Know why McCain wants to distance himself from former Senator Phil Gramm? It's not because of Gramm's obnoxious remarks calling Americans "a nation of whiners" who are in "a mental recession." Those remarks were so ascerbic that they may've been made just to give McCain an excuse to distance himself from Gramm. This issue is a lot deeper than it looks on the surface.
When Gramm was a Senator he was Chairman of the Banking Committee. He pushed through the legislation known as the "Enron Loophole." This loophole allowed US investment banks to bypass Federal regulations governing futures trading, and is the reason why investment banks were able to falsely inflate the prices of oil, wheat, corn and other commodities through massive futures trading, causing your costs of gas, heating oil and food to go through the roof.
Gramm also created the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, which got rid of the laws that seperate banking, insurance and brokerage activities in America. The Gramm Act was touted as a new way to protect consumer privacy, but the real meat on the Act's bones was banking deregulation. Essentially, this Act did away with laws written after the Great Depression to protect us from another Wall Street/Banking Industry collapse. That's right, Gramm stripped the system of it's safe guards nine years ago, and guess what? The value of the dollar has nose-dived, four major economic institutions have failed, Wall Street is unstable, and we are in a worsening recession.
Notably, the US investment banks that gained the most from the Enron Loophole and from the Gramm Act contributed more than a million dollars to Gramm's campaign.
Currently Gramm is Vice Chairman of UBS, the Swiss Bank that came up with the idea of "death bonds." Worse, though, UBS is involved in a scam where they sold auction rate securities to American customers. Auction rate securities are supposed to be as safe as cash, but the way UBS did it, the fees garnished by their in-house investment bankers were intentionally higher than the return on the securities, ripping off their American customers. The Massachusetts Attorney General has already filed charges against UBS, and private brokers world-wide have dropped UBS stock. UBS is forecasted to lose 82.91% of it's value in 2008. We are talking about the corporate bank where Gramm is Vice Chairman. Looking at his track record there and at the havoc he has wrought on the US economy through the Senate Banking Committee, it's clear that either Gramm is a criminal or grossly incompetent.
Now McCain wants nothing to do with Gramm, wants us to forget Gramm has been a key player on McCain's team. Gramm was McCain's campaign CO-CHAIR and LEADING ECONOMIC ADVISOR. Previously, McCain had said that he planned to appoint Gramm as SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.
With Gramm as McCain's leading economic advisor, now you know why economists and analysts say that McCain's economic policy plans are untenable.
McCain's Power Outage
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Announcer: John McCain stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming, five years ago. Today, he has a realistic plan that will curb greenhouse gas emissions. A plan that will help grow our economy and protect our environment. Reform. Prosperity. Peace. John McCain.
John McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.
McCain released a new ad this week in which the narrator says that "McCain stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming … five years ago." That's true. McCain and Lieberman first introduced their climate change bill in 2003, and it didn't go over well with McCain's fellow Republicans.
Yet the imagery in the ad of solar technology and windmills might lead viewers to draw some false conclusions about McCain's energy policy. McCain has been less than enthusiastic about the development of wind and solar energy. The Politico points out that McCain's favored source of alternative energy, nuclear reactors, did not make the cut for visuals – there are no shots of a cooling tower in the ad. As we noted above, his own climate change bill provides billions to help nuclear power. Yet, while McCain has mentioned solar and wind on the campaign trail, the energy plan on his Web site leaves them out, while specifying his support for nuclear power. Here's what he told Grist, an environmental Web site, when he was asked about subsidies for the wind and solar sectors in an interview last October:
McCain, Oct. 1, 2007, interview: I'm not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the '70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time.
One last point on the ad: At the exact moment the ad's narrator says that McCain "stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming, five years ago," a newspaper headline fills the bottom of the screen: "McCain Climate Views Clash with GOP," it reads. But the UPI story is from just three weeks ago, not five years.
Gas Tax
Back in April, McCain proposed lifting the federal gas tax for the summer to give drivers a break from skyrocketing prices. Then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton soon followed suit. But as we said then, it's unlikely that the "gas-tax holiday" would mean lower prices at the pump. Because the supply of oil will still be tight, increased demand is likely to drive the cost right back up – except that the oil companies will get to keep the 18.4 cents per gallon that would normally go to the federal Highway Trust Fund.
In early May, more than 300 economists, including several Nobel laureates, issued a statement opposing the proposal because, among other reasons, "research shows that waiving the gas tax would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers."
The view of hundreds (at least) of economists from across the political spectrum hasn't stopped McCain from promising voters that "[i]n the short term, I can give you some relief" by repealing the tax.
Republished with permission from factcheck.org.
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