John McCain came out today with his latest abandonment of deregulation. He wants to regulate the financial sector so closely that he’s proposing a limit on CEO salaries. I suppose this is like the campaign finance regulatory loopholes McCain left that allows the GOP to fundraise even though he accepted public funds, so maybe he’s allowing any size of bonus at all in concert with the regulatory bullcrap he’s proposing. Here it is from Politico:

“I notice at Lehman … some $2.5 billion in compensation,” McCain said. “If they’re bankrupt, where did they get that? But the major point is that no CEO of any corporation or business that is bailed out by us, that is rescued by American tax dollars, should receive any more than the highest paid person in the federal government.”

The highest paid person in the government is the president, who makes $400,000 a year, just under twice as much as the House Speaker and the Chief Justice.

Harwood asked McCain: “What do you say to conservatives in your party who look at this and say, `Wow, this is a lot closer to socialism than to free market capitalism’?”

McCain replied: “I say to them: ‘I’m with you in spirit, but I remember the S&L crisis, and we had to go in, we created the RTC, and we had to go in and fix these problems.’ The Japanese, as we know, had a crisis some years ago. They didn’t fix it, and their economy has limped along, as we all know. So this is going to require drastic action. The role of government in our society is clearly that we help Americans who are being hurt by circumstances beyond our control.”

Keep reminding us of your role in the S & L crisis, McBush, and we’ll keep screaming “Charlie Keating” at the top of our lungs. To continue, the very thought of putting a limit on executive salaries at the federal level is simply stupid. It’s the shareholder’s job to make that decision in a capitalist society. The fact that corporations have been controlled by a few institutional investors who are bidding up the price of CEO pay is no reason to institute a federal pay limit. Besides, this is stupid — McCain wouldn’t vote for an increase in the minimum wage, but he’ll vote for a maximum wage? Bullcrap. It merely shows McCain to be beholden to a top down approach, and once he’s detected that trickle down has become trickle ON, he’s merely proposing to tinker with the system. The real solution is that McCain acknowledge how closely he is tied to the bufoons whose deregulatory work helped cause this problem. Like Rick Davis.

McCain’s been mentioning Fannie and Freddie in his speeches a lot lately, and it has not been kind to the two big lending firms. So the executives at Fannie and Freddie have decided to strike back, detailing how Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, took in $2 million from Fannie and Freddie, telling them that he had influence with . . . John McCain. Now there’s no explicit quid pro quo here, but these guys, who benefited from deregulation McCain pushed over the years, are now telling us exactly how McCain is flip flopping now. Delicious! From the New York Times:

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month.

This shouldn’t be surprising, that John McCain has as his chief advisor a man who earned huge money based on his ability to provide access to John McCain. It also shouldn’t surprise us that McCain, a dereulator for a long time, was the target of Fannie and Freddie, through Rick Davis, the lobbyist and McCain campaign manager. No, no surprises here at all, but a whole bunch of influence peddling, at least on the surface.