What this article misses, of course, is McCain's personal fight with US regulators who wanted to investigate his friend Charles Keating and and his failing S&L. Yes, he personally intervened to protect a wealthy donor. Why McCain continues to gets a free pass on that expensive financial failure escapes me. Nevertheless, it's obvious to everyone that John McCain has fought against regulating almost everything, until the meltdown on Wall Street kicked in. Regulation goes against his 26 year history in Washington. When McCain said in March of 2008 "I'm always for less regulation" shouldn't we believe him? Doesn't his own history back up that statement?
In 2002, McCain introduced a bill to deregulate the broadband Internet market, warning that "the potential for government interference with market forces is not limited to federal regulation." Three years earlier, 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.So McCain is shocked that Wall Street did what the Gramm bill proposed and he voted for? Is he confused again or just plain stupid?
That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.
McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that "in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand."
