“MCNASTY” MARGINALIZED – THE PARTING OF THE RED SEA

John McCain was thrust into ice water in a bath tub by his parents to curb his anger when he was young.

However questionable this parental chilling may have been, McCain’s anger and outbursts have persisted into his adult life, and into this campaign; thus, has McCain rightly earned the nickname, “McNasty”.

This week saw McCain’s magma rise and erupt again in the face of the economic crisis that he helped create, little understands and has not a clue how to cure.

It is all the more personally tragic because McCain’s “let it alone” attitude toward Wall Street has allowed this greed and fraud to up-end the stability of our economic engine and compromise the entire world market.

It is difficult to understand why anyone would take a moment to consider anything McCain has to say on the economy after thirty years in Washington, including his role in another significant crash and burn scandal involving Savings and Loans Banks, starring Senator McCain in a leading role, who carried water for a prominent corrupt banker named Keating who made McCain’s congressional career possible.

McCain first made his Hoover-like assurance that our economy was “fundamentally sound” early this past week – when no one else saw it that way.

When Senator Barack Obama, moments later, castigated McCain for his Pollyannish nonsense, McCain disappeared into a sea of dissembling “explanations” of what he really meant, then asked for a study to avoid committing himself to any course of action, and then demanded we fire the SEC Chairman and get even with Wall Street and reform the Congress – as if he was some bystander who hadn’t created the problem in the first place.

In a truly remarkable political pirouhette, he even tried to blame Senator Obama for the crisis.
It was quite a spectacle: Multi-millionaire McCain, agent of Wall Street, playing populist, with full-throated cries of pain and anger, assuring us he’d get even for us when he did nothing to stave off the disaster that has overrun our economy.

At the end of the week, McCain was upset with reporters that the final iteration of “his economic solution” didn’t get coverage by the press, when it looked suspiciously identical to the “solution” offered by the Administration.

Finally, as McCain embraced the “prescription” to save our economic ills, let’s consider what the proposal says and how it adversely affects all us real folk.

The Administration proposes to pay out one trillion dollars (or so)(sort of like “real money”) to protect these economic pigs who got us into this mess, and to bail them out with our hard-earned tax dollars, and to allow these same ill-run companies to keep the profits that we all underwrite because we were so “stupid” as to be self-reliant in our lives when they all knew that their friends in the Administration would protect them from their economic debauchery.

This “solution” has been described in various simple formulae by the array of tv radio and print pundits but the most accurate one is to characterize this as Bush and his friends “socializing” their financial losses (so we pay), and “privatizing” the profits (so they get to keep what they “make”).

But what does that really mean to us?

The answer is simple because there are limits to what we have in our treasury or can get (meaning tax or borrow) to spend on wars and failed businesses, and spending on the war and the economy means that Congress and the next Administration will have to compromise “entitlements” meaning your Medicare, Social Security, and much much more that affects each and every one of “us” working stiffs, and not the economic pigs who literally sold out America.
Conservative columnist George Will today called this Administration’s plan a prescription for “trickle down misery.”

There is an interesting and poignant parallel we should consider between the Iraq war and what has gone wrong with the economy, how something is done wrongly, and then we are all expected to pay for it.

The Bush Administration lied us into a war that former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned against, and we are paying for that lie to war with our nation’s treasure and the blood of young fighting men and women.

The Bush Administration allowed business to lie us into this crisis, looking the other way while banks cheated, granting 0% loans to borrowers who they knew couldn’t make the payments when there were due; and they did this because they knew they were going to pass the bad paper on, irresponsibly, and hoped that this house of bad paper would never collapse, because, at the end of the day, we taxpayers would pick up the tab.

Millions of Americans now live lives of quiet desperation, insecurity is everywhere, in their life’s investments, afraid that they’ll lose their jobs, concerned they may fall ill and not be able to afford treatment, maybe not be able to retire at all, because of the greed, fraud and incompetence that the government now would protect with their hard-earned money.
If there’s anyone who should be mad, it is the people who have been betrayed by this Administration, by greedy businessmen, and, yes, Senator McCain, now found out once again, for posing as our savior when he was in fact among the predatory class that made this disaster possible.

This election is a special historical opportunity to set matters right – and that answer is not Senator McCain and his cohort of self-serving corporate socialists.

J. Flannery