John McCain lives in a big, bright glass house.... so it's surprising his campaign is mounting an attack against Barack Obama regarding his association with Bill Ayers, who held a fund-raiser for Obama in 1995 and who already sat on a school reform board funded by the Annenberg Foundation when Obama was recruited as chair.
Ayers, a onetime Weatherman has been a University of Illinois education professor for nearly two decades, and does not advise or participate in Obama's presidential campaign.
Yet, mindless of all of the glass in his political house, McCain enlisted Silly Sarah Palin to be in the vanguard of lobbing Swiftboat-style bombs at Obama in an attack designed to change the subject away from the economy.... undoubtedly hoping no one remembers that McKeating McCain has already been through one such serious financial market bailout that had his fingerprints all over it.
Silly Sarah even accuses Obama of "palling around" with Ayers, even though their acquaintance is more of the nodding kind.
It's strange that in the face of the meltdown of the markets and Wall Street investment banks that the McCain campaign would try a "palling around" tactic since McKeating has a real toxic pal, someone with whom he not only has a close association, but who formulated his D.O.A. economic policy.
As Harold Meyerson points out in "A Pal Around McCain," (WaPo) ...."if McCain's people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru."
You remember Gramm.... he's the one who recently accused us of being a "nation of whiners" as people lost jobs, homes, and savings.
Meyerson went on to explain.... "Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate..... Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up.
"As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion".... let's say that again, $62 TRILLION.... "And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up."
As McCain tries to distract with Swiftboat tactics, and his earmarking crusade.... a fix amounting to a few millions in chump change.... he is hoping that no one notices his politically-incestuous relationship with Gramm. "McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort."
Maybe scariest of all, "McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected,".... then truly the pirates will be in change of the $700 billion+ mother lode.
November 4.
Showing posts with label Keating Five. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Keating Five. Show all posts
Monday, October 06, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
History: McKeating to Meltdown
By contrast, the Keating Five scandal was small potatoes. A financial institution bailout costing over $3 billion in 1989.
Compared with the bailout of hundreds of billions for the current financial meltdown, it seems small potatoes. But, there are other comparisons that chill.
The Keating Five scandal.... five Senators entangled in the failure of big- time campaign contributor Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. The five were accused of intervening with banking regulators to protect Keating.
Then-economist Alan Greenspan wrote a letter on Keating's behalf extolling the management of Lincoln Savings as "seasoned and expert" with a "record of outstanding success."
Sen. John McCain, now seeking the presidency of the United States, was one of the five.
Alan Greenspan went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In today's New York Times Frank Rich puts a fine point on this history in Truthiness Stages a Comeback.
Rich reminds us that McCain.... "has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn't, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
These smear tactics are nothing new.... George Bush smeared McCain in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, and Swiftboated John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election..... but, it was the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who codified such tactics in a 1996 GOPAC memo entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
Gingrich advised GOP campaigners to memorize as many of his suggested words as possible and use them. He suggested they talk about themselves with optimistic positive governing words such as... change, commitment, moral, family, vision... and use words to define Democrats such as.... abuse of power, betray, cheat, corrupt, greed, hypocrisy, traitors, welfare.... even, gasp, liberal.
And the point.... control. Over our country, over our lives.
And control the GOP did. Congress from 1994 to 2004 and the White House for the last eight years. Now they want to point the finger at everyone else for the dismal state of our economy, although there is plenty of blame to go around and the Democrats skirts aren't all clean.
The combination of Rove's bogus alternative to reality and the application of Gingrich's advice to use words as tactics has been politically successful for the GOP, and lethal for the country as the populace was manipulated and misled.
As Rich explains: "When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that 'we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say' about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: 'Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.' In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight...
"If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else."
This same media filter is being used in the current financial crisis. Why isn't the press talking about McCain's Keating past? Rich notes that the "indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
"It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
"After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for 'poor judgment.' .... Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk."
McCain as a "maverick" is just another manipulative use of a word as a tactic.
In truth, as Rich reminds us.... "The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas."
Eric Hovde explains today in Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis (WaPo) ...."In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown."
The meltdown didn't happen, but the "monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks."
Large Wall Street investment banks recognized the potential profit in promoting the technology boom and from mid-1999 to mid-2000 they took about 500 companies public, raising about 77 billion for the IPOs, for which they received a 6 percent underwriting fee.
In this rush for profits, the investment banks also invested in these companies before the IPO when the stock was valued at a fraction of the post IPO, and threw out their underwriting guidelines in place since the Great Depression.
Then.... the technology bubble burst and as Hovde explains, "America's corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion."
Greenspan's Federal Reserve reacted by increasing the money supply and slashing short-term interest rates to 1 percent... a level not seen for more than 45 years. This stimulus led to an enormous housing boom and new mortgage products that ignored all previous lending guidelines.
