McCain Economic Adviser Phil "Nation of Whiners" Gramm and Wife Wendy Brought Us Enron

[McCamy Taylor]

I. Phil Gramm Knows That Economic Wellbeing Is All a State of Mind….And Creative Bookkeeping

Some people were surprised when Phil Gramm, formerly a United States senator from Texas and currently working with the John McCain for president campaign said what he said. I quote the Washington Times:

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession…We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline"

http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jul/09/mccain-adviser-addresses-mental-recession/

If you look at Phil Gramm long enough, you get depressed.



He looks like Droopy.



He is starting to sound more and more like Droopy, too.

Yesterday, after the press got wind of what Phil Gramm said, John McCain pretended to throw him under the bus. He said that he was thinking about making him ambassador to Belarus or some other god awful country that Wendy Gramm would just hate. However, as of today, former Senator Gramm is still an economic adviser with the McCain Campaign.

Anyone who knows anything about the Gramms and Enron should be wondering why on earth John “Keating 5” McCain would want to associate with people like this.

Frank Rich from 2002

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E7DD173BF93AA25752C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Phil Gramm, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, and his wife, Wendy (a former federal regulator now on Enron's board), could pass for one of Enron's wholly owned Cayman Island subsidiaries.

II. Enron Got Its Start in The First George Bush Administration….And Wendy Gramm Was There

Like a proud mother hen, Wendy Gramm laid the golden egg that kept on giving for almost a decade. Here is how the scam worked.

Enron’s orgy of greed began in 1992 with the passage of the National Energy Policy Act which allowed power producers to compete for the sale of electricity to utilities.

The 1992 Act gave Enron the springboard it needed to catapult itself from a small gas pipeline company to the seventh largest US corporation. For a half a decade, 1995 through 2000, it achieved a 40 percent annual increase in the value of its stock. Regretfully, during this period of spectacular growth, Enron was blissfully ignored by the SEC, which did not audit the company’s financial reports in any year from 1997 through 2001.

Enron was recklessly empowered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which issued an exemption for futures trading in energy derivatives. This was Enron’s most lucrative business. 4/ Speculators, including Enron, used these financial instruments to drive the cost of wholesale electricity to astronomical levels. As it grew in size, the Enron octopus bought off political candidates with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contribution to guarantee its success. 5/ The utter neglect of FASB, the SEC and the CFTC permitted Enron to run amuck and steal both investors and employees life savings.

Snip

The Chairperson at the time of the CFTC ruling was Wendy Graham, the wife of Senator Graham of Texas. Mrs. Graham resigned her position with the CFTC in 1993. She joined Enron’s Board 6 months after approving the ruling that was favorable to the company. The integrity of this woman is highly suspect.

http://www.quarterly-report.com/energy/enron.html

The above article is entitled “The Octopus of Greed”. Do we really want another slimy tentacle monster in our White House?

Know the enemy. Wendy Gramm.



III. Here is What Bob Herbert Said About the Gramms and Enron in 2002

People do remember why Phil Gramm had to leave the Senate, right? Because he was up to his waddle in the scandal. Same for his lovely wife. In case people have forgotten, here is an excellent editorial at the NYTs. Please read the whole piece. Beautiful work by Bob Herbert. He describes how Phil Gramm crafted legislation “that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure. It was a gift tied with a bright ribbon for Enron.” *

After Wendy laid the golden egg and went to work for Enron

.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D81038F934A25752C0A9649C8B63

According to a report by Public Citizen, a watchdog group in Washington, ''Enron paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in salary, attendance fees, stock options and dividends from 1993 to 2001.''
As a board member, Ms. Gramm has served on Enron's audit committee, but her eyesight wasn't any better than that of the folks at Arthur Andersen. The one thing Enron did not pay big bucks for was vigilance.

In other words, she was paid to look the other way.

Herbert describes the Republican obsession with “deregulation” which is really just a desire to return to the good old days when businessmen could make a profit off people without regard to the harm they did them. In other words, the days of robber barons and swindlers.

Enron exploited the deregulation mania to the max, and the result has been economic ruin for thousands upon thousands of hard-working families. As Public Citizen put it, ''Enron developed mutually beneficial relationships with federal regulators and lawmakers to support policies that significantly curtailed government oversight of operations.''

The kind of madness that went on at Enron could only have flourished in the dark. Arthur Andersen was supposed to have been looking at the books, but the vast shadows cast by the ideology of deregulation allowed that company to escape effective scrutiny as well. So you have revolving-door abuses and pernicious financial arrangements between companies like Enron and auditors like Andersen that are similar to those between private companies and government agencies.

Who's left to look out for the small fry?

If the deregulation zealots had their way, we'd be left with tainted food, unsafe cars, bridges collapsing into rivers, children's pajamas bursting into flames and a host of corporations far more rapacious and unscrupulous than they are now.

Bravo, Bob Herbert. Well said! This was back in 2002. Notice how much bad food we have had since then and how many bad drugs the FDA has allowed on the market. And we all watched in horror as that bridge collapsed....

* aka "The Enron Loophole" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000


IV. Now We Know Why Phil Gramm Hates “Whiners”

My, how Phil Gramm must have hated the voices of all those Americans who lost their life savings when Enron went belly up because of his wife’s corporate malfeasance and his own political efforts to aid her. $65 billion in investments were lost when Enron failed and it was revealed that the corporation was nothing but a house of cards, “an elaborate accounting hoax”.

http://www.cpa.org.au/booklets/enron.pdf

Phil Gramm had to leave the Senate because of those “whiners”, people who could not accept the fact that they had been robbed of their jobs or their pensions. Didn’t those people understand that it was their fate to suffer so that their betters could live like the actors on Dallas and Dynasty ?



