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This video by Corey Ogilvie explains why Occupy Wall Street started.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President 

Tricky auto loans didn’t cause the financial meltdown on Wall Street. Unscrupulous payday lenders didn’t cost taxpayers a $700 billion “troubled asset” bailout. 

So fussing about whether U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s financial reform legislation contains an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency is like worrying about whether you’ll lose your tool shed as a conflagration consumes your home. 

Sure, shielding consumer borrowers would be nice. But safeguarding the entire economy from another collapse is essential. 

Preserving the economy requires limiting, regulating and exposing derivative trading.  That’s because derivatives – those credit default swaps – took down Wall Street. 

Neither the House of Representatives’ version of financial reform nor Dodd’s proposal adequately deals with derivatives. In fact, the language for derivative regulation isn’t even complete in Dodd’s bill. That is to say, it’s unfinished two years after Bear Stearns toppled onto Wall Street, triggering domino disasters at Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, and warnings from regulators and politicians of a financial doomsday if taxpayers didn’t hand over their hard-earned cash to save financial institutions accustomed to bonus payments in the billions.   

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Wall Street, derivatives were designed to make investing safer. Instead, in the hands of speculators, they became a form of betting that nearly destroyed the financial world. 

Conservatives have repeatedly tried to blame the financial collapse on homeowners defaulting on mortgages. That’s ridiculous. That’s blaming the victim of a crime. Wall Street committed the crime. It went like this: Financial wizards on Wall Street created “securities” out of mortgages. They bought a bunch of mortgages, then sold what were supposed to be high yield bonds based on the future income from the mortgage payments. These were called Mortgage Backed Securities. That worked fine as long as the mortgages were solid – in the sense that the homeowner had income and assets sufficient to make the monthly mortgage payments. In the good old days, when banks didn’t sell off mortgages to Wall Street, they had a vested interest in accurately determining whether the applicant really could pay. So they required proof of income and assets. 

But as these Mortgage Backed Securities became overwhelmingly popular investments, and pressure increased to produce more and more mortgages to create these securities, the standards for investigating mortgage applicants slipped. That’s how no-income, no-asset verification loans – known as a liar’s loans – came to be. It wasn’t necessarily the applicant who was lying. Frequently it was the mortgage broker, who exaggerated income numbers to give loans to unqualified applicants so that the broker could reap a big commission for producing a new mortgage. Brokers and banks didn’t care if the loans were so dicey that applicants weren’t able to make even the first month’s payment because the brokers and banks didn’t keep them. They quickly sold them to those Wall Street wizards who were making “securities” out of them. 

Investors could buy what Wall Street calls derivatives — credit default swaps — to “insure” the “securities.” So, for example, if an investor began to feel a little queasy about his “security” paying off because it might be filled with liar loans, then the investor could “insure” it. For an annual premium of a small percent of the face value of the security, the investor got a credit default swap — assurance of payment in full in case of default.   

Unlike insurance, however, derivatives like credit default swaps aren’t regulated. So the “insurance company,” like AIG or a bank or a hedge fund needn’t bother keeping collateral on hand to pay its contractual obligations should a tornado of defaults or a hurricane named Bear Stearns occur. Credit default swap issuers are like lotteries collecting bets but not reserving money to pay winners. 

The derivative market differs from the legitimate insurance market in another important way. The derivative market allows speculators to purchase insurance on securities they don’t own. These are called naked credit default swaps. NPR’s Planet Money reporters explained it like this: it’s like buying insurance on your neighbor’s house. The buyer of that policy has a vested interest in your home burning down. And the more “derivative insurance” speculators buy, the greater the interest in your home’s demise. 

Many financial analysts believe derivative buyers have used naked credit default swaps in deliberate campaigns of destruction — like, for example, to take down Lehman Brothers or the country of Greece. 

If you tried to buy real insurance on your neighbor’s car or house, the broker would turn you away when you couldn’t prove ownership. That’s because states regulate real insurance. And those insurance watchdogs see the inherent problem with speculators placing bets that will pay off if catastrophe befalls the real asset owner. That would, of course, encourage arson. 

If derivatives like credit default swaps were traded on public exchanges, investors could at least see orchestrated efforts to take down a firm. But derivatives are traded behind closed doors, in secret deals between speculators and unregulated “insurers” that Wall Street calls “over the counter” but which should really be called “under the table.” AIG provided $440 billion worth of this “insurance” without any regulator knowing, without sufficient collateral to back up those deals, and without anyone questioning why the buyer needed insurance on something he didn’t own. 

