Here is John McCain's new stance on regulation:
There's a problem here for our dear Senator McCain. He's been a passionate deregulator for a quarter of a century! He was still a passionate deregulator last week! From the Washington Post:
In 2002, McCain introduced a bill to deregulate the broadband Internet market, warning that "the potential for government interference with market forces is not limited to federal regulation." Three years earlier, McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies.
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That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.
McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that "in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand."
He was complicit in allowing these companies to do the very things that he is now railing against. Put another way, if not for he and Phil Gramm, Lehman Brothers and AIG would not have been able to get into the trouble they got into because it would have been against the rules. John McCain and Phil Gramm took away those rules. Now we see why those rules were there. Now we see what happens without regulation.
He is trying to take the offensive here, but, if anyone calls him on it right now, he is like a sitting duck. He has to be called on this now, and hard. He has to be called on it before he establishes some type of 'regulator savior' image with the voters.
Show the voters how he created this. This wasn't even George W. Bush. This is on him. Hammer it in, over and over!
This is manna from heaven David Axelrod! Use it! Now!
Comments welcome,
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