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 ThereLike 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.htmlThe 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.