The secrecy also enabled Goldman Sachs to sell subprime mortgage backed securities to investors with a straight face, and then turn around and buy credit default swaps that bet those securities would fail – and thus pay Goldman big bucks. Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers detailed this duplicitous scheme by Goldman in a story last fall entitled, “How Goldman Sachs secretly bet on the housing crash.”

Goldman made out, as its name says, like gold, in this dealing. Goldman announced record earnings during 2009 and distributed  $16 billion in year end bonuses, enough to pay each of its 32,500 workers $498,000. That accomplishment, of course, was aided and abetted by $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid given to Goldman. It also helped that AIG paid off Goldman bets dollar for dollar – for a total of $12.9 billion from the $180 billion taxpayers gave to rescue AIG. 

In the mean time, the individuals and agencies that Goldman sold those crappy mortgage backed securities to, well, they’re not so golden. For example, California’s public employees’ retirement system, called CALPERS, bought $64.4 million in mortgage-backed securities from Goldman on March 1, 2007, Gordon noted in his story for McClatchy. A little more than two years later, Gordon wrote, they were worth $16.6 million – only 25 percent of their original value. Goldman, by contrast, banked on such losses and won big. It earned $13.4 billion last year. 

Goldman distributed those big bonuses while Main Street continued to reel from the effects of the Wall Street melt down. The financial collapse reverberated through the economy, causing high unemployment – which meant, of course, that many mortgage holders who had legitimately qualified under old stringent bank rules could no longer make their payments. Now they’re unemployed and homeless – while those wizards at Goldman are sipping champagne on those bonuses. Meanwhile, Gordon showed in his story, Goldman is aggressively seizing the homes of delinquent mortgage holders. 

Yet, Congress has failed to act. This is at the same time that European Union officials are considering restricting the trade of derivatives linked to government debt – like those believed to have worsened the economic crisis in Greece. 

Wall Streeters who get millions in bonuses to know better are still trading in derivatives. Nothing is preventing another financial collapse, another day when Wall Street comes crying to Washington for a new $700 billion troubled asset bailout.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Last week, when President Obama was asked about the $9 million bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, he described Blankfein as a savvy businessman, adding that Americans don’t begrudge people being rewarded for success. While the White House later qualified Obama’s comment about Blankfein and his fellow bank executives, it’s worth examining more closely some of the ways in which Blankfein and the Goldman gang were “savvy.”

Perhaps the Goldman gang’s best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman’s concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.

In fact, Goldman actually recognized that many of these loans would go bad. So they went to the insurance giant AIG and got them to issue credit default swaps against many of the securities it had created. In effect they were betting that their own securities were garbage. Now that is savvy. (It says something else about the highly paid executives at AIG.)

Goldman doesn’t just confine its savvy to the US economy; it shares it with the rest of the world as well. According to the New York Times it worked closely with the Greek government over the last decade to help it conceal its budget deficit. The trick was to construct complex financial arrangements that appeared on the books as “swaps,” even though they were in fact loans. Greece was adding billions of dollars to its debt, and thanks to the ingenuity of the Goldman crew, no one knew about it until now.

But Goldman’s greatest triumph was to get the government to come to its rescue when the financial sector was melting down in the fall of 2008 as the housing bubble that they had helped to fuel began to collapse. The treasury secretary and former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson rushed to Congress and demanded $700 billion for the banks, no questions asked. He dragged along Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke for support, along with Timothy Geithner, then the important head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now President Obama’s treasury secretary.

This triumvirate somehow managed to convince Congress that we would have a second Great Depression if it didn’t cough up the money immediately with no conditions. At that point Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and most of the other major banks were staring at bankruptcy. While this cascade of bank failures would have been bad news for the economy, there was no plausible scenario in which it would have led to a second Great Depression.

There was also no reason that Congress could not have put conditions on its money. For example, Congress could have dictated that as a condition of getting the money that bankers would get the same sort of paychecks as other workers, that they would get out of highly speculative activity, that the largest banks would be downsized and that the principle would be written down on bad mortgages. At that point, Congress could have told the bank honchos that they had to run around Wall Street naked with their underpants on their head. The bankers had no choice; their banks would crash and burn without government support.

