Presidential candidate John McCain is now a born-again government regulator. Having preached and practiced business-first, country-last policies that lay off business, McCain and the GOP are responsible for the awful spectacle of Wall Street and the federal government's trying to stave off economic collapse. They are responsible for the robber barons' stealing away with tens of millions of dollars each as rewards.
For methodically driving his 158-year-old firm into ruin, Lehman Brothers CEO Richard S. Fuld Jr. convinced spineless directors to lavish $354 million in salary and bonuses on him over the last five years.
That's chump change, however. Hedge fund managers, whose incomes were exempted from usual tax laws by special legislation, each have walked away with several hundred million dollars a year—per year!
Don't underestimate the Republican ability to dupe the public again. After it persuaded voters and Congress that giving Wall Street free rein benefits everyone ("everyone" meaning Wall Street), now the GOP is flip-flopping to persuade voters that those failed policies were wrong and that they are just the people to keep Wall Street from treating the national economy like a private game of Monopoly.
McCain, admittedly a low-IQ student of economics, relies on fiscal advice from former Sen. Phil ("a nation of whiners") Gramm, the architect of Republican policies that brought the nation to its financial knees and the puppet master behind McCain's imbecilic babble that "the economy is fundamentally sound."
If McCain becomes president, he'll be as likely to regulate Wall Street as to transform the symbolic GOP elephant into a pussycat.
