Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior economic adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), is the former top lobbyist for Koch Industries, the right-wing corporate polluter. Her current husband, Kurt Pfotenhauer, is the CEO and top lobbyist of the American Land Title Association, “the national trade association and voice of the abstract and title insurance industry.” Until this year, Kurt was the senior vice president and top lobbyist of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), “the national association representing the real estate finance industry.”

Pfotenhauer, like his wife, is part of Washington’s revolving-door lobbyist culture. Prior to joining MBA in May 2002, Pfotenhauer was chief of staff to Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) for five years (in 2006, Smith received $14,000 in campaign contributions from the MBA PAC). Previously, Pfotenhauer was a lobbyist for United Parcel Service (UPS) for five years, and before that was chief of staff to Rep. Denny Smith (R-OR).

Kurt Pfotenhauer’s past and present clients are, of course, the real estate finance corporations that are at the center of the present financial crisis. Their predatory and deceptive lending practices in pursuit of irrational profit margins — in concert with hedge funds and investment banks who blew up toxic mortgages into towers of unregulated debt — have threatened the fiscal underpinnings of the global economy.

For years, they worked in concert with the Bush administration to block, weaken, and delay regulatory reform by Congress, such as the Predatory Mortgage Lending Practices Reduction Act of 2007, which died in the Senate. Last year, Pfotenhauer testified before Congress against the Emergency Home Ownership and Mortgage Equity Protection Act, a bill that would have allowed judges to restructure toxic mortgages to allow people to keep their homes — and would have helped prevent the current financial meltdown and bailouts. Read more

Last night, President George Bush addressed the nation, in an attempt to explain the current financial crisis and to build support for the administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal. In the address, Bush said that the crisis began after “a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad because our country is an attractive and secure place to do business,” which led to easy credit and then to the housing bust. Watch it:

Bush, though, left out a large part of the equation. The problem isn’t simply that too much foreign investment came into the U.S. because of businesses. It’s that the U.S. had to borrow money from foreign nations at an alarming rate, after it dug itself into debt paying for the Iraq War while cutting taxes. This, as well as lax regulation and oversight of Wall St. on the part of the administration, contributed to the credit troubles.

A significant reason for the current $9.6 trillion federal debt has been the Iraq War. And while the Bush administration has been spending $12 billion a month in Iraq, it’s also been cutting taxes. The Center for Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP) says Bush’s tax cuts accounted for 42% of the “unprecedented” explosion of the deficit in recent years, which of course adds to the debt. The total cost of the full cuts amounts to about $400 billion per year.

Thus, the U.S. had to turn to foreign investment for financing. Currently, 45% of U.S. Treasury securities are owned by foreign nations, with the most owned by China and Japan. Other nations owned less than 20% of these securities as recently as 1994.

Bush simply left out of his assessment the fact that much of the foreign investment went to finance a war and tax cuts that couldn’t be paid for.