The Blame Game: John McCain, Teddy Roosevelt and the Economy

There are a few things we can count on in this troubled world: If someone says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money. If someone says it’s not about race or gender, it’s about race or gender. And if someone says it’s about time we stopped playing the Blame Game, they belong to the guilty party.

The Blame Game is not a game to the worker who saw his job shipped overseas. It is not a game to the woman whose pension fund is wrapped up in an unstable stock market. The Blame Game is not a game to millions of families losing their homes or watching the value of their homes sink like a stone in black water. The Blame Game is not a game to each and every taxpayer who must now assume the risk of Wall Street’s unregulated excess.

Recall how swiftly the Neocon brain trust that gave us the Iraq War on a foundation of lies and deception tried to shift the subject and turn the page. They wanted to end all discussion of the reasons for war the moment the first bombs fell on Baghdad.

Now, with the institutions of finance falling like the twin towers on September 11, 2001, the party that got us into this mess wants us to forget the last eight years of policy that drove us to the edge of economic collapse and concentrate on the finer qualities of their candidate.

Not so fast.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing it exists. On this the Republican candidate has spectacularly failed. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling faster than a skydiver without a parachute, John McCain was still reading from the old script: "The fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Never mind the ludicrous revisionism that he was actually referring to the American worker (he hasn’t given the worker a second thought since he first went to Washington nearly three decades ago), the Senator from the "right to work" state seems to believe that we only have to clean up corruption from Washington to Wall Street and the meltdown will suddenly come to an end.

Is there an economist on the planet who has come to the same conclusion? Or did the candidate pull it out of his Karl Rove bag of tricks?

In a reversal worthy of a John Kerry windsurfing ad, John McCain decided to pin the blame on the Chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission. Never mind that no one outside the Rove-McCain circle finds anything to blame on the hapless Christopher Cox. He just happened to be sitting in the chair when the crap hit the fan.

Even more bizarre was McCain’s angry demand that Barack Obama accept responsibility for his part in the meltdown. After nearly three decades as a loyal "deregulator" the assertion is just too strange for rebuttal.

The second step to solving a problem is understanding what created it.

Despite the prosperity of the Clinton years, Republicans are welcome to point back to that administration’s embrace of corporate-financial deregulation and consolidation and they would get little counterpunch here.

I do happen to believe however that Bill Clinton is smart enough and sane enough to abandon a failed economic experiment before it ran us off a cliff. Unlike McCain and George W. Bush, Clinton was not married to a laissez faire, corporate free ride economic philosophy.

The current crisis did not arrive overnight. We were warned against the extreme dangers of corporate deregulation over and over. We were warned with the technology bust. We were warned with the $50 billion "energy crisis" and the exposure of the Enron Ponzi scheme.

What was the government’s response? The Sarbanes-Oxley Act: An accounting and disclosure fix that actually might have helped in the current crisis. Unfortunately, any piece of legislation is wholly dependent on an executive branch that is dedicated to enforcement. The Bush administration, with Republicans like Senators Phil Gramm (McCain’s economic guru) and John McCain in lockstep, were dedicated to non-enforcement. In fact, they rolled back every measure of regulation they could find.

As for the mortgage meltdown itself, we saw it coming a hundred miles away. Like an approaching hurricane, we tracked it on a collision course with an already stumbling economy as the White House and their lackeys in both houses of congress did nothing to soften the blow.

To his credit, Barack Obama saw it coming too and tried to sound an alarm. His proposal would have brought some transparency, accountability and oversight to the mortgage giants before the train derailed but his cry fell on deaf ears.

Our financial institutions were allowed (even encouraged) to create paper assets where none in fact existed. Moreover, these phony assets were consolidated into fewer and fewer hands (the hands of the corporate elite) so that when the poison of systemic fraud took seed it quickly infected the whole of the economy – not just ours but the world’s.

By his own repeated testimony, no one is guiltier than John McCain. He is not only out of touch with the American worker, not only unable to conceptualize the problem; he is the problem.

McCain likes to compare himself to President Theodore Roosevelt but he fails the test. Teddy Roosevelt went after the banking, transport and industrial monopolies. He broke up an estimated forty monopolistic corporations and trusts.

McCain wants to take on the accountant who cooks the books, the politician who claims earmarks and the CEO who takes excessive profits. In the grand scheme of things, in an economy that loses a trillion dollars of net value in a matter of days, McCain’s villains are the little guys. Take them out and someone else fills their shoes overnight.

It is the system that stinks and McCain is at the heart of it. He just doesn’t get it.

Teddy Roosevelt was known as a progressive reformer. He was the youngest president to take office at that time (sound familiar?) and the first to call for universal health care and national health insurance.

Any historian who knows Roosevelt will attest: John McCain is no Teddy Roosevelt.

Moreover, with the nation balanced on the precipice that divides stability from a great depression, it is another Roosevelt that we need now.

Whether Barack Obama can rise to that high standard is unknown. One could argue that Obama is no FDR but neither was FDR before Huey Long and the Great Depression pushed him.

What we do know is that John McCain doesn’t have a clue.

Random Jack
Jack's Blog, Random Voices