McCain's sudden conversion to economic populism

[inanna]

Gag me with a spoon as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising "tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways?" Just how dumb do they think we are?

Seriously, 20 minutes of Google searches should be sufficient to convince all but the dimwits among us that McCain has been a master of the special interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown. Duh, he voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat. The two main bills accomplishing that, which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, chair of the Senate Banking Committee when he acted as chief sponsor of both pieces of legislation. The same Gramm that McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign.

<snip>

Barack Obama has been way ahead of McCain in grasping the severity of the problem and back in March offered a scorching criticism of the deregulation mania, in particular the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law that allowed the stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks to merge for the first time since the 1930s, ushering in this era of irresponsibility. But that was in the primaries, and now he has turned for advice to Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers who both served as treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration and talked the president into signing that wretched legislation.

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/16/EDKB12VBBP.DTL

[yourout]

1. It would be nice if someone would ask him why the person largely responsible for this mess is.....

the co-chair of his campaign and his senior economics advisor?

[On the Road]

2. Tougher Rules for Wall Street?

Didn't Palin just get finished talking about getting the government off the back of financial companies? Do they even know what they're saying?