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Olbermann: 'McCain's top guy
on the economy made it easier for bin Laden'
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw
Story
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Last week, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann revealed that the co-chair
of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, the fiercely pro-deregulation
Phil Gramm, had been lobbying for a Swiss bank this spring to
head off relief for victims of the mortgage crisis at the same
time that he was acting as a leading McCain economic advisor.
Now Olbermann reports that McCain's Phil Gramm scandal has widened,
explaining that the former Republican senator from Texas "made
it easier for bin Laden. ... In the Senate he blocked legislation
that would have enabled the Bush administration to force foreign
banks into cooperating on anti-terror measures before and after
9/11."
"Gramm's bank is under investigation for alleged use of
overseas tax havens to hide assets of the wealthy from US authorities,"
Olbermann began, citing a current story in Newsweek.
Olbermann went on to point out that "on September 20, 2001,
the New York Times reported that a single senator had blocked
legislation that would have helped US investigators track Osama
bin Laden's financial network before 9/11. It was Phil Gramm --
who still defended these tax havens after 9/11, whose bank was
still lobbying Congress on behalf of tax havens as recently as
last year."
(Article continues below)
This fresh controversy about Gramm arose as McCain was blasting
Obama for his promise to talk with Iranian leaders and the Obama
campaign was responding that McCain "continues to cling to
a foreign policy that's failed to make the U.S. or Israel safer."
"How does McCain run on being tough on Israel's enemies?"
Olbermann asked Chris Hayes of The Nation.
"What this reveals is really a profound contradiction at
the heart of the Republican coalition," Hayes replied. "It's
home to the most sort of chest-beating, self-righteous moralists
about foreign policy. ... At the same time, it's a party whose
agenda is run by global conglomerates that pursue dollar and profit
with no regard for any kind of sense of morality. ... It blows
apart this entire moralistic rationale."
Hayes added that McCain's latest proposal for putting pressure
on Iran is an "international campaign towards divestment."
However, when "Senator Obama proposed divestment legislation
in the Senate and ... it was blocked by a Republican senator because
it would have required the government to report on what businesses
have dealing with Iran ... [McCain] was unwilling to lift a single
finger to make it happen."
A full transcript of the segment is available here.
This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast June 2, 2008.
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