"Abuses"? Get real...

[jducoeur]

You know, I'm really not sure McCain even understands why the current crisis happened. That makes me deeply skeptical that he'll be capable of doing anything about the next one.

I mean, what are McCain and Palin blaming? "Mismanagement and abuses"? Sure, there was a bit of that, but it was, frankly, mostly at the fringes. "Greed"? This is Wall Street -- if you expect Greed to *ever* cease to be the primary motivating factor, you're not even living on the same planet as reality.

Really, the primary cause of the disaster was collective deliberate blindness. I mean, most of the people who caused this problem were not only doing what they thought was right -- they were doing what they thought was *necessary*. In business, your job is to make money for your stockholders, and that's what they were, by and large, doing until a year ago. Was it foolish? Were they making money today by ignoring the fact that they were building a house of cards for tomorrow? Sure -- but when everyone around you, including the government, is being willfully blind, it's very easy to put on a blindfold yourself and pretend it's not there, that the small number of Cassandras are wrong and your peers are right.

The heart of the problem is that the people whose job it was to bring things down to sanity were afraid to do so. It was convenient and easy to do nothing -- to believe that the business people knew what they were doing. That's part of the conservative message, after all: Trust Us, We're Businesspeople. It wasn't about corruption: it was about taking the politically easy route, which was to follow the herd.

And do you really believe McCain would have done *anything* different? All the evidence says otherwise. I mean, first of all, he said *nothing* against any of this when it was building. Hell, he's scarcely saying anything about it now: putting this much emphasis on "greed" and "abuse" just misses the point that this was caused mostly by fairly well-meaning people collectively being stupid. Furthermore, his supposedly maverick reputation has shown itself to be paper-thin over the past year: in general, he follows the party line, with notable but rare exceptions.

(Yes, there are times when his principles get riled and he stands out -- but none of those have *ever* been economic in nature. Everything indicates that he neither knows nor cares much about economics: he just takes the Republican Party line of assuming that the business people know what they are doing, and Washington must stay out of their way at all times.)

So get real: is he really the man who is going to stand up to business and say, "Stop that, and stop it NOW" the next time things look all rosy and it's easy to ignore the looming crisis? Or is he simply going to grab the blindfold that they offer him, and pretend that everything will be fine? Everything he's saying indicates that he wouldn't even put a stop to the *last* problem, much less the next one...

Comments

[dsrtao]

McCain may or may not know what's going on. That has zilch to do with what he's going to sell to his base as what happened and why.

(McCain should have disappeared from American politics after Keating.)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I was also going to bring up Keating. McCain's only major connection to economic policy is participation in an infamous scandal and economic crisis from a few decades back, where the investigating committee specifically called him out for "poor judgment".

[jducoeur]

Yep. But the American public, broadly speaking, has a short memory.

To be fair, this works both ways -- Biden has also been rehabilitated by time, after his *utterly* idiotic "plagiarism" scandal a couple of decades ago. Neither of the elder Senators in the race has consistently covered himself in glory...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

There's also the fact that one of McCain's main economic advisors*, Phil Gramm, is, more than any other single elected official, responsible for the current mess (as if being responsible for Enron wasn't enough.) He spearheaded the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act) repealing much of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000), which together led directly to the problems of the past year. Unless they actually repudiate any of the principles in those laws, it's much safer to assume that his administration would continue to follow similar policies.

I got to hear his and Obama's economic advisors on Diane Rehm yesterday morning (worth checking out if the audio or transcript is available), and almost the entirety of the McCain guy's position was "this will require bipartisan solutions, and McCain is Mr. Bipartisan," plus denying that they've had no disagreements with the Bush Administration's handling of the economy while failing to actually cite any.

*Gramm is now an "unofficial" advisor since making embarrassing gaffes, but he's still on the campaign trail with McCain, and there's been no indication that his "resignation" produced any change in the economic policy advice he wrote for them.