Historically Dirty Maverick

A new documentary about John McCain's involvement in the crash of the savings and loan industry is being released today.

The preview is out now.



The blame for the current crisis rests on familiar players. Besides McCain and his zeal for non-regulation of everything, Wendy and Phil Gramm bear a share of the responsibility for the current mess. Phil Gramm was a powerful senator who was deep in the pocket of UBS Bank. Wendy Gramm was the chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who made sure that the CFTC did not regulate credit default swaps or credit derivatives.

This is a short Q&A article on what credit derivatives are and why they are collapsing the world economy. Note this one:

Was everyone so clueless?
No. Concern about financial derivatives first surfaced in the late 1990s, and congressional Democrats launched a drive to bring them under federal oversight. The effort was beaten back by Republicans led by then­–Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who pushed through a law that explicitly exempted financial derivatives from federal regulation. By 2003, the pace of derivatives trading had exploded, leading Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful investors, to call derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Phil Gramm, in case you have forgotten, is McCain's top economic guru. He "resigned" from the McCain campaign after his "nation of whiners" crack, but there is no doubt that he is still intimately involved. That corrupt old bastard would be McCain's pick for Secretary of the Treasury, the same official now running around with a $700 billion limit on his credit card; does anyone seriously question that Gramm would use that money to benefit his banking friends and screw the American people?

John McCain is like George W. Bush in that both men only care about rich people. Neither one has shown any smidgen of concern about the middle class, let alone the poor, in any of their actions.

"Cake for the rich, death to the poor!"