America is a “A Nation of Whiners.” -Foreclosure Phil Gramm- top economic advisor to John McCain
Phil Gramm, the top economic adviser to John McCain, said in a recent interview: “You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,”….”We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.” Adding insult to injury Gramm said of America, “We have sort of become a nation of whiners.”
Wages are stagnant or falling. The housing market is imploding, the price of oil is exploding, and purchasing power has dropped by $1,000.00 for the average family over the last 8 years. What alternate reality does Phil Gramm live in exactly?
For starters, Gramm’s wife sat on the board of Enron. Gramm cut and run, from the Senate just months before Enron collapsed, robbing thousands of employees of their life savings.
John Corzine (D) NJ stated that much of the staggering increase in the price of oil is due to “speculation in the oil markets and a lot it flows directly from,” a loophole,” that “… might as well be called the Phil Gramm loophole, because it was snuck in at the 11th hour, 59th minute to the 2000 energy policy bill,” by Senator Gramm.
If one were to compile a list of leading screw-ups for the current financial meltdown, the most severe since the Republican gifted Great Depression, Foreclosure Phil would be at the top of that list. In 2000, just before he bolted the Senate to become a highly paid executive at a foreign bank, Gramm slipped language into a bill that paved the way for the multibillion-dollar sub-prime meltdown.
Gramm was rewarded for his economic ineptitude by being named co-chair to McCain’s presidential campaign and is McCain’s top economic advisor. Nothing succeeds like failure in the Republican Party.
McCain, who originally opposed the Bush Economic Plan and correctly characterized it as deficit exploding, irresponsible economic policy, flip flopped and now embraces it. “Trickle-down Economics,” failed under Ronald Reagan, failed under George H.W. Bush, and is currently failing under George W. Bush. McCain must believe the 4th time is the charm.
Demonstrating a finely honed sense of political expediency McCain quickly repudiated his long time friend’s characterization of Americans as “whiners,” but the question remains, “Why would McCain choose such a stumblebum like Phil Gramm for his top economic advisor?”
McCain, who said that he does not know much about economics, deserves credit for his willingness to admit his shortcomings. But considering the economic black hole he would inherit if elected president he would do well to exercise better judgment in choosing his economic advisors.
McCain’s lack of economic understanding runs deeper than his choice of friends. He and his wife own 10 homes whose total value is just under $14,000,000.00. McCain, having
a reputation of not liking to mix with “the little people,” has long lived in an alternate economic reality, isolated in the echo chamber and encapsulated in the cocoon that is woven from living decades in the culture of Washington DC. McCain, like Phil Gramm live in a very different world than most Americans.