But the savvy Mr. Blankfein and the other bankers got the money no questions asked. In fact, Goldman even got the government to pick up the bankrupt AIG’s debts. Thanks to the government’s intervention, Goldman got paid every penny on its bets with AIG. This came to $13 billion, enough money to pay for 4 million kid-years of health care under the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

No one should doubt that Blankfein is a very savvy banker. Without his ingenuity Goldman Sachs would likely be out of business, its component divisions being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Instead it is making record profits and paying out record bonuses.

But unlike the successful ballplayers to whom President Obama compared Blankfein, Goldman’s success is inherently parasitic. It comes at the expense of taxpayers and the productive economy. President Obama must decide whether he stands with the Wall Street banks or whether he stands with the workers and businesses who actually produce wealth.

            ***

Dean Baker is author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy,” PoliPoint Press, LLC. This piece was first published in The Guardian and on  Huffington Post.

Leo W. Gerard

 
By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Can’t buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can’t buy me love
No, no, no, no

      From the 1964 Lennon/McCartney song, “Can’t Buy Me Love”

 Maybe you can’t buy love, but you can buy a job.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it with the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. And the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February created jobs to relieve what is now 10.2 percent unemployment.

Both came at the cost of taxpayer dollars. Now, as labor and business leaders, economists and politicians gather Dec. 3 for President Obama’s Jobs Summit, some are calling for a second stimulus. These include Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. He says  the initial stimulus was too small and insufficiently focused on jobs. 

Krugman recommends instituting a reduced version of FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), offering public-service employment, the kind that left solid WPA bridges, bus shelters and other monuments that serve citizens to this day across this country. At a cost of $40 billion a year for three years, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates this would create a million jobs. Krugman also endorses the EPI’s recommendation of tax credits for employers who add jobs. 

A second stimulus is completely reasonable at a time when there are six unemployed Americans for every job opening and when it takes six months on average for an unemployed worker to find a job, the longest since the Great Depression. But the Obama administration already has sent out signals that it doesn’t want Jobs Summit solutions to worsen the federal deficit.

Fine. There are ways to create jobs that don’t have to be bought. One is to enforce and strengthen trade policy.

Chicken Littles all over this country ran around screaming, “A trade war is coming! A trade war is coming!” in September when President Obama enforced trade law by imposing tariffs on Chinese tires being dumped in this country. That flood of Chinese tires had cost 5,000 American workers their jobs.

The Chicken Littles, always wrong, were mistaken about a trade war. China never engaged in one. And now, Cooper Tire has announced a $10 million expansion of its Findlay plant, creating 100 new jobs, and tire factories across the country have increased hours.

By contrast, a paper company, NewPage, filed a trade case in 2006 seeking protection against Chinese and Indonesian dumping of coated paper, the heavy kind used in brochures and annual reports. The Commerce Department found egregious dumping, but later the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) refused to impose sanctions because it decided the U.S. industry hadn’t been injured.

Now, three years later, the United Steelworkers union has joined NewPage and two other paper companies in filing for another trade case regarding coated paper. Perhaps since 7,000 U.S. paper workers have lost their jobs, the ITC will see injury to the American industry.

But here’s the thing: Why do American workers and industries have to suffer? Our trade laws should be strong enough to prevent that injury in the first place. And that doesn’t cost a dime.

Another obvious way to create good, family-supporting jobs that don’t have to be bought is to develop an industrial strategy for this country. The idea of a strategy is to design a way to rebuild manufacturing as a base of the U.S. economy.

America cannot depend on housing or high tech or financial bubbles. These false financial mechanisms have led to nothing but heartache, recession and job loss. A strong economy is based on taking raw materials, adding creativity, energy, and work to construct products – like steel and tires and glass. Those products have real value and can be sold to make real wealth. They are not risky bets on the market like credit default swaps.

We need to place our faith in our own ingenuity and industry as a country, our ability to research and develop creative new products and manufacture them here, at home. For the love of country, that’s what we can buy.  And should.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

AIG Chairman Edward M. Liddy gets the Creep of the Week award for his stunning, overwhelming, dumbfounding display of cluelessness.

Liddy not only awarded $165 million in bonuses to the very AIG employees whose risky speculation in credit default swaps bankrupted the once-great insurance giant, forcing it to beg for $170 billion in taxpayer bailouts, he then claimed he was a helpless victim of retention bonus contracts written before he took over in September. Here’s exactly what he said: “Quite frankly, AIG’s hands are tied.”