V. How Does Phil Gramm's History in the Senate Prepare Him to Handle the Current Economic Recession?

Simple answer: it doesn't.

Phil Gramm knows only one thing. He knows how to cater to large corporations who want federal regulators off their backs so that they can rape consumers. The price gouging of California---Enron jacking up the wholesale price as much as it wanted and then making utility companies in California pay until they went bankrupt---is what Gramm knows how to facilitate. He does not know jack about how to deal with the lopsided economy that has resulted from oil price manipulation---transportation, manufacturing, travel, food prices affected---because it goes against his grain to attempt to rein in corruption in any one market sector. If John McCain seriously intends to have the King and Queen of deregulation, Phil and Wendy Gramm running the show during his administration, then we can expect the economy to do more of what it has done under Bush. Every effort by business to cheat, cut corners, make a quick buck will be rewarded. There will be no incentive for investment, because the get rich quick loop holes could change with the next president, so businesses will want to take advantage of them right now. Make your million or billion and then retire, that will be the thinking. This will be the chance for those who did not manage to accumulate quite as much as they would have liked under the Bush-Cheney administration. And of course, a chance for all those who are currently members of the Bush-Cheney administration to make their way into private industry and get rich quick before the rules change.

Four more years of increasing income and wealth disparity is just what we need to change this recession into a full blow Second Great Depression.

[Skidmore]

1. McCamy...

Do you mind if I copy this and e-mail it to a few fence sitters I know?

[McCamy Taylor]

2. Go right ahead.

But who on earth could sit the fence? McCain is suffering from brain damage. He has short term memory loss, long term memory loss and expressive aphasia that are obvious to anyone who watches him speak.

He lied about the stage of his facial melanoma (according to the NYT it had local mets making it most likely that it had already spread by lymphatics on his temple before it was treated). Since he lied about that, he probably lied about the treatment he received too. A presidential contender with an invasive melanoma on his temple with evidence of lymphatic spread even with negative nodes almost certainly would have gotten radiation and chemo. The radiation could have damaged his left brain causing memory and speech deficits. Plus, efforts to stop bleeding during the long surgery could have compromised blood flow on the left side of his head, leading to the same thing.

Unless this man reveals the results of his complete medical records including neuropsych testing there is no way that people can elect him president. How can someone who can not remember think through problems? He is at the mercy of advisers....like the Gramms.

[Dollface]

3. Great job boiling down a complex story. I will be sharing it too.

[speedoo]

4. The truth about Phil and Wendy Gramm must be promoted.

Thanks, great job.

These two people are truly evil.

[McCamy Taylor]

5. I can not believe that McCain is getting away with this.

The press is willing to let the Gramms "reform" themselves by coat tailing on the Straight Talk Express. The Gramms should be in jail. For them, McCain is their ticket back into public office. McCain must be stopped.

[McCamy Taylor]

6. Another great Bob Herbert editorial on Phil Gramm. Here's a link

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

How much of a Scrooge is Phil Gramm? He did not ask if the work houses were full. He has said thing much worse:

“We’re the only nation in the world,” Mr. Gramm once said, “where all our poor people are fat.”

During one of the many Republican assaults on Social Security, the issue of cutting back benefits for the elderly came up in the Senate. “They are 80-year-olds,” howled Mr. Gramm. “Most people don’t have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it’s hard for me to feel sorry for them.”

A recent study showed that life expectancy for lower income Americans is declining due to preventable diseases related to obesity----heart disease, diabetes, vascular disease. Obesity is an illness associated with poverty, which in this country forces people to live in dangerous areas where they can not get out and exercise and forces them to eat unhealthy diets high in fat and starch and low in veggies, fruit and protein. Poverty also predisposes people to depression, tobacco, alcohol and drug use and apathy----this is a medical problem, not an "all in your head" problem . But a fat cat politico like Phil Gramm would never understand the health effects of income disparity, because he spends all his time sucking up to robber barons.

As for his remark that old folks should just be grateful that they were allowed to live to 80 (and not sent out on an ice flow when they were 70), that is beyond the pale.

But the truth is that Mr. Gramm, a close friend of Senator McCain’s for many years, has had a very loud say in the economic policies of the McCain presidential campaign. And those policies are an extension of the G.O.P. orthodoxy that is threatening to sink the ship of state, even as the very wealthy are dancing mindlessly to the music of another Gilded Age.

In the real world, somewhere outside of Phil Gramm’s field of vision, increasing numbers of Americans are working two and three jobs to make ends meet; struggling families are worried sick in July about what it will cost to heat their homes in January; food costs and home foreclosures are soaring; the job market has tanked; and the stock markets are running with the bears.

You tell them, Bob Herbert. This is my sentiment exactly. Fiddling while the Titanic sinks. Here comes the 2nd Great Depression, if John McCain manages to steal this election. He will make Herbert Hoover look good .

[DeepModem Mom]

7. K&R

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Thank YOU for posting that reminder! nt

[indepat]

9. One of the sorriest b-words every to grace the political landscape

:D

[flpoljunkie]

10. Excellent research!

[defendandprotect]

11. And Ole Phil, I understand removed some regulations against SPECULATION . . .

in markets --- at least what would have controlled such speculation ---

He's a big anti-regulation guy and has done much damage --