9-26-08, 9:49 am

John McCain sought to cancel the first presidential debate scheduled for Friday, Sept. 26, ostensibly to work on the financial crisis. Before the phony campaign suspension, McCain was at Morgan Library and Museum 'preparing' for his Friday debate, New York Times reporters Elizabeth Buhmiller and Michael Cooper write, 'which, by coincidence, is where J. Pierpont Morgan bailed the country out of the Panic of 1907 by locking the leading bankers of the day in his library and forcing them to come up with a rescue plan.'

Unless I earned my Ph.D in history in vain, that isn't remotely what happened in 1907, although there are a few grains of truth. Morgan the leading finance capitalist intervened over and over again between October 19th and November 2nd, 1907, to get bankers to pump money into a crisis ridden banking system. He also met with and worked with Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou, representing the government of his political enemy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who deposited $25 million in treasury funds into endangered banks. Morgan's greatest capitalist rival, John D. Rockefeller, himself the head of the second leading finance capitalist syndicate in the country, threw in $10 million and phoned the Associated Press that he would 'pledge' half of his wealth to preserve the banking system.

But as this crisis ended, with the leading syndicates of finance capital and the government both pouring in funds, a new one began almost immediately as a a major Wall Street firm was threatened with collapse if it did not sell the Tennessee Coal and Iron Coal Iron and Railroad Company. Morgan seized the opportunity to have the United States Steel Company buy Tennessee Coal and Iron, even though that violated all of Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust principle and commitments , since US Steel controlled 60 percent of the market. Roosevelt yielded.

For socialists, the crisis and its resolution showed as nothing else did who had the power in the capitalist system. It also helped to radicalize the non-socialist progressive movement in its demands for far-reaching regulatory reforms and real anti-trust policies. It also led the representatives of big capital in Congress, led by Republican Senate leader Nelson Aldrich (coincidentally John D. Rockefeller's son-in-law), to establish a 'National Monetary Commission' to study 'reform' of the national banking system.

I haven't written this to be pedantic or to stick it to two New York Times reporters for spreading capitalist myths. The Morgan and Rockefeller syndicates and their allies 'saved' the unregulated banking system and profited from the crisis mostly with their own money. The Bush administration is proposing to save the 'deregulated' system with public money and no real benefit for the people. The 1907 crisis was a textbook case of the anarchic nature of advanced finance capital. The 2008 crisis is a textbook case of the anarchic nature of a more advanced finance capital.

John McCain, who has in the past often invoked the name of Theodore Roosevelt as a role model, has represented from the 1980s on positions of domestic economic and social questions very far to the right of the positions that Theodore Roosevelt represented from the 1880s on.

McCain wanted to withdraw from a debate with an intelligent and able presidential candidate to whom McCain will in all probability lose. The policies of George W. Bush and McCain's Republican Party stand behind the crisis. As Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is representing House Democrats in negotiations on the 'bailout,' said of McCain's move, 'It is the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.' Frank's comment may have been over the head of 'Honest' John McCain, boning up in the Morgan Library when he really thought that he would be preparing to play John Wayne in his first debate.