By Bruce B. Brugmann
A tip of the Potrero Hill martini glass to Bob Scheer for his superb column in the Chronicle outlining the damming role of former Senator Phil Gramm as Senator John McCain’s campaign co-chair. And a tip of the Potrero Hill martini glass to the Chronicle for running this excellent column and for his column regularly from Creators Syndicate. Key question: Why does it take Scheer, a columnist not on the campaign trail, to lay out this critical line on Gramm and his Senate leadership as chair of the powerful senate banking committee to engineer “passage of legislation that effectively ended the major regulatory restraints applied to the financial industry in response to the Great Depression.”
Scheer raises the critical question for McCain and the Republicans:
“Why in the world would you designate as your key economic adviser someone who left the Senate to become an officer of the UBS bank that is at the very center of this mess, a former senator who not only secured highly paid employment with a banking giant that benefited from legislation he helped pass, but who then lobbied Congress for even more of the deregulatory breaks that got the bank into such deep trouble?”
Another question for the rest of the mainstream media: Why does it take Scheer, former Ramparts editor who did the pioneering stories on the origin of the Vietnam War, to raise these obvious questions that ought to have been investigated and dramatized about McCain rather than the daily minutia that keeps popping up on the cable and TV shows and in the daily newspapers? Why isn’t an authentic, liberal, political reporter asked to appear on any of the talk shows or on any programs commenting on the campaign? B3
Click here to read, How about ‘tough love’ for bankers? by Robert Scheer.