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Open in TheBrain

Gramm, Phil Sen

power couple: Glass-Stegall (evil elf gingrich helped) CDS, dodd-frank

SEE VOUGHT

see wendy (bak)

NO MERRI

 "nazi-hunter" accountability? tozzi, john graham? rev dr

omg ted cruz 2016

hallib loophole,

foreclosure phil

?

bak capt 10 25

---

nyer 10 25

...

Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late two-thousands, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s ninety-five per cent wrong.’ ” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose—to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with Party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse-gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that Senator Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grass roots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a sixteen-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 Presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s C.E.O., Michael Needham, openly supported Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: one was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the O.M.B., where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the O.M.B.’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”

....

booktv

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

LAST AIRED NOVEMBER 7, 2022

The Myth of American Inequality

Former Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and co-author John Early took a critical look at economic inequality in the United States and how it is measured. This event was hosted by the…

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act,

==

ted cruz 2016:

Republicans, you will be happy to know that the guy who is the sober alternative to Donald Trump is being advised on economic policy by the guy who helped lay the groundwork for most recent total collapse of the global economy.

Ted Cruz this week decided that one of his senior economic advisers will be former Texas Senator Phil Gramm—90s kids remember Phil Gramm! Looks like an old mouse and hates Bill Clinton? Yep, that’s the guy. He also has a long track record of opposing government regulation of Wall Street: “The distinguishing feature of Gramm’s career in