So, with the word this morning that Morgan Stanley may be on the ropes, there's one thing that we need to be absolutely crystal clear about: if you count on two hands the people responsible for this crisis, John McCain is at the top of the politicians.
Every single piece of deregulatory legislation over the past decade and more has John McCain's fingerprints all over it. He's been President Bush's point man on all of this. The entire legacy of trickle-down, deregulated, anything goes, corporate welfare economic philosophy has brought us to this point. John McCain lead the fight for, along with his current leading economic advisor Phil Gramm, passage of the Gramm/Leach/Blealy Act, which tore down the walls between banks, investment houses, and insurance companies. It's the bill that allowed the sub-prime banking crisis to spill over into those other industries. It's why the American taxpayer had to spend 85 billion dollars the other day to rescue AIG. It's why dozens of other firms are at risk. There could not be a more simple, stright-line, cause-and-effect relationship. The thing is, everybody thinks that economics is a really complicated field. The facts is, it's only complicated on a small scale. The more you pull back, the easier it is to see the big picture.
They refer to these regulations that saw the US through the most productive economic decades of any nation in the history of the planet, derisively, as repressive "depression-era" regulations. Turns out, they learned a thing or two during the Great Depression, and some of those regulations weren't such terrible ideas. The remnants of them are the only things that may keep things from getting worse (which is why John McCain is suddenly all for regulation, changing his tuneon that topic, literally, overnight). Believe me, things are about to get bad by anyone's standards. Make no mistake: we're entering into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the man with his hands on the tiller is running for President, and winning. That's something that everyone needs to think about before heading to the voting booth.
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