No other contender for this week’s Creep prize awarded by the USW sunk close to those depths of obtuseness. And in so many diverse areas! Let’s count the ways:

First, there’s Liddy’s claim that he just can’t squirm out of contracts. Boy, he’d be the first CEO on God’s green earth to be too feeble to break a contract. Think about it: Congress insisted that the Big Three auto companies crack open their contracts with the United Auto Workers to qualify for federal bailout money. Union contracts at all sorts of companies across this country have been broken, bent, re-opened and renegotiated by cooperative labor organizations willing to accept a variety of cuts to preserve employment during an economic crisis caused by the likes of, well, let’s face it, reckless speculators at AIG! But, somehow, Liddy couldn’t find a way to break, bend, re-open or renegotiate contracts with the white collar workers who caused the mess taxpayers are both suffering and cleaning up.

Second, there’s Liddy’s claim that he had to honor the bonus contracts or he’d be sued by his employees. With a straight face, Liddy asserted that the employees in AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary who neglected to account for the possibility of a decline in real estate prices would actually list their names on court documents contending they deserved extra money after bankrupting the company. If Liddy thinks there’s a jury in America that would buy that argument and award the bonuses, I’ve got some credit default swaps I’d like to sell him. It’s clear, in fact, even Liddy doesn’t buy the argument since he’s declined to publicly release the names, though he has given a great deal of information – under duress – to New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo who is working on a lawsuit to recover the bonuses for taxpayers.

Third, there’s Liddy’s failure to understand these simple facts: people who caused a company’s demise don’t get bonuses and neither do employees of companies getting bailouts with federal tax dollars. The average AIG bonus payment was $395,000 – though 51 employees got more than $1 million and the winner of the fattest bonus got $6.4 million. Liddy told Congress he has asked some of the 418 recipients to return half of their bumps. If all 418 complied, the average would decline to a mere $197,500. That may be chump change to a Wall Streeter, but it is a life-saving sum to a middle class worker who has lost his job or can’t pay his mortgage because of Wall Street’s greed and  recklessness. In addition, there’s an important reciprocal issue Liddy failed to understand: the fury he has provoked by paying those bonuses has made the middle class even less willing to invest their tax dollars in any future bailouts that Congress may claim AIG or Wall Street banks desperately need.

Fourth, there’s Liddy’s ability to treat with reverence those who caused the financial meltdown while regarding with disdain those who suffer as a result of it. It was Liddy’s contention that his white collar workers were special. He had to give them the bumps, or they would abandon AIG, refusing to clean up the mess they’d made. That didn’t apply to auto workers, though. No one cared what happened to them. They could be furloughed as a result of Wall Street’s misbehavior — and pay taxes to clean it up as their bonus. But what’s worse is the level of continued boldfaced, outright deception from Liddy and his like. The bumps were crucial for retention, he said, right? Wrong. Cuomo discovered that 11 big time bonus beneficiaries – those who got $1 million or more – had already left AIG.

Fifth, Liddy acted as if the American people didn’t already own 80 percent of his company. Earlier this month, after AIG reported a $61.7 billion quarterly loss, the largest in corporate history, the federal government promised to help prop it up by giving it another $30 billion in taxpayer dollars. The solution here is simple, as the Washington Post pointed out in a story last week. If the feds simply insist on a 100 percent share of the company, which, frankly, the American people deserve for that kind of investment, the bonuses stop.

In addition to Creep of the Week, Liddy gets a special bonus award: Clueless of the Week.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

In 1941, car manufacturer Willys-Overland demonstrated the strength and sturdiness of its new Army scout vehicle – the Jeep — to Congress by driving it up the U.S. Capitol steps.

Invented and manufactured in the USA, the Jeep would become an icon of American ingenuity, durability and mechanical ability. Soldiers loved the lithe little vehicle for its uncanny capacity to go anywhere. The New York Museum of Modern Art would exhibit it in 2002 and describe it as a masterpiece of functional design. Now it’s 68 and constructed by United Auto Workers for Chrysler in Toledo, Ohio.

Disregarding Jeep’s help in securing this country against fascists, conservatives like former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are calling for its execution. Romney and his conservative compatriots want Congress to deny Chrysler, GM and Ford federal loans so that the Big Three go bankrupt. Using false wage information, these conservatives have persuaded the public that auto workers are overpaid. That has resulted in polls showing 61 percent of Americans oppose aid to the Big Three. And now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reed is saying he fears he can’t muster the votes necessary for a loan.

