John McCain on the Financial Crisis
September 20th, 2008 at 09:20am Mark Noonan
Just an excellent statement:
There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we’re living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
These quasi-public corporations lead our housing system down a path where quick profit was placed before sound finance. They institutionalized a system that rewarded forcing mortgages on people who couldn’t afford them, while turning around and selling those bad mortgages to the banks that are now going bankrupt. Using money and influence, they prevented reforms that would have curbed their power and limited their ability to damage our economy. And now, as ever, the American taxpayers are left to pay the price for Washington’s failure.
Two years ago, I called for reform of this corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress did nothing. The Administration did nothing. Senator Obama did nothing, and actually profited from this system of abuse and scandal. While Fannie and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of cards, Senator Obama was taking their money. He got more, in fact, than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them. And while Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent’s trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search.
This CEO, Mr. Johnson, walked off with tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses for services rendered to Fannie Mae, even after authorities discovered accounting improprieties that padded his compensation. Another CEO for Fannie Mae, Mr. Raines, has been advising Senator Obama on housing policy. This even after Fannie Mae was found to have committed quote “extensive financial fraud” under his leadership. Like Mr. Johnson, Mr. Raines walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
Senator Obama may be taking their advice and he may be taking their money, but in a McCain-Palin administration, there will be no seat for these people at the policy-making table. They won’t even get past the front gate at the White House.
My friends, this is the problem with Washington. People like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system.
We’ve heard a lot of words from Senator Obama over the course of this campaign. But maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems. The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was square in the middle of it.
As Matt and I detailed in Caucus of Corruption, there is this nexus of money and power in DC which confounds the efforts of the honest and hard working to build a better future. There is, indeed, plenty of blame to go around and there are GOPers who played a dishonorable role here, but the fundamental revolves around the way business is done on Washington, DC; and the business culture of DC is almost entirely the creation of the Democrats, who essentially ran the DC show for the better part of 60 years.
While I did (and do) oppose McCain’s campaign finance reform, he was on the right track with it - while Money shouts for the attention of Power, the quiet words of the People are drowned out. I know that Obama and his Democrats are continuing to advance the narrative that they are for the little guy and will kick Money out of the loop, the pragmatic facts of life are that Democrats set up the system where Money has to wait upon government and, in order to preserve and/or advance itself, Money is forced to play the money and power game of DC. Unless there is a fundamental shift in how things are done, the best we can hope for is a band-aid designed to do no more than get the nation past the next election cycle before everything goes to heck in a handbasket.
The problem with Obama - as evidenced by the very large amount of money he swiftly amassed from the very same interests at the center of the financial meltdown - is that he isn’t an agent of change and he can’t ever be as long as he’s a liberal Democrat. Over the years the confluence of money and politics has become very tight…and a lot of the people running banks into the ground are people who have been high up in Democratic politics, and these people are not about to allow Democrat Obama to mess up their lucrative game. In the end, only a McCain/Palin Administration gives us a shot at real change in the way DC does business.
Neither McCain nor Palin are enthralled to any particular pressure group. Both McCain and Palin seem to take delight in kicking in the doors of political consensus and allowing enough light to force the cockroaches to scatter. Imbued with a love of country which knows no bounds, connected with average Americans by grace of suffering, poverty and struggle in their own lives, McCain and Palin will batter down the walls of corruption and bring about real change - not in a century have we had a prospective President so keen to help the average American and so contemptuous of what Theordore Roosevelt termed the “malefactors of great wealth”. We can have real change - but only from someone who is entirely uninterested in whether or not some of his fellow politicians will have to lose office; that thing which is the only bad thing as far as Democrats are concerned.
Entry Filed under: Campaign 2008, Congress, Corruption, Democrats, Economy, Republicans
8 Comments
1. kmg | September 20th, 2008 at 10:20 am
“The total listed for Obama is $126,349 — a tiny fraction of the approximately $390 million his campaign has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The list shows McCain has received a total of $21,550 from Fannie and Freddie employees. The list includes donations of at least $200 from those who receive paychecks from Fannie and Freddie. It also includes donations from political action committees — pooled contributions from employees. Obama decided early in his presidential run not to accept PAC contributions, but the Center for Responsive Politics’ list includes all contributions for members of Congress dating back to 1989 — including Obama and McCain’s Senate campaigns.
“The New York Times has published a separate list looking at contributions from “directors, officers, and lobbyists for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” for the 2008 campaign cycle. That list — using figures from the Federal Election Commission — shows McCain receiving $169,000, while Obama received only $16,000.”
