McCain's McMortgage McCrisis McWoes

As a U.S. senator, Phil Gramm shepherded a law easing regulation of energy-commodity trading, and California experienced a sharp run-up in energy costs. Some of you may recall that California’s Democratic governor, Gray Davis, was scape-goated over this debacle and subsequently removed from office in a controversial recall election won by current Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Energy-trading giant, Enron, was blamed for the gouging and fraud and soon went down in a hail of subpoenas and indictments.
In 1999, Gramm lobbied successfully to have Congress revoke the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, removing the decades-old wall between commercial banking, which was heavily regulated, and investment banking, which was not. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not extend significant new regulation to investment banking. Some economists point to Gramm’s deregulatory efforts like these, along with poor oversight and lax enforcement, for not only the current crisis in the subprime mortgage industry, but for the cascading crises in other finance sectors.

And we must keep in mind, or rather, Obama and Biden must keep reminding us-

1. that Phil Gramm and the Republican party are responsible for the grave recession we find ourselves in;
2. that John McCain still relies on Gramm’s counsel and has hinted that he would appoint Gramm Secretary of the Treasury if he gets elected;
3. and that Phil Gramm said, as recently as July of this year, that America’s financial troubles are all in our minds. I believe he said it is a “mental recession,” and that we’re all a bunch of “whiners.”
   

As Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute told the Washington Post, “McCain is counting on people having very short memories and not connecting some pretty obvious dots here.”