Me too. But what is the purpose of increasing our debt limit in relation to this particular piece of ‘emergency legislation’ if not to pad the balance sheet to make the Bush administration look better than it should? My own theory is that the increase in the debt limit is a way to get the cost of the Iraq war onto the balance sheet without debate.
The Patriot Act taught me not to trust anything put before the taxpayers with the “urgent that we do this RIGHT NOW” admonition. That’s how we signed away part of our Constitutional rights. And just like now, it was done in a climate of fear and uncertainty.
Fear and uncertainty is the tool by which Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin browbeat everyone into being forced to accept their point of view. Because so much of what they do would not stand up to public debate, they invoke fear-based ‘emergency legislation’, and then slide in provisions that don’t make much sense unless they’re considered in the larger context of world events.
For some perspective, here’s a chart of the growth of our national debt since 1940:
For extra credit, you can map out the increases to the party in power for some real eye-popping madness, but for purposes of this post, consider the end point of the graph – years 2000-2007.
Increasing the debt cap by 3 trillion dollars means a weaker dollar — weaker than it was even before this disaster. Now that may be inevitable, given the credit gorge we’ve been on. According to some, the alternative was a complete collapse of the dollar. However, what I take away from it is a promise that higher taxes are inevitable, no matter who is in office. So there remains only one lingering question: Who will spread the tax burden more fairly?
The answer can be found easily enough in the candidates’ tax proposals. One gives relief to those earning 6 figures; the other gives relief to 95% of taxpayers. While I’m not a huge fan of either proposal, I’ll opt into the one that lessens the burden for the majority wherever possible.
Paul Krugman has some questions about the bailout, too. Go read it here.
Sphere: Related ContentNo Offshore Drilling – #3
Third of the daily postings of images of California shores, untainted by the fingers of Big Oil.
The news that Exxon/Mobil raked in $1,485/second for the entire second quarter of 2008 should spark a loud national dialogue about the control that the Big Oil companies have over our economy, our quality of life, and yes, our environment. Not only was Exxon/Mobil given a huge pass over their destruction caused by the Exxon Valdez, now they are trying to reverse-spin the story with this nonsense:
Exxon Mobil Corp. reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest profit from operations ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares slumped 3 percent.
The expected takeaway that we’re all supposed to accept is that hey, they made a lot of money but were EXPECTED to make more, so they really didn’t make all that much because they could have potentially made much, much more.
It’s a little like saying that the Bush Administration could’ve killed detainees, but since they only tortured them it’s okay.
John McCain has wrapped his arms around the oil companies and planted a big, sloppy kiss on their foreheads. If he were to be elected, you can count on more nonsense like this, and scenes like the one above will have the added bonus of a few oil platforms in the distance, lighting the night as bright as that moonrise.
Sphere: Related ContentListen: Rachel Maddow – What’s Wrong with John McCain?
“…everybody acknowledges that the facts don’t matter…only matters what is said about the candidate regardless of their relationship to the truth”
“What ought to be the scandal in this campaign is the fact that John McCain is making stuff up.”
Sphere: Related ContentHey, What’s this Iraq War charge on my bill?
$275 per person. That’s $1,100 per family. As of today.
Visit lessjobsmorewars.com
(h/t Jack & Jill Politics)
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