Wall Street then packaged these subprime mortgages, again receiving billions in fees, and sold them to investors.
We are now facing the disastrous result as this whole get-rich-quick scheme falls apart as the bills come due.
Hovde explains, "First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street.... But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history."
Of course, the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investing public in the Internet and housing bubbles. Treasury secretaries took no action to curb these abuses, and "Wall Street investment banking firms sprinkled some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials," and bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement, Hovde explains.
And, regardless of his current fiery calls for a crackdown on Wall Street, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by his campaign financial guru then-Sen. Phil Gramm "that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses," Rich reminds us.
Now, Gramm is keeping a low profile after he blamed the economic meltdown on our 'nation of whiners' and 'mental recession,' but he remains in the McCain loop.
So there you have it.... greed, corruption and a gulled electorate have brought us to this catastrophic financial crisis.
But history doesn't have to be prologue to the future. We can and must change business as usual.
November!
Compared with the bailout of hundreds of billions for the current financial meltdown, it seems small potatoes. But, there are other comparisons that chill.
The Keating Five scandal.... five Senators entangled in the failure of big- time campaign contributor Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan. The five were accused of intervening with banking regulators to protect Keating.
Then-economist Alan Greenspan wrote a letter on Keating's behalf extolling the management of Lincoln Savings as "seasoned and expert" with a "record of outstanding success."
Sen. John McCain, now seeking the presidency of the United States, was one of the five.
Alan Greenspan went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In today's New York Times Frank Rich puts a fine point on this history in Truthiness Stages a Comeback.
Rich reminds us that McCain.... "has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn't, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
These smear tactics are nothing new.... George Bush smeared McCain in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, and Swiftboated John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election..... but, it was the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who codified such tactics in a 1996 GOPAC memo entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
Gingrich advised GOP campaigners to memorize as many of his suggested words as possible and use them. He suggested they talk about themselves with optimistic positive governing words such as... change, commitment, moral, family, vision... and use words to define Democrats such as.... abuse of power, betray, cheat, corrupt, greed, hypocrisy, traitors, welfare.... even, gasp, liberal.
And the point.... control. Over our country, over our lives.
And control the GOP did. Congress from 1994 to 2004 and the White House for the last eight years. Now they want to point the finger at everyone else for the dismal state of our economy, although there is plenty of blame to go around and the Democrats skirts aren't all clean.
The combination of Rove's bogus alternative to reality and the application of Gingrich's advice to use words as tactics has been politically successful for the GOP, and lethal for the country as the populace was manipulated and misled.
As Rich explains: "When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that 'we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say' about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: 'Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.' In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight...
"If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else."
This same media filter is being used in the current financial crisis. Why isn't the press talking about McCain's Keating past? Rich notes that the "indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
"It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
"After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for 'poor judgment.' .... Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk."
McCain as a "maverick" is just another manipulative use of a word as a tactic.
In truth, as Rich reminds us.... "The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas."
Eric Hovde explains today in Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis (WaPo) ...."In the run-up to the millennium, the Federal Reserve, led by then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, began to pump money into the capital markets to deal with any financial problems that might arise from a Y2K meltdown."
The meltdown didn't happen, but the "monetary stimulus, coupled with the aforementioned hype, created an unfortunate bubble in Internet, technology and telecommunications stocks."
Large Wall Street investment banks recognized the potential profit in promoting the technology boom and from mid-1999 to mid-2000 they took about 500 companies public, raising about 77 billion for the IPOs, for which they received a 6 percent underwriting fee.
In this rush for profits, the investment banks also invested in these companies before the IPO when the stock was valued at a fraction of the post IPO, and threw out their underwriting guidelines in place since the Great Depression.
Then.... the technology bubble burst and as Hovde explains, "America's corporate landscape was littered with bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and investor losses have been estimated at more than $1 trillion."
Greenspan's Federal Reserve reacted by increasing the money supply and slashing short-term interest rates to 1 percent... a level not seen for more than 45 years. This stimulus led to an enormous housing boom and new mortgage products that ignored all previous lending guidelines.
Wall Street then packaged these subprime mortgages, again receiving billions in fees, and sold them to investors.
We are now facing the disastrous result as this whole get-rich-quick scheme falls apart as the bills come due.
Hovde explains, "First, the Fed laid the groundwork for both these asset bubbles by lowering interest rates to historic lows. In an attempt to protect his legacy after the Internet-bubble collapse, Greenspan provided unprecedented stimulus to re-inflate the economy and maintain his popularity with Wall Street.... But in doing so, he spawned the largest debt and asset bubble in U.S. history."
Of course, the SEC stood idly by as Wall Street took advantage of the investing public in the Internet and housing bubbles. Treasury secretaries took no action to curb these abuses, and "Wall Street investment banking firms sprinkled some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials," and bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement, Hovde explains.
