Sept. 18, 2008 – 12:31 a.m.
McCain’s Vows to Tighten Reins on Financial Industry at Odds with His Anti-Regulation Past
By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff
Republican presidential nominee John McCain is hitting a populist note with the zeal of a convert amid the deepening crisis on Wall Street. That’s probably because he is a convert when it comes to giving government greater regulatory authority on behalf of “the public interest.”
“Government has a clear responsibility to act in defense of the public interests,” the Arizona senator said in Florida on Tuesday. “In my administration, we’re going to hold people on Wall Street responsible. And we’re going to enact and enforce reforms to make sure that these outrages never happen in the first place.”
On ABC’s “Good Morning America” yesterday, McCain said of the current upheaval in the financial world: “Congress, the regulators paid no attention whatsoever to it. We have an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies; all of them were asleep at the switch.”
That’s the same McCain who waged a quixotic battle against a “public interest” provision in the sweeping 1996 rewrite of the nation’s telecommunications law.
One of five senators who eventually voted against the landmark law, McCain waged a passionate battle against what he saw as excessive government regulation throughout the legislation.
The bill allowed regional Bell companies to provide long-distance service for the first time, after they were prohibited from doing so when “Ma” Bell was broken up in 1982. To do so, they would have to meet a “checklist” of requirements and persuade the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that the move was “consistent with the public interest.”
McCain railed against new powers for the FCC and said the “public interest” provision would be a detriment, not a benefit, to the public.
good read
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