McCain walks tightrope on AIG bailout

"When I say corruption, many of these executives, these Wall Street CEOs, said everything's fine. As you know, up until a short time ago, everything's fine. Not to worry."

Does that mean John McCain was corrupt when he was saying everything was fine until just recently?

Dioes he remeber that he is part of Congress? That HE was asleep at the switch too?

"And the Congress, particularly as far as Fannie and Freddie are concerned, went right along with it and the special interests and the lobbyists took over."

You mean Lobbyists like Arthr Culvahouse, the man who you selected to so thoroughly investigate your VP candidates? You mean like Rick Davis who is your campaign manager? You mean like your economic advisor Aquiles Suarez? Your Congressional liason John Green? Your Finance Co-chairman Frederic V. Malek?

Are those the lobbyists who took over? It sure looks like they took over your campaign.

So is that a "yes" or a "no" Senator?

"McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies." - msnbc.com

McSame - now trying to run from his record is saying that there needs to be regulation?

What a hypocritical do-nothing/SAY ANYTHING self-admitted economic moron.

Well, I agree with you these are hard-working Americans.

What political garbage. Everyone knew what he meant about fundamentals and it sure as hell wasn't the American worker. Lie.

Start the chant: four more years, four more years, four more years.

A tightrope !! What is it, a foot off the ground !! Senator McCain listens to Senator Obama's positions, then changes a few articles and prepositions and releases them, as his own. Now, that is what i call a man, without an idea, let alone, a clue !! He will be a better Senator for Arizona, after this election. He will realize, what a privilege it is to serve in our Senate and represent all of the people of our nation, not just Corps !!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE AND WHOLE. NOW.

"When I say corruption, many of these executives, these Wall Street CEOs, said everything's fine. As you know, up until a short time ago, everything's fine. Not to worry."
-
Hey Mr. McDeregulator; What happened to Regan's creed of 'turst bu verify'??
You helped create the very climate that lead to this disaster. Guess you didn't learn from the S&L debacle, Enron, and all the rest.
How long before Palin tosses you off the ticket?

Did anyone else catch the incongruous, energetic affirmative nod of the Cynthia McCain head in the background when she (making $6M/yr. on a Phoenix beer distributorship) heard him denounce the "greed" of certain players in the financial market? I think she thought he was calling more players into the market.

"But fully embrace the AIG bailout and you appear to be contradicting your words of just days before."

And why would that be a problem for McCain? He has made it a habit to take both sides of any issue whenever possible. Heck, the ink is hardly dry on his last quote that "the economy is fundamentally sound".

This two-faced approach is actually a pretty clever strategy for McCain. By saying he supports both sides of every argument, he's only lying to us half of the time. That makes him look like George Effing Washington compared to Bush/Cheney.

He's right, he tried to get reform passed many times thru the years that would have kept us from being in the mess we're in now. Biden was hard set against any changes. You can't force a Democratic Congress to look into something like Fannie/Freddie that they're knee deep in taking money from.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31264_Obama_Got_$126K_from_Fannie_and_Freddie#rss

Bottom line is this-- McCain has sponsored legislation that if enacted, would have addressed issues like this ( leveraged investments and short term gains)..

Obama has been receiving large contribution from Fannie and Freddie...

You make the choice-
McCain with a record of fighting against the root causes of the meltdown…
or
Obama being beholden to one of the key players, that have driven much of the meltdown..

"Posted by: KNEE DEEP>time for a real change | September 17, 2008 12:31 PM"

... and for HOW MANY years was McCain trying so hard to get reform to get passed, only to be rebuffed by a Democratic Congress? Up to 2006, it was a REPUBLICAN Congress, so he had plenty of opportunity before then.....

I'm not a financial markets expert, but the gist I got from NPR yesterday was that shaky loans were hidden in shell entities. That sounds like an accounting regulation problem. Can anyone enlighten me?

... and for HOW MANY years was McCain trying so hard to get reform to get passed, only to be rebuffed by a Democratic Congress? Up to 2006, it was a REPUBLICAN Congress, so he had plenty of opportunity before then.....

Posted by: Op109 | September 17, 2008 1:17 PM

Good point-Obviously McCains eforts were not enough!

A better question is how much influence over the messiah has been purchased by Freddie and Fannie?

Given that there has been NO reform attempted by the "Change you can believe in guy" - why shoudl we listen to his opinion on the subject?

McCain clearly is an expert on bank failures. After all his son was a Director of a Bank that just failed.

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/bbdp/silver-state-bank-is-latest-to-fail/163073

Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people and, as it turns out, some people who couldn't afford them.

Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington Democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions. The Clinton administration's White House Budget Director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected $50 million. Jamie Gorelick — Clinton Justice Department official — worked for Fannie and took home $26 million. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama's VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job.

Now remember: Obama's ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain — Sen. Obama — was at the head of the line when the piggies lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.

Sen. Barack Obama: No. 2 on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the Senate.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=306450721119747

Wrong, 'Reality Bites'
Fannie and Freddie were in existence long before Clinton; and they were generally successful and important to many of us being able to buy homes. Only in recent years did they get lax on loan standards; that and the real estate bubble, and asleep at the switch government oversight did them in. So don't be blaming the 3 people you name. That's just wrong.

Rupert, yes, they have been around for longer, but the current problems that we are seeing started in the Clinton Admin.

There was a housing bubble that collapsed during the Clinton Adminstration and that's when they began to start giving out loans that people couldn't afford to try and prop things back up. This is also when the BIG CEO PAY started, and along with it came greed.

The letter I posted was a portion of something from FOX, this was the beginning>

Lehman Brothers collapse is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago.

Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.

A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 is Sen. Barack Obama.

Now remember, he's only been in the Senate four years, but he still managed to grab the No. 2 spot ahead of John Kerry — decades in the Senate — and Chris Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

SOMETHING ELSE VERY FEW PEOPLE ARE BEING TOLD TODAY, is that in 2005 McCain (after years of wanting reform) tried to get support for Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act. You can read it, and see he was on top of this years ago, but DEMOCRATS VOTED 100% against it and it failed.

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2083931/posts
***********************************
As you know by now Obama is SECOND in order of the biggest recipients of political money from Frannie/Freddie in the last ten years (out of over 300 politicians), after only four years in Washington.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31264_Obama_Got_$126K_from_Fannie_and_Freddie#rss

Democrats blocked Bush’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Reforms.
''These two entities -Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the
Financial Services Committee.
http://strategicthought-charles77.blogspot.com/2008/09/democrats-blocked-bushs-fannie-mae-and.html

AIG is using corrupt doctors to put people on SSI so they don't have to cover injuries of patients that they covered. I know orf two patients that this happened to.