Congress cannot let the Jeep die in bankruptcy. Congress must not fail the U.S. auto industry. Doing so would be abandoning the core of the American economy – manufacturing. America is not built on Wall Street’s credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.  Its wealth and culture are built on and built by middle class workers who construct actual products like steel beams, tires and Jeeps, who operate and repair machines that pull oil and coal out of the ground, who log trees and man the mills that convert them into paper.

Just after the end of World War II, when the Jeep first became a civilian vehicle, 35 percent of workers belonged to labor unions. That’s significant because union members earn 30 percent higher wages than non-union workers and are 59 percent more likely to have health insurance. Those better wages and benefits helped create the great middle class in America. Workers earned enough money to buy refrigerators and homes and cars and, later, college educations for their children. The money they earned and spent churned through the economy and kept it humming.

But over the next half century, union membership declined. So it is only about 12 percent now. Business and industry groups intent on the extinction of unions can claim credit for a good part of that. These are the same organizations that are today misleading the public about auto worker wages, claiming they make $70 an hour when it’s really $28. They’re the same ones advocating auto company bankruptcy because it would allow the Big Three to renege on their contractual promises to workers and to retirees. They criticize auto workers for making a decent living, $28 an hour plus health benefits and a pension. And they denigrate the companies for being decent corporate citizens and fulfilling their health care and pension promises to retirees.

Over the past half century, multinational corporations have shipped a significant number of those good-paying union jobs overseas. With the help of wrong-headed federal policy that encouraged it, the U.S. lost an average of 12,000 manufacturing jobs per month since 1980. Since May this year, the average has been nearly 60,000. Multinational corporations sought cheap labor and lax environmental regulations in places like China and Indonesia, in what has become an international wage race to the bottom. Americans supposedly benefit from the import of cheap goods. But unemployed workers can’t afford to buy them.

Along with the decline in jobs and union membership came a reduction in the rate of personal savings and an increase in household debt. The financial situation of the typical American family became increasingly precarious even as, over the past 25 years, the very richest one tenth of one percent accrued more and more wealth. These were the kind of guys involved in short-selling – a practice through which a person owns nothing but makes money by betting that a stock will lose value – and by selling sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. These were the kind of know-it-all Wall Street risk takers who gave themselves $30 billion in bonuses last Christmas.

You know what happened next. Three months after those bonuses the initial investment bank fell. Bear Stearns got the first big federal bailout in March. Then other financial institutions and a gigantic insurance company involved in the subprime speculation toppled: AIG, Washington Mutual, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers. Congress quickly offered up $700 billion to save financial institutions, and giant Citigroup took $25 billion of that in October and another $20 billion in November trying to stave off bankruptcy.

Congress used taxpayer dollars – working people’s money – to save those year-end-bonus awardees on Wall Street. Then it stiffed the working stiff. So far, there’s been talk, but no actual help for millions facing foreclosure. And while unemployment is rising, Congress is dithering over the Big Three’s request for a loan that could save millions of auto worker and support industry jobs.

Unemployment increased to 6.7 percent in November, after 533,000 people got thrown out of work in just those 30 days. Over the past 12 months, 2.7 million people lost their jobs. And finally, what every one of them already knew was officially declared earlier this week – the country has been in a recession for a year.

This nation clearly can’t survive on what is produced by Wall Street – reckless speculation. That took America down.

This country should not be spending all of its financial resources salvaging those who destroyed the economy. America needs to invest in what works – its people. Congress must provide mortgage relief. But, most urgently, it’s crucial that we re-invigorate our manufacturing base. America must be able to actually produce products. Swapping paper is not enough to sustain a strong and stable middle class that will save money and buy cars and homes.

The Jeep helped us win World War II. What has Wall Street actually done for you? Saving the Jeep – and Chrysler, GM and Ford – would be a symbol that America understands manufacturing is key to a strong economy and financially brawny workers.

Jeep owners should let Congress know they’re prepared to drive up the Capitol steps to support loans for the Big Three and investment in American manufacturing.

International President

In a perverse way, the media painted Republicans perfectly when it selected red for their states.

