SCRANTON, Pennsylvania (AFP) — John McCain Monday warned that a 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout plan would endow one official with historic levels of power and public money with little or no accountability.
The Republican White House hopeful said he was "deeply uncomfortable" with the lack of oversight on the Bush administration plan to steady turmoil-wracked markets and rescue debt-laden finance firms.
McCain's Democratic rival Barack Obama was meanwhile due to lay out a fresh plan for tackling "greed and excess" as the rivals dueled over the economy ahead of their first face-to-face debate on Friday.
"I am greatly concerned about the plan that gives a single individual the unprecedented power to spend one trillion dollars without any meaningful accountability," said McCain in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
"Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money been concentrated in the hands of one person," McCain said, though expressed respect for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
"This arrangement makes me deeply uncomfortable. When we are talking about trillions of dollars of taxpayer money 'trust me' is simply not good enough."
He called for an oversight board made up of figures respected in the business world such as billionaire financier Warren Buffett, his Republican primary opponent Mitt Romney and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Details of the bailout should be transparent and made available for any American to inspect on the Internet, the Arizona senator told an "Irish-American presidential forum" in the blue-collar town of Scranton.
McCain also warned against "golden parachutes" for executives of disgraced Wall Street firms, saying they should not get salaries higher than top government officials.
The bailout plan would allow the US Treasury to sell new debt to buy vast amounts of mortgage securities and other "toxic" assets that have clogged the financial system.
Obama was in another battleground state, midwestern Wisconsin, and was due to give a speech on the "greed and excesses of Washington," his campaign said.
He was set to announce plans to curb influence of lobbyists on the US government, reform government contracting, eliminate inefficient state programs and modernize financial regulation.
Obama would offer the US Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority over the financial industry, and bolster capital, liquidity and disclosure requirements, his campaign said.
One of the Illinois senator's top strategists, Robert Gibbs, meanwhile mocked McCain's call for a commission to probe the root of the financial meltdown, along the lines of the probe into the September 11 attacks in 2001.
"That's the greatest Washington idea -- let's write a report, let's get some people to sit around a table and blue tablecloths," Gibbs said on MSNBC.
"We know what got us into this mess? They fired the regulators, hired the speculators. They have run wild on Wall Street and now they want a bailout from Washington."
On Sunday, Obama also expressed reservations on the Wall Street bailout plan expected to be taken up in Congress as soon as this week.
He warned the Bush administration was saddling taxpayers with a "staggering price tag" to bail out finance firms but no real plan to fix the economy and blamed McCain for backing policies which fomented the debt crisis.
Like McCain, Obama also wants more independent oversight of the bailout effort.
"I don't think it can be a blank check," Obama said on CNBC.
"We can set up a system where there's an independent overseer, maybe the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Democrats and the Republicans each appoint somebody to oversee the system," Obama said.
Earlier, Obama said President George W. Bush's administration had so far "only offered a concept with a staggering price tag, not a plan."
"This initial outlay of up to 700 billion dollars is sobering" even if the Treasury recoups its money over time, he said.
Unlike Paulson and other Republicans, who called for a simple rescue deal, Obama said the plan working through Congress must protect hard-pressed voters on "Main Street" and not just corporate managers and shareholders.
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