McCain May Not Understand the Fundamentals, But His Lobbyist Advisors Do. A McCain Admin Would Drill Our Economy into the Ground

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

In the second in our two-part series about the Republican ticket's economic past, we saved the best for last. As we mentioned in our first piece, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin doesn't have a long record, but it's one that would make any economist (or working, middle class American for that matter) shake their head in disbelief.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, on the other hand, has a long, rich history of either screwing up the economy or just ignoring it, hoping the problem will go away or be handled by his lobbyist friends and advisors.

We could start as early as the late 1980s with the embarrassing Keating Five incident, in which McCain used his influence in Congress to help out his friend and donor, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. Keating spent five years in jail on corruption charges stemming from his influencing McCain and four other senators. McCain brushes off questions about the incident, saying he's paid for it and learned his lesson. It seems the lesson was "let other people handle economics. It's not that big of a deal anyhow."

In case you haven't been listening to the chatter on the economy in the past few months, here's an interesting mash-up video of exactly where McCain and his supporters are on the issue:

As you can see, McCain has said consistently and repeatedly that he doesn't understand economics. In an interview with the editorial board of the Sentinel Source in New Hampshire in December 2007, McCain was asked about the subprime mortgage crisis, which had just hit fever pitch in news coverage. He said he couldn't give an answer because "I don't claim to be smart enough... I‘d love to give you a solution, but I don‘t know." In a subsequent question, he said he was surprised by the subprime collapse as well as the dotcom bubble burst:

"...in all of this kind of new ways of packaging mortgages together and all, that is frankly something I don't know a lot about, but I do rely on a lot of smart people that are both in my employ and are acquaintances of mine. And most of them did not anticipate this."

The people that McCain relies upon are probably not the best for Main Street America. In fact, McCain's advisors are much more likely to have Wall street in mind when they make recommendations to the Republican presidential candidate. Let's look at some of the major players:

Phil Gramm - Up until recently, he was McCain's top economic advisor. Though kicked to the sidelines for making the campaign look bad, he's still whispering in McCain's ear. His insistence that Americans are just whining about the economy and that the economic crisis is imaginary makes it easier to understand his work to deregulate the financial system. He essentially created the Enron loophole with a last minute amendment to the 2000 Omnibus bill. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 reversed key regulations in the banking industry, ushering in the current crisis.

Charlie Black - He's the chairman of the huge K-Street lobbying firm BKSH and Associates, which has clients such as AT&T and JP Morgan. He has even been quoted as saying he makes lobbying calls from the Straight Talk Express bus. Dig back much further in Black's past, and you'll find he worked for infamous dictators and despots from around the world. His firm also worked for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but that's nothing new in the McCain campaign. Several others on McCain's campaign have worked for the two failed mortgage insurers that were just bailed out by the Fed, with at least 20 McCain contributors having lobbied for Freddie or Fannie.

Rick Davis - McCain's campaign manager, who co-founded a firm which lobbies for telecom giants Verizon and SBC Global, also lobbied for Freddie and Fannie.

Wayne Berman - The Co-chair of McCain's National Finance Committee has lobbied for AIG, the insurance company that was lucky enough to be bought out by the Fed this week. Surprise, surprise: he's also lobbied for Freddie and Fannie.

That is far from all the lobbyists working on McCain's campaign. In fact, of the 177 lobbyists the DNC identified as working for McCain, a Mother Jones investigation found that 83 had recently lobbied for financial institutions.

The most recent manifestation of McCain's economic problems is his stance on regulation. McCain has been calling himself "fundamentally a deregulator" and "always against regulation." But, as Rachel Maddow points out, that is just another of McCain's many recent flip flops:

Now McCain wants a commission, much like the one convened to study the events of 9/11, to find out what went wrong with our economy. Wait, no (puts hand to earpiece)... OK, now he wants a whole new government agency to tackle the problem. Wouldn't that add to the "alphabet soup" of government regulators McCain was railing against a second ago? It's hard to keep up with the economic flip flops.

On CBS this week, McCain said that, in his role as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, "every part of America's economy, I oversighted" (sic). So even though he's working tirelessly to change his stripes, he has to admit he knows he's part of the reason for our economic woes today.

If you put McCain's ignorance, lax oversight, and flip flops together with the current failed economic policies of the Bush Administration and the taint of corruption lent to McCain by his advisors, you come up with a recipe for an economy drilled straight into the ground. We're not whining when we say we cannot afford that.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Click here to read part one in this series: Palin Has a Track record of Managerial Malfeasance: She'd Drill the U.S. Economy into the Ground, Given the Chance.

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