McCain Follows Obama Down Socialist Road
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | October 8, 2008
The situation is now so bad that Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, tried to move to the left of the Democrat, Barack Obama, during Tuesday night’s debate…
It
is terrifying to see our financial system crumbling because of corruption on
Wall Street, aided and abetted by government policies of too much federal
spending, debt, and intervention in the economy. But it is also troubling to see
our economic system of free enterprise slipping away as the candidates of both
major political parties propose more federal intervention, spending and debt as
solutions to these problems. Our media have an obligation to inform the American
people that we are moving into a full-blown socialist economy.
At
this point, with the financial crisis continuing to grow, isn’t it apparent that
the “bailout” plan was in no real sense a “rescue,” as both the liberal and
conservative media were calling it?
On Glenn Beck’s CNN
show on October 6, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial page
at least had the integrity to admit he was just wrong. He said he is
“embarrassed” over endorsing the “rescue” plan. “I want to apologize,” he said.
“I drank the Kool-aid.” There are many more in the media who should feel
embarrassed and issue apologies, and I discussed them in several columns for Accuracy in Media.
On Fox News, for example, “conservative”
Fred Barnes called House conservatives “crazy” and “idiotic” for opposing the
plan. Now who looks like the idiot?
On CNBC, the plan was
considered so vital and important that correspondent Michelle Caruso-Cabrera led
a discussion of how to bypass Congress and the Constitution when the House
initially failed to approve it.
Rather than rescue anything, these
airheads have endorsed a socialist-style takeover of the financial sector, paid
for with more federal spending and debt. To make matters worse, they won’t label
it for what it is―socialism.
The situation is now so bad that Republican
presidential candidate, John McCain, tried to move to the left of the Democrat,
Barack Obama, during Tuesday night’s debate by proposing that he would “order
the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages
in America…” McCain didn’t explain where this authority would come from. But
this proposal, which is estimated to cost $300 billion, followed his statement
that “We obviously have to stop this spending spree that’s going on in
Washington.”
On top of this monumental gaffe, in a tragic but humorous
example of Washington doublespeak, the McCain campaign issued a statement
calling this socialist proposal the “American Homeownership Resurgence Plan.”
This debate performance followed McCain’s announcement that he would
“tap” people such as former Democratic vice-president Al Gore to work in his
administration on developing a new and much tougher U.N.-sponsored global
warming treaty. Gore is considered a menace among conservatives for falsifying
the causes and dangers of global warming in order to increase government control
over our lives. “I have great respect for Al Gore,” McCain said.
Once again, Barack Obama would agree.
On the Washington Wire blog of the
Wall Street Journal, the responses to the McCain “resurgence plan” on housing
were interesting and informative. They
included:
· McCain is sounding
more like Obama every day. This truly is a race to the
bottom.
· After bailing out the
Wall Street crooks, I’m bailing out the irresponsible and greedy speculators?
What has happened to freedom and accountability that made America
great?
· Oh, great, now even
McCain is a socialist! Is this part of the spending freeze proposal?? We have
lost our minds.
In a statement on the plan, issued after the debate, the
campaign claimed that the next president would already have the authority to buy
up these mortgages under the socialist-style “bailout” plan approved by
Congress. That is a matter of dispute. But the statement does admit, in its
final sentence, that “It may be necessary for Congress to raise the overall
borrowing limit.” That means more debt.
Another McCain proposal was to
recommend an increase from $100,000 to $250,000 for FDIC insurance on deposits.
This, too, was supported by Obama, and it was incorporated in the “bailout”
bill. But as financial analyst and adviser Peter Schiff has noted, this proposal
was not coupled with extra money budgeted to fund the increased taxpayer
liability. “Only in Washington would a bill pass which simultaneously makes
banks more likely to fail while increasing taxpayer exposure when they do!” he
commented.
McCain also proposed that “we use the exchange stability fund
that the Treasury has available―$250 billion―to shore up these [U.S. financial]
institutions.” But the Exchange Stabilization Fund was never intended for such a
purpose. It was established to defend the value of the U.S. dollar. However, it
was used during the Clinton Administration, without a vote of approval by
Congress, to prop up the Mexican peso. This U.S. taxpayer-backed bailout scheme
was arranged by then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who had been co-chairman
of Goldman Sachs, which was heavily invested in Mexico.
This is the same
Goldman Sachs which spawned the Bush Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson,
who sparked the current financial panic and quickly offered a three-page
proposal to make himself a financial dictator of the United States in order to
solve it.
Now that he has assumed this power (after the three-page
proposal mushroomed into more than 400 pages, complete with pork barrel spending
to get the necessary votes for passage), Paulson has named a former Goldman
Sachs banker, Neel Kashkari, to run the Treasury Department’s program to buy
troubled assets. Kashkari is the new Treasury Department Assistant Secretary and
will run the new “Office of Financial Stability.”
This appointment has
drawn fire from Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, on the right,
and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, on the left. “His appointment seems
like appointing a fox to protect the hen house,” noted Kucinich.
National
security expert and former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney warned two years ago
about Bush’s appointment of Paulson, calling him the “Armand
Hammer of China,” a reference to the businessman who built up the power of
the old Soviet Union in exchange for favors from the communists. At a time when
Paulson was up for Senate confirmation, Gaffney asked, “Will any of his Senate
interlocutors even bother to explore the nominee’s troubling fifteen-year ties
to Communist China and the potential for serious conflicts of interest they
pose, with national security as well as economic implications for our country?”
The answer was no. Paulson’s nomination was confirmed by unanimous voice vote.
As we noted in a column, Paulson’s plan,
which was passed by Congress, includes a provision to enable him to bail out
banks in China and other countries holding U.S. financial assets. This is one of
many conflicts of interest involving Paulson and China.
In a
little-noticed dispatch from Beijing on September 25, the Reuters news agency
reported that Chinese regulators had told its domestic banks “to stop interbank
lending to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the
financial crisis…”
What did Paulson know and when did he know it?
Congressional “leaders,” as well as Bush, McCain, and Obama, seem to have no
interest in getting to the bottom of this.
In terms of the media,
where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins when we really need them?
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at
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