|
Phil Gramm, the top economic adviser to McCain, said in a recent interview: "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,"…."We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet." Adding insult to injury Gramm said of America, "We have sort of become a nation of whiners." Wages for Working Americans are stagnant or falling. The housing market is imploding, the price of gas is exploding, and purchasing power has dropped by $1,000.00 for the average family over the last 8 years. What alternate reality does Phil Gramm live in exactly? For starters, Gramm’s wife sat on the board of Enron. Gramm cut and run, from the Senate just months before the Enron fiasco broke, robbing thousands of employees of their life savings.
John Corzine (D) NJ stated that much of the staggering increase in the price of oil is due to “speculation in the oil markets and a lot it flows directly from,” a loophole,” that "… might as well be called the Phil Gramm loophole, because it was snuck in at the 11th hour, 59th minute to the 2000 energy policy bill,” by Senator Gramm.
If one were to pick a leading screw-up for the current financial meltdown, the most severe since the Republican gifted Great Depression, Foreclosure Phil would be at the top of that list. In 2000, just before he bolted the Senate to become a highly paid executive at a foreign bank, Gramm slipped some language into a bill that paved the way for the multibillion-dollar sub prime meltdown.
Gramm was rewarded for his economic ineptitude by being named co-chair to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and is the top economic advisor to McCain on economic matters. Nothing succeeds like failure in the Republican Party. McCain, who originally opposed the Bush Economic Plan and -correctly characterized it as deficit exploding, irresponsible economic policy-, now embraces it. “Trickle-down, Bush-style Economics,” failed under Ronald Reagan, failed under George H.W. Bush, and is currently collapsing under George W. Bush. Considering McCain's flip flop on this issue he must believe the 4th time is the charm. Demonstrating a finely honed sense of political expediency McCain quickly repudiated his long time friend and colleague’s characterization of Americans as "whiners," but the question remains, "Why would John Sydney McCain III choose such a stumblebum like Phil Gramm for his top economic advisor?" Unlike working people, John McCain is insulated from the harsh realities of today's economic hardships. He and his present wife Cindy, heiress to one of the nation’s largest beer distributorships, own 10 homes whose total value is just under $14,000,000 dollars. McCain has long lived in an alternate economic reality, isolated in the echo chamber and encapsulated in the self woven cocoon that comes from living decades in the culture of Washington DC. Working Americans are not whiners. John McCain does not understand working class economics. McCain, like his friend and advisor Phil Gramm, is not one of us. mike kohr 7/11/2008
|