Worried about losing your house to foreclosure? Can’t pay bills on time—or at all? Lost a job or can’t find another one that actually pays a wage you and your family can live on?
A top John McCain adviser has some advice for you: What you’re experiencing is just a “mental recession.”
That’s right. The mortgage nightmares, credit card debt, jobs without health care or retirement security, the college education you can’t afford for your kids—it’s all a state of mind.
This from The Washington Times today:
Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline. [snip]
“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.
“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.
In short, says Gramm: “You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession….We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”
Gramm, former senator from Texas, is known as “Foreclosure Phil” for his role in pushing through a banking deregulation bill in 1999 that
decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.
That bill greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown.
As Christy Hardin Smith points out on Firedoglake, this is the same Gramm who defended Enron and basically told California the state’s energy problems were of their own making. At the time, his wife, Wendy, was a member of Enron’s audit committee and also served on the company’s board of directors. UBS was a consultant for the state of California in 2002 to help fix the state’s energy crisis. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) wanted Gov. Gray Davis to fire UBS, saying the company had a conflict of interest since they represented both the state of California and Enron. After Enron went bankrupt, Gramm took a job with UBS Warburg as a vice president.
Gramm has been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win.
Imagine the fun he could have then playing with our financial security
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