Biden hits McCain on financial crisis
WILKES-BARRE — Against the backdrop of the Susquehanna River and a downtown that has felt the ebb and flow of decades of economic downturn and industrial dissolution, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden sharply attacked John McCain’s evolving response to the fiscal crisis that has bankrupted investment firms and forced millions of homeowners into foreclosure.
Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, spoke to a crowd of more than 350 at Nesbitt Park on Thursday, at the same time his running mate, Sen. Barack Obama, was meeting with McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, and President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss the government’s proposed $700 billion bailout package for faltering investment firms.
Biden, who lived in nearby Scranton until he was 10, said McCain’s support of financial deregulation helped create a highly competitive and corrosive environment on Wall Street, leading to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the recent collapse of Lehman Brothers and the government bailouts of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the insurer American International Group.
“Where was John a week ago, where was John a month ago? Where was John five years ago?” Biden said. “I’ll tell you where he was, he was bragging to the very Wall Street titans he now calls ‘merchants of greed,’ he was literally on Wall Street bragging to them that he was shredding the regulations that were tying them down.
“Now John, God love him, expects us to believe he’s the man that’s going to corral that greed he identifies on Wall Street, that he’s the man who’s going to go out and reinstitute consumer protections and regulations so that we don’t see these cowboys run wild with your money and your future. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you. I guarantee you it’s a bridge to nowhere and it starts in Alaska.”
Biden and McCain took contrasting positions on what many observers see as the most significant measure of financial deregulation in the last decade, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a bill signed into law in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. It permitted banks to offer investment, commercial banking and insurance services for the first time since Congress passed a series of banking reforms in the wake of the Great Depression. McCain supported the original bill. Biden voted against it.
At a campaign rally last week in Tampa, McCain said he now supported some form of regulation and, if elected, would seek greater accountability from Wall Street executives.
“Government has a clear responsibility to act in defense of the public interest, and that’s exactly what I intend to do,” McCain said. “In my administration, we’re going to hold people on Wall Street responsible. And we’re going to enact and enforce reforms to make sure that these outrages never happen in the first place.”
Biden questioned the sincerity of McCain’s reform pledge and his grasp on the totality of the economic crisis.
On Sept. 15, as the news of the Lehman bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch’s $50 billion sale to Bank of America sent stocks plunging 504 points, McCain gave his oft-repeated economic assessment during a rally in Jacksonville, Fla.: “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
Two hours later, McCain admitted the economy’s crisis state.
“We Catholics call that an epiphany,” Biden said to laughter.
“John changed his rhetoric, but he hasn’t changed his policy,” Biden said. “He hasn’t changed anything in his politics or his policy. If he did, he’d be forced to admit that the economic philosophy that he shares with George Bush is the very reason that we’re here. It’s as bankrupt as Lehman Brothers is bankrupt.”
Biden said an Obama administration would revive the economy by restoring the middle class, eliminating tax cuts for corporations that send jobs overseas and stimulating job grow in the United States through investment in clean energy programs and infrastructure improvements.
Biden said those programs could produced more than 7 million new jobs, while improving the environment and the safety of roads, bridges and other public works.
“The next president of the United States is going to face extraordinary challenges, but will also have the most extraordinary opportunity since Franklin Roosevelt,” Biden said. “Literally, the most extraordinary opportunity to change the way this country does business.”
