blackascoal
The Force is With Me
There is a ticking time bomb in the John McCain campaign and the sooner that Barack Obama can turn his full attention to exploiting it the bigger and consequential the explosion should be for this phony maverick.
The presumptive Republican nominee supposedly swore off lobbyists after the Keating Five scandal nearly destroyed his political career, but they continue to have him by the short and curlies.
Phil Gramm, who is co-chair of McCain’s campaign, is not just another lobbyist. He is the man most responsible for the repeal of Depression-era banking regulations that have led directly and inextricably to much of today’s economic turmoil, and parlayed that classic example of legislative legerdemain into a lucrative lobbying career for the very people who scratched the smug Texan’s back — as well as McCain’s — on Capitol Hill.
Gramm was the biggest of the big guns behind the 1999 repeal of the banking regulations — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act — which was officially called The Financial Services Modernization Act. (Don’t you just love the name!)
Passage of the law was greased with an astonishing $300 million in lobbying money, and it encountered little opposition other than from those old-fashioned banks that actually insure your deposits, while receiving the enthusiastic blessing of the Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency. And you had better believe that the so hands-on First Lady was all for it.
One of many consequences of the repeal was that a year later the Swiss bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. A year after that, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm and has since energetically lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department on banking and mortgage issues.
In 2002, as the full extent of the Enron scandal was emerging, The New York Times called Gramm “a demon for deregulation” as one of the chief engineers of the stealthy approval of a bill that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure.
Meanwhile, Gramm’s wife Wendy was paid over $1 million in salary, stock options, dividends and other goodies from 1993 to 2001 as an Enron board member, but of course was deaf, dumb and blind to the energy company’s rampant cooking its books with the acquiescence of the late unlamented Arthur Andersen accounting company.
--- more at link
http://themoderatevoice.com/politics/bill-clinton/18787/phil-gramm-mccains-terrorist-in-pinstripes/
As if that isn't bad enough, now it's been discovered that Gramm had connections to banks funding terrorists and blocked legislation that demanded full investigations of those banks, before and after 9/11.
The presumptive Republican nominee supposedly swore off lobbyists after the Keating Five scandal nearly destroyed his political career, but they continue to have him by the short and curlies.
Phil Gramm, who is co-chair of McCain’s campaign, is not just another lobbyist. He is the man most responsible for the repeal of Depression-era banking regulations that have led directly and inextricably to much of today’s economic turmoil, and parlayed that classic example of legislative legerdemain into a lucrative lobbying career for the very people who scratched the smug Texan’s back — as well as McCain’s — on Capitol Hill.
Gramm was the biggest of the big guns behind the 1999 repeal of the banking regulations — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act — which was officially called The Financial Services Modernization Act. (Don’t you just love the name!)
Passage of the law was greased with an astonishing $300 million in lobbying money, and it encountered little opposition other than from those old-fashioned banks that actually insure your deposits, while receiving the enthusiastic blessing of the Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency. And you had better believe that the so hands-on First Lady was all for it.
One of many consequences of the repeal was that a year later the Swiss bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. A year after that, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm and has since energetically lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department on banking and mortgage issues.
In 2002, as the full extent of the Enron scandal was emerging, The New York Times called Gramm “a demon for deregulation” as one of the chief engineers of the stealthy approval of a bill that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure.
Meanwhile, Gramm’s wife Wendy was paid over $1 million in salary, stock options, dividends and other goodies from 1993 to 2001 as an Enron board member, but of course was deaf, dumb and blind to the energy company’s rampant cooking its books with the acquiescence of the late unlamented Arthur Andersen accounting company.
--- more at link
http://themoderatevoice.com/politics/bill-clinton/18787/phil-gramm-mccains-terrorist-in-pinstripes/
As if that isn't bad enough, now it's been discovered that Gramm had connections to banks funding terrorists and blocked legislation that demanded full investigations of those banks, before and after 9/11.