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/19/fact-check-did-obama-profit-from-fannie-and-freddie/
“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.” - John McCain
http://www.contingencies.org/septoct08/mccain.pdf
“The McCain campaign is clearly exaggerating wildly in attempting to depict Raines as a close adviser to Obama on “housing and mortgage policy.” If we are to believe Raines, he did have a couple of telephone conversations with someone in the Obama campaign. But that hardly makes him an adviser to the candidate himself — and certainly not in the way depicted in the McCain video release.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903604.html?hpid=topnews
2. kmg | September 20th, 2008 at 10:26 am
And if you want to talk about who’s advising whom:
Yesterday, Senator John McCain released a television commercial attacking Barack Obama for allegedly receiving advice on the economy from former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. From the stump, he has recently tried tying Senator Obama to Fannie Mae, as if there is some guilt in the association with Fannie Mae’s former executives.
It is an interesting card for Senator McCain to play, given that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, was paid by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac several hundred thousand dollars early in this decade to head up an organization to lobby in their behalf called The Homeownership Alliance. …
I worked in government relations for Fannie Mae for more than 20 years, leading the group for most of those years. When I see photographs of Sen. McCain’s staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me. Senator McCain’s attack on Senator Obama is a cheap shot, and hypocritical.
Sincerely,
William Maloni
Fannie Mae Senior Vice President for Government and Industry Relations (1983-2004)
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=7CBB865D-18FE-70B2-A80ACC7D03A8F14D
3. Aitch | September 20th, 2008 at 10:37 am
“there are GOPers who played a dishonorable role here”
No kidding. It was all set up so the Bush campaign could run on this in 2004.
“I have signed into law the American Dream Down Payment Act, which will help low-income Americans to afford the down payment and closing costs on their first home. I’m asking Congress to provide an annual $200 million for this program. That additional money would help an estimated 40,000 low-income families every year become first-time homeowners. I’m proposing that we make zero down payment loans available to first-time buyers whose mortgages are guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration. And this will help about 150,000 families buy homes in the first year alone.”
George W Bush, 3/27/2004
4. js | September 20th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
thats a low shot….low down payments did not cause the sub prime mortgage mess…and suggesting it is, is only boshophobia…or..in layments terms…mental midget mentality…
5. js | September 20th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
all the bs flies in the face of the truth…read mccains bill from 06…if it had passed this whole mess could have been averted…so it really proves that the “spin” on the truth is originating in the liberal rhetoric
6. yekepyt | September 20th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
When you are talking about McCain’s response to the financial crisis, which response are you referring to?
His first response, which was to set up a blue-ribbon panel like the 9/11 commission to study the problem and then report back?
Or his second response, which was to fire the Chairman of the SEC (McCain: “If I were President today, I would fire him). Never mind that the President does not have the authority to fire the Chair of the SEC, or that making a rash move like this would send the markets into immediate and further turmoil.
Or his third response, which was to scrap the other two and establish a long-term re-regulation without seeing where the chips fall after the short term patch-up of taxpayer-funded cash infusion (which he opposed for AIG originally but then flip-flopped to support)?
Or, should we wait a day or two to see if McCain is going to throw all three of his solutions away and come up with a new one to supersede them all?
The man is a doddering fool. Just in the past few days he’s confused the Army with the Alaska National Guard, picked a fight with Spain, confused the FEC and the SEC… what’s next? God help us if this man gets elected.
He’s a corrupt, double-speaking, rash, two-faced, petty liar whose response to any crisis seems to be “Ready, Fire, Aim.”
7. searp | September 20th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
The same day my opponent attacked me for being associated with a Fannie Mae guy I’ve talked to for maybe 5 minutes in my entire life — the same day he did that — the head of the lobbying shop at Fannie Mae turned around and said wait a minute — ‘When I see photographs of Senator McCain’s staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me.’ Folks, you can’t make this stuff up. So when you hear John McCain talk about taking on the ol’ boy network in Washington — know this, on the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.
Honor, duty, patriotism, money. Or did I get the order wrong?
8. Observer20 | September 21st, 2008 at 7:05 am
So…if he’s so pro-corruption, as many of you claim, then why did he try to introduce a bill that goes to the contrary? If he was just there to soak up their big bucks, why would he do that? Wouldn’t that be foolish? Or perhaps you all think he purposely introduced it knowing full well that it wouldn’t be voted through just so that he could maintain his maverick image (good grief)?
If Obama is so anti-corruption and not part of the good ol’ boys network, then why didn’t he do anything to try to counter this? Why did he vote against the bill? Shouldn’t he have voted for it if he’s so “bi-partisan”?
I don’t care who got more money from who, I’m interested in how they vote. The president could be getting funding from the Taliban for all I care so long as, through his real actions, he shows his intent to obliterate them.