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Friday, July 11, 2008

Hurting, Not Whining

From Progress, 7/10/08
Yesterday, in an interview with the Washington Times, former Sen. Phil Gramm, the so-called "econ brain" of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), remarked that the United States has "sort of become a nation of whiners." "Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day." "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said. Yesterday afternoon, McCain said that Gramm "does not speak for me," despite the fact that Gramm's comments mirror what McCain said in April: "A lot of our problems today, as you know, are psychological." Gramm's apparent desire to keep to a minimum discussion of the real and painful effects of the nation's stalling economy is not surprising, given that he shares the same harmful conservative ideology as McCain and Bush. Gramm played a key roll in gutting many of the institutions designed to keep the economy sound. Serving Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee between 1999 and 2001, he "routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street." Later, he "pushed to end oversight" of energy futures trading for a key campaign contributor and his wife's onetime employer, Enron. Around the same time, "Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms." The financial maneuvers enabled by Gramm's legislative measures would become "the heart of the subprime meltdown." More recently, it was revealed that Gramm was "being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy." But while Gramm is able to insulate himself, and even profit from, the negative effects of his legislative and lobbying record, the vast majority of Americans are not so fortunate. Here are 10 real examples of how Americans are hurting in the current economy:

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