John McCain, Deregulation Hawk, Criminal

[Joanne98]

John McCain’s affinity for supporting the deregulation of major industries puts him in league with the worlds most notorious corporate criminals. Deregulation is the tool of the super rich corporate criminal class, and John McCain is their poster child.

Suddenly, John McCain is fashioning himself as the great protector of the common folk who will march upon the good ol’ boys in Washington whose feckless deregulation has allowed Wall Street to veer out of control. The only problem with this little fantasy is that the first good ol’ boy he’d need to whack is himself. As the above article from Politicor pointed out six weeks before the Wall Street meltdown, we should not be fooled.


Last month, the blog Politicor wrote an article on the subject of John McCain’s shameless pursuit of stuffing the coffers of the good ol’ boys. Given the current Wall Street debacle and bailout that will be funded by taxpayers going into hoc to China for decades to come, the Politicor article could have been written today, but they had the foresight to expose McCain six weeks before his lifelong policies came home to roost.

More excerpts:

McCain and the S&L crisis:

First McCain supported deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry. All the while accepting lavish gifts and trips on private jets from Charles Keating who would benefit directly from the legislation. This led to rampant theft of customer savings. The Savings and Loan industry then crashed costing the American taxpayers $30 Billion. McCain was indicted for corruption and Keating went to prison.

McCain and the energy deregulation crisis:

McCain followed that mess with deregulation of the energy industry. This created in the energy markets, the Enron scandal, and cost rate payers across the country $20 billion in manipulated energy costs. Within a year all competition for gas and oil was gone and prices began rising.

On a personal note, I’m one of the people directly slammed by the McCain-supported deregulation of the energy markets. I saw my electricity bill climb 500% in a matter of days, basically a transfer of wealth from ordinary people in California to criminals in Texas while Bush-McCain and the Republican congress did absolutely nothing other than facilitate the rape - a bit of vengeance against the state that said NO to Bush. This nearly ruined my business - proof that the Republican party doesn’t care about the small business that fuels the growth of the middle class. It only cares about corporate giants that transfer wealth to the elite power brokers.

McCain and oil windfall profiteering:

A sweet deal for Exxon Mobile who this year raked in more profits than any company in the history of the world, and payed their CEO $500 million in bonuses, while spending less that 2 million to develop new sources of oil from the more than 10 million acres of undeveloped US oil leases Exxon holds.

McCain and the mortgage crisis

That was not enough for our hero John McCain. He then supported deregulation of the Mortgage industry which led to rampant lender abuse and the current mortgage crisis. Now with the just passed bailout legislation this will cost taxpayers $150 Billion.

Of course, this has since been followed directly by the collapse of the banking system and what is (so far) the biggest bailout in history, with the AIG bailout costing over 50 times more than the Chrysler bailout.

The article goes on to describe McCain as basically a stooge of the real criminals: the Charles Keatings, the Ken Lays, and the Phil Gramms of the world. McCain may be the architect of financial ruin, but his puppet masters are the looters.

http://tpzoo.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/john-mccain-deregulation-hawk-criminal/

[hermetic]

1. Oh, he's worse than that

JOHN McCain is making a big show of criticizing the government "bailout" of insurance giant AIG. But it turns out that AIG, which received $85 billion in US tax dollars earlier this week, is one of the largest donors to McCain's pet think tank, the comically named "Reform Institute," which he co-founded in 2001 "in direct response to the millions of Americans who, during the 2000 presidential campaign, expressed profound disillusionment with corrupt fundraising activities."

Apparently, AIG was so troubled over the issue of corrupt fundraising activities that they loaded in as one of the top VIP donors in McCain's nonprofit think-tank, whose website lists AIG in the "over $50,000" donor category--although exactly how much over that $50,000 is still unclear. Nor is it clear why AIG had any business donating so much money to a think tank whose work in no way overlapped with the insurance company's--unless, of course, that money was just meant to gain access to McCain.

The "Reform Institute" has taken a lot of heat as a front organization designed to funnel money to McCain's political career. As Ari Berman wrote, McCain's campaign co-chair, Rick Davis, served as the president of the nonprofit Reform Institute for three years, earning $395,000 in salary. Davis also headquartered his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, in the Reform Institute's offices at that time. He is just one of several McCain people who passed through the Reform Institute's revolving door while McCain prepared for the 2008 campaign. McCain formally stepped down from his own institute in 2005, but he remains deeply linked to the Reform Institute to this day.

So when McCain declared this week that "The government was forced to commit $85 billion" to his mega-donor AIG, the question becomes, "What forced you to do it?" The American taxpayers never got a red cent in donations from AIG--but now, they're being forced by people like McCain, whose career profited from AIG donations, to buy his backer's massively indebted trash heap in what can only be described as the worst business deal in this nation's history, or the worst example of crony nationalization. AIG isn't just funding McCain's policy think tank, it's also quite literally thinking for the presidential hopeful. Martin Feldstein, who serves on the board of AIG, is one of McCain's top economic advisers. Earlier this month, Feldstein gushed in the Wall Street Journal over McCain's plans to cut taxes even further, and to shift healthcare costs from employers to employees in a "tax credit" scheme that many believe will solely benefit insurance companies, at the expense of workers. Since AIG is--or was--the world's largest insurance company, it stood to gain from McCain's policies.


read more: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/ames