And, regardless of his current fiery calls for a crackdown on Wall Street, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by his campaign financial guru then-Sen. Phil Gramm "that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses," Rich reminds us.
Now, Gramm is keeping a low profile after he blamed the economic meltdown on our 'nation of whiners' and 'mental recession,' but he remains in the McCain loop.
So there you have it.... greed, corruption and a gulled electorate have brought us to this catastrophic financial crisis.
But history doesn't have to be prologue to the future. We can and must change business as usual.
November!
Saturday, February 23, 2008
McCain's "Bent Talk"
Ah, those pesky little facts.
Responding to the recent New York Times article on his ties to a particular lobbyist, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) denied meeting with broadcaster Lowell "Bud" Paxson or his lobbyist Vicki Iseman before sending two controversial letters to the FCC on Paxson's behalf while McCain was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Letters the FCC chairman called "highly unusual."
A statement issued by the McCain campaign Thursday said that he had not met with Paxson or Iseman on the matter.... "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay [the lobbying firm where Iseman is a partner] personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding."
Well.... "Paxson Contradicts McCain Campaign on Meetings." (WaPo)
It turns out... Paxson talked with McCain in his Washington office before the letters were sent and Iseman attended the meeting and most likely set it up.
Pshaw, was the reaction of McCain's attorney-to-political-polecats, Robert Bennett, ".... Now it appears he did speak to him [Paxson]. What is the difference?"
The difference?
If there is nothing to hide, why lie about it.
"Statements from McCain's office said Iseman met only with staff and indicated that a staff member was involved in drafting and sending the letter..... and, "Thursday's statement went to lengths to say why McCain could not have met with Paxson." Untruths.
At the time McCain wrote those letters, he had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson Communications and its law firm.
The second letter came a day after the company's jet ferried McCain to a fundraiser aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach attended by Paxson, arranged by Iseman's lobbying firm, and hosted by a cruise line her company represented.
Cozy.
We're reminded of a statement by the Republican Party chairman in McCain's home district before the recent primary there.... he said that McCain's Straight Talk Express campaign bus should be renamed.... "We call it the Forked Tongue Express around here. He'll lie about anything."
Which should be the lesson of the current hoopla.
Thus far, it appears all the Times article about McCain and Iseman really accomplished was to galvanize the GOP conservatives to McCain's defense.... the Times is rabidly reviled by conservatives.... and clouded the bigger issue of McCain's ethics.
Since McCain's involvement in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal, he has carefully cultivated his anti-corruption, anti-special interests "Straight Talk" persona.
The Democratic National Committee sums up this latest peek behind that facade.... "John McCain's 'do as I say, not as I do' approach to ethics and lobbying reform can be called a lot of things. 'Straight Talk' isn't one of them."
Responding to the recent New York Times article on his ties to a particular lobbyist, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) denied meeting with broadcaster Lowell "Bud" Paxson or his lobbyist Vicki Iseman before sending two controversial letters to the FCC on Paxson's behalf while McCain was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Letters the FCC chairman called "highly unusual."
A statement issued by the McCain campaign Thursday said that he had not met with Paxson or Iseman on the matter.... "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay [the lobbying firm where Iseman is a partner] personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding."
Well.... "Paxson Contradicts McCain Campaign on Meetings." (WaPo)
It turns out... Paxson talked with McCain in his Washington office before the letters were sent and Iseman attended the meeting and most likely set it up.
Pshaw, was the reaction of McCain's attorney-to-political-polecats, Robert Bennett, ".... Now it appears he did speak to him [Paxson]. What is the difference?"
The difference?
If there is nothing to hide, why lie about it.
"Statements from McCain's office said Iseman met only with staff and indicated that a staff member was involved in drafting and sending the letter..... and, "Thursday's statement went to lengths to say why McCain could not have met with Paxson." Untruths.
At the time McCain wrote those letters, he had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson Communications and its law firm.
The second letter came a day after the company's jet ferried McCain to a fundraiser aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach attended by Paxson, arranged by Iseman's lobbying firm, and hosted by a cruise line her company represented.
Cozy.
We're reminded of a statement by the Republican Party chairman in McCain's home district before the recent primary there.... he said that McCain's Straight Talk Express campaign bus should be renamed.... "We call it the Forked Tongue Express around here. He'll lie about anything."
Which should be the lesson of the current hoopla.
Thus far, it appears all the Times article about McCain and Iseman really accomplished was to galvanize the GOP conservatives to McCain's defense.... the Times is rabidly reviled by conservatives.... and clouded the bigger issue of McCain's ethics.
Since McCain's involvement in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal, he has carefully cultivated his anti-corruption, anti-special interests "Straight Talk" persona.
The Democratic National Committee sums up this latest peek behind that facade.... "John McCain's 'do as I say, not as I do' approach to ethics and lobbying reform can be called a lot of things. 'Straight Talk' isn't one of them."
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