Reporters would never have guessed when they did it that the red party’s candidate would engage in red-baiting. But there was John McCain repeatedly doing it in the debate Wednesday night, trying to convert Barack Obama into a terrifying “spread-the-wealth-around” commie. And earlier this month, the Republican’s brother, Joe “McCarthy” McCain, called two Democratic-leaning Virginia counties “Communist Country.”

When it comes to spreading assets around, however, the royal red Republicans, led by King “I-am-a-capitalist-really” George, take the Triple Crown. Their upside down communism works like this: the middle class pays for the tax breaks awarded the nation’s rich and for the financial recklessness of Wall Street’s ultra-wealthy.

Trickle down

In the Republican world, in the view of John McCain and George W. Bush, it never, ever works the other way. A curse, they would say, on anyone who would dare suggest that the rich should be taxed so that government could “trickle down” a portion of their extraordinary wealth to benefit the majority.

They believe in “free markets,” that is, allowing financial markets to run unrestrained and unregulated, or as some have put it recently – amok. They believe government interferes in markets and therefore should be shrunken and impotent. They believe that when an elite few accumulate wealth in that system, some of it naturally will eventually “trickle down” into the empty porridge bowls of the nation’s vast unworthy masses.

A dreadful thing happened on the way to the fiscal crash, though. That philosophy failed.

The “small government” Bush and Republican Congress increased spending, thus replacing the budget surplus bequeathed them with deficits. And not just any deficits – the largest known to man — $455 billion this year, edging out the $413 billion record debt Bush set in 2004.

The rich won’t be paying for that. No, Bush gave them a tax break, and McCain swears he’ll make that break for the wealthy permanent. The middle class, and their children and grandchildren will be making payments on that debt — which, by the way, was caused in part by the revenue loss from Bush’s tax break for the rich.

That’s spreading the wealth around – from the pockets of middle class to trust funds of the rich.

Over the past eight years, middle class Americans have watched with shock and awe as corrupt and incompetent CEOs left their failing corporations with golden parachutes – like McCain’s top financial advisor Carly Fiorina, who exited Hewlett-Packard with $45 million in 2005 when the board dismissed her as CEO following the company’s stock dropping 50 percent and her furloughing 20,000 workers.

Bail out speculators

Now those same middle class Americans are incredulous as Bush — who had McCain’s support 90 percent of the time over the past eight years — is taking $700 billion of their tax dollars to nationalize banks. Their tax dollars will be used to bail out the Wall Street financiers who wouldn’t cut the middle class a break when they were late on mortgage payments, the speculators whose uninhibited risk-taking caused financial institutions to fail, lending to freeze, stocks to swoon.

Deregulation of the financial industry allowed banks and other sorts of financial institutions to merge and become “too big to fail” and engage in risky purchases without sufficient supporting capital. McCain, who until recently bragged about being “Mr. Deregulation,” endorsed this suspension of rules. Its chief champion served as his campaign co-chairman – former Texas Senator Phil Gramm.

Gramm successfully pressed for repeal of the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which was designed to prevent financial institutions from becoming too big to fail, and for passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that deregulated those now infamous credit default swaps that took down insurer AIG, costing taxpayers another $85 billion.

Gramm left the senate in 2002 for an executive position with the Swiss investment bank, UBS, the stock for which, by the way, has plummeted right along with that of American banks.

McCain’s mentor

Gramm still advises McCain, though he’s no longer campaign co-chair. He had to resign that position after he called the United States a nation of whiners during an interview in which he also denied the seriousness of the financial crisis. Here’s what McCain’s financial mentor said, “You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.”

Sure, when the coins of the middle class are flowing up into your pockets, Mr. Gramm, it doesn’t feel like a recession at all. Spreading the wealth around – from the middle class to the wealthy Gramms and multi-millionaire McCains.

Really, Joe “McCarthy” McCain was right when he called the Virginia counties of Arlington and Alexandria Communist Country. John McCain owns a condo in Arlington, and that’s where he located his campaign’s national headquarters. They’re communist all right, McCain Republican-communist, under which middle class earnings are spread to the rich.

In the debate Wednesday night, McCain accused Barack Obama of conducting class warfare because the Democrat wants to end Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy and instead cut the taxes of the middle class – 95 percent of American families.

What Obama proposes isn’t warfare; it’s fairness.

Class warfare is what the Republicans have done to the middle class over the past eight years, and what McCain pledges to continue. It’s a war the rich now are winning.

That’s what Obama wants to change.