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Faulking Around - Nov 3, 2008 - Printable Version
- It's your money, you paid for it!!!
by Mark Faulk
It is arguably the most historic presidential election of the past hundred years, and not because the country is poised on the verge of electing its first non-white leader ever. Instead, this election has become a battle that echoes the battle-cry of Bill Clinton 28 years ago. "It's the economy, stupid." As our financial market collapses under the weight of its own greed, both candidates jockey to convince an increasingly smaller undecided voter base that they are the one to lead us from the precipice. John McCain and the Republican Party as whole have given up the high road and taken to trolling the gutters of politics while grasping at straw after straw as they attempt to paint Barack Obama either as a socialist, a communist, or at the very least, a modern-day Robin Hood bent on stealing from the rich and redistributing their wealth (God forbid) to the middle-class. Unfortunately for McCain, his undying adherence to "trickle-down economics" seems both misguided and archaic in light of recent economic events.
A clear majority of American voters have finally gotten the message. They realize that they are the ones who have been the victims of the most lopsided period of wealth redistribution in our nation's history, and not because those at the top of the economic food chain are more ambitious or work harder to make it to the mansion on the hill. Instead, it has become sickeningly obvious that it is unbridled greed and money-controlled influence that created the largest division of wealth in history. More than ever, money buys power, power buys even more money. The system has been rigged under the guise of deregulating our government, and even many of those on the so-called liberal left have fallen prey to the same politics of greed greed that has permeated Washington during the Bush Administration.
Indeed, deregulation had already begun during the Republican controlled Congress of the Clinton years, and Clinton himself failed to recognize the impending consequences or take a stand against allowing Wall Street and the major financial institutes have their way with the wealth of America. But if failing to regulate derivatives in 2000 opened the door to fraud on Wall Street, the Bush Administration has bulldozed the entire system of checks and balances in our financial markets over the past eight years.
In the last decade, unregulated hedge funds have become the dominant force in gaming a system so full of loopholes it has become difficult to determine where good old-fashioned legal manipulation ends and outright fraud begins. Whether it is the rampant failure of brokers to make good on delivery of stocks (and later bonds), naked short sellers who never borrow the stock they sell into the market, or the more recent manipulation of the futures market, driving oil and other necessities to new heights and effectively robbing Americans of their hard-earned money at every turn, the game is always the same. Create artificial "paper wealth" by skewing the most basic principle of capitalism: supply and demand. Because of the failures of both the SEC (whose job it is to regulate the stock market) and the CFTC (who is charged with overseeing the futures markets), traders have been allowed to sell almost anything they can get their hands on without ever delivering the goods, creating a flood of phantom stocks, bonds, and derivatives. With little or no regulatory oversight, hedge fund giants like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank have moved the markets up and down at will, always leaving the smaller investor holding the bag while they line the pockets and offshore bank accounts of their wealthiest clients.
But now, Americans are (finally) waking up to the realization that they have been had. For the first time in almost twenty years, they have refused to fall victim to the politics of ideaology and fear, instead focusing almost solely on the economy, where Obama has a decided advantage over his Republican opponent. In fact, McCain was telling Americans that "our economy is fundamentally sound" just weeks before the worst stock market meltdown since the Crash of '29, relying on information from his top economic advisor Thomas Hassett. Astute observers will remember Hassett as the co-author of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, a book touting the economic boom of the late 1990's....just before the last major stock market crash in March of 2000.
Another of McCain's top economic advisor is Phil Gramm, who "officially resigned" in June after saying that Americans were a "bunch of whiners" for worrying about impending problems with our economy. In this case, the whiners were right, and the so-called expert was dead wrong. Not incidentally, Gramm also co-authored a bill that deregulated the mortgage industry, almost singlehandedly creating the current subprime mortgage crisis. Although no longer officially tied to the McCain campaign, Gramm stills sits on the front row at McCain events and is one of his closest friends and confidants.
And then there's Martin Feldstein, who has been repeatedly referred to as a top economic advisor to the McCain campaign but seems to have been disowned since the collapse and subsequent bailout out of AIG. Feldstein is the longest sitting Board of Directors' member of AIG (since 1988), and is the only person who escaped the corporate cleansing after the company was forced to restate financial reports to the tune of over $2.7 billion. In that little financial faux pas, they paid $126 million fine to the SEC and a $1.6 billion settlement to the state of New York for soliciting rigged bids for insurance contracts from insurers.
In an article entitled "Top Advisor Linked to AIG Collapse" I noted that McCain released a statement after the $85 billion bailout (now well over $100 billion) condemning the management of AIG, saying "The government was forced to commit $85 billion. These actions stem from failed regulation, reckless management and a casino culture on Wall Street that has crippled one of the most important companies in America." He failed however, to mention that one of his own advisors was a integral part of the "reckless management" that he himself condemned.
And for those who still aren't convinced that McCain's slash and burn economic policies pose a far greater threat to our current economic crisis than Obama's plan to return wealth to the Middle Class, there's one other detail concerning all three of McCain's advisors....they all have close ties to the Bush Administration. So while Obama might in many ways still be an unproven entity when it comes to enacting the change that has been his battle cry, the verdict on McCain is already in, and it's not good.
And that, my fellow voters, is the Faulking Truth.
(Author's note: For those who wondered or even care, the title of this article is taken from a speech by our current Commander-in-Thief George W. Bush, who uttered that classic phrase as the climatic comment during a speech in the 2000 election. Indeed, it is time for a change.)
Mark Faulk’s first book is entitled The Naked Truth: Investing in the Stock Play of a Lifetime, and is now available at www.thenakedtruthbook.com. Tune in with Mark and Paul Faulk every Saturday from 1-2 PM CST on The Faulking Truth X2 Show at www.toginet.com
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