Change We Can't Afford

(Proudly cross-posted at CCN & The Moose)

On Monday, I talked a little about what's at stake in this election. And today, I'd like to expand on that some more. Now that the stupid scandals are gone and we're all focusing again on the economy, now's the perfect time.

When John McCain talk about "change", he talks about some supposedly high-minded concept of "reform". Now of course, McCain has never actually supported any effort to regulate the financial sector and curb the runaway "laissez-faire" madness that threw us into this nmess in the first place. He's never supported reforming our trade agreements to make them fairer for our workers. He's never taken real action to help us working people afford good health care or avoid losing our homes to foreclosure. But now that his poll numbers are dropping like Lehman Brothers' stock price on Monday, he's now embracing the "reform" mantle. But no matter how much McCain talks "reform", we can't believe it.





Why not? Well, let's look at the facts. McCain's "plan to clean up Wall Street" basically consists of appointing a commission to "study what went wrong". Huh?! Don't we all now know what went wrong? McCain's good buddy Phil Gramm pushed to deregulate the financial sector, and he stood by and supported those efforts. McCain's other good pal, George W. Bush, pushed to loosen up regulations even further, basically creating an environment where mortgage lenders could devise ridiculous schemes to entrap borrowers in loans they couldn't really afford while institutional investment banks could pounce upon these subprime mortgages, claim them as "hard assets" as good as cash. If we had the regulations intact that had once set rules for the institutional investment houses, the commercial banks, and the mortgage lenders, we wouldn't be in this debacle today.

But now, John McCain wants us to forget his role in creating the problems he claims he can solve. He wants us to forget that he's supported the Bush Agenda over 90% of the time. He wants us to forget that his chief economic adviser only thinks of us working class people as "a nation of whiners". McCain wants us to forget that even though he's consistently stood with Bush in opposing common-sense regulation of Wall Street, equal pay for women for their equal work, real solutions for affordable and accessible health care, and creating new, well paying "green-collar jobs" that would revitalize our economy while helping us solve the climate crisis, that somehow McCain is different from Bush.

Fortunately, Hillary and Joe remind us of the real truth on McCain:



Can we afford to forget all of that? Can we afford the "change" John McCain offers us? Bush is doing nothing now to help us working people survive the financial meltdown, yet all McCain offers is some silly "commission to investigate" what we already know went wrong. We continue to lose good jobs to unfair trade agreements, but McCain has no plan to fix these broken trade agreements and no plan to create new and better jobs for our workers. McCain seems more interested in pleasing his neoconservative and economic royalist friends than enacting an agenda that helps people survive. Barack Obama got it right when he made his point on how his plan of action offers real help and real change over the Bush-McCain plan for more of the same.



Simply put, John McCain offers "change" we can't afford. He only offers more of the same Bush-Cheney ideology when we need practical solutions. And if we want this nation to recover and our economy to work for working people again, we can't afford more of the same. We need
real change that we can count on.



Now I know times are tough, and many of us can't afford to give much of our money or our time. That's OK, as there is plenty we can do to make real change happen. Tell your friends who are still considering McCain that he's not the "maverick" he claims to be. Spend a few minutes tonight making some calls or writing a letter. And if you can, please donate whatever you can to help Democrats win this fall. I donated $15 myself this week, and I'll continue to give whatever I can to make sure we have a President and a Congress that will put working people first, not corporate lobbyists. I hope you'll join me.

But above all else, I hope you see the truth for yourself and I hope you join me in bringing about the change we need.