Presidential Election and Financial Crisis

I’m of the strong opinion that in order to understand the problem that our nation is facing financially you would need to know all of the facts that caused it. It is wiser to have the facts before you than just present a plan for the sake of saying you have a plan. That is just the wrong way, and a very irresponsible way to do things when your nation is facing financial collapse. There is not a band-aid big enough for this problem facing America! Senator John McCain who is running for President thinks it is as easy as that and it is not.

Anyone that has worked in quality control knows that you just don’t guess on the cause of a systems failure. You wait to get all of the facts, examples, research the probable cause of the failure, investigate all probabilities, and eventually you find the root cause of the failure. CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) is very similar to a very well run quality management system. There are steps that need to be taken before you tell the chicken to stop laying eggs because an egg broke on Wall Street. As any good lawyer will tell you, you don’t ask a question in court when you know what the real answer is. Same thing works for quality control and the same thing needs to be in place before any politician races forward with a quick fix plan such as Senator McCain has done with this nations financial market meltdown.

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Barack Obama did the right thing by not offering a quick fix to this situation till he knows all the facts. Throwing hundreds of billions of dollars if not $1 Trillion dollars at this issue is not the only answer and Obama knows that. Changes in the way our nations financial markets work needs to be looked at very closely and the roll that our government played in this collapse needs to be looked at as well! There is no quick fix and as a Presidential candidate Obama and McCain are not privy to the information that President Bush, Secretary Paulson, and Fed Reserve Chairman Bernake are very well informed of.

When John McCain tells you he knows how to fix this problem and has the experience to back up his words I find serious doubt in his word. When his General Co-Chair campaign manager is Phil Gramm who derailed every opportunity he could to free up Wall Street and the financial markets and stripped the safe guards that Franklyn Roosevelt put in place to prevent another financial collapse. John McCain was right there with Gramm on these votes to suspend regulation of the banking industry so there is some root cause suspect right there.

When you look at what John McCain has said about privatizing Health Care just as he has DONE with BANKING then you see even more root cause for the financial crisis that we all will end up paying for. When you look at the stance that John McCain wanted to privatize Social Security and let it be market driven then you see more root cause to the financial crisis facing America today. Both scenarios point to a future bailout that would dwarf the current one we as American’s will have to pay for.

We all know what a lemon is when we buy it as a car, I think you can spot a lemon in a political candidate when you see one. Just last week John McCain wanted to change our nations Health Care system just like HE CHANGED our nations banking system.

If you know a retiree, then warn them that the checks they receive every month may rise or drop with the market on Wall Street if John McCain is President. Can they afford the gamble that McCain wants to take with all the years they paid into Social Security? Could they afford to live if the same crisis happened to their retirement benefit if it collapsed because Wall Street became greedy and started passing out millions of dollars in bonuses from get rich quick scams. That is exactly what happened in the housing finance markets and those that got paid are sitting fat and happy.

There was a reason why FDR put in the fail safe regulations on the markets and banking industry, it was to protect the people from losing their hard earned money. Their was a reason why John McCain and Phil Gramm removed those protections, there was money to be made by friends.

By all means, you can vote for John McCain for President but you had better learn to say “Paper or plastic” in the job you are going to have to get when you are seventy or eighty years old. Enjoy your golden years but get a job you free loaders that should have a secured retirement benefit from Social Security!

Papamoka

*****Reuters has picked up this entire post! Thank You

$1 TRILLION Mortgage Bailout

In a very serious effort to save the American economy from outright collapse the federal government wants to write a blank check to all of the good old boys in banking and George W. Bush. Why the hell not? We could put California up on Ebay to pay for it and I bet we might just have a few bucks left over to go to McDonalds for lunch.

What angers me about this whole situation was the deliberate melt down of serious oversight of the financial markets by the federal government. George Bush and the Congress that let him ride for free will go down as the most destructive President to our economy in our nations history! Thanks W!

Over at Politico they have this on the $1 Trillion Dollar bailout…

Congressional leaders said after meeting Thursday evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that as much as $1 trillion could be needed to avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system.

Paulson announced plans Friday morning for a "bold approach" that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At a news conference at Treasury headquarters, he called for a "temporary asset relief program" to take bad mortgages off the books of the nation's financial institutions. Congressional leaders had left Washington on Friday, but Paulson planned to confer with them over the weekend.

"We're talking hundreds of billions," Paulson told reporters. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get to the heart of the problem." - Politico

Let there be no doubts on this financial disaster, John McCain is not walking away from this bailout squeaky clean. While some Senators were screaming for regulation even two and four years ago, Maverick was pushing for absolutely no regulation from the Federal Government. With John McCain fighting for less oversight he was in fact enabling the people in the financial markets to recklessly loan out money to people that could never afford to pay it back. But McCain still saw no problem with that issue till this week when he flip flopped on the bailouts needed from the Federal Government to save not just a few banks but dozens.

If you look at the facts then you can clearly see who bares responsibility here and it isn’t the SEC Chairman Cox! Going back to March of 2008, not that long ago really, Politico had this to say on Phil Gramm aka the Mavericks Campaign General and finance guru…

The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.

“A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed,” the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. “But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”

Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs. - Politico

I just want to be clear on this issue, John McCain is going to reform the banking system and Wall Street by taking advice from one of the people to blame for the crisis? Sorry, not buying that!

Don't stand there telling the people that you are going to clean up this mess when you Senator McCain and your best buddy for life Phil Gramm were more than complacent for this massive and very costly mess. This isn't even funny, how can McCain face the American people and claim total innocence and he knows how to fix it. To late Senator McCain, the damage you have done is now complete.

Papamoka