DATE: 19 Sept. 2008
TO: My Political E-Mail List
SUBJECT: FW: The New Hoovers
I’m forwarding you below the most concise, yet thorough and well-documented (-linked) analysis of the current financial situation I’ve read.
As almost everyone recognizes, we are in the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. And why? In a word, DEREGULATION.
And of course, we all know who who never met a regulation they didn’t want to axe: the Republican Party.
And among the great “champions” of the very deregulation that is now costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars — and putting us at risk of trillions of dollars of loss, as we buy up or ensure securities backed by loans so bad that no one in the private sector wants anything to do with them — was none other than Sen. John McCain. Even though he now claims otherwise ... and, oh-so-characteristically, then flip-flops on the issue within hours ...
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/16/mccain-flops-on-regulation/
But even more to blame than McCain was one former senator who was most influential in writing and passing the two pieces of legislation that did more than any others to deregulate the financial markets and, thus, are now recognized as being most responsible for having gotten us into this dire mess: none other than the architect of McCain’s own economic plan, who until recently was McCain’s chief economic advisor — until he had to step dow for having called Americans a bunch of “whiners,” for complaining about the economic problems we’re having — former senator Phil Gramm ...
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/16/krugman-on-gramm/
... who has been the odds-on favorite to be a President McCain’s Treasury Secretary! Not surprisingly, McCain’s other economic advisors are no better ...
http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/09/15/mccain-econ-team/
McCain/Gramm/Bush have already given us “change” — bringing the world’s economic “house of cards” to (at the very least) the brink of disaster, leaving the next administration with half-a-TRILLION-dollar a year deficits (after the previous, Democratic administration created surpluses), and saddling us with a needless war overseas that has cost us thousands of lives and over a TRILLION dollars and growing. We simply cannot AFFORD any more of such “change”!
In contrast, here is what a President Obama and a Democratic Congress have to offer ...
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/economyvideo
That is the pragmatic, compassionate change America needs, deserves, and can achieve — but only if we work together, to overcome the powerful interests who have given us the nightmare scenario that now threatens us all.
Doug
P.S. The bit of satire I recently sent was from my cousin Doug, not me (Even though I’ve got a “pretty big head,” I usually don’t call my own work “brilliant” and “insightful” ... and truth be told, he apparently got it from someone else, who got it from ...? But it did ring true, didn’t it?)
###
THE PROGRESS REPORT
by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers
The New Hoovers
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2008/09/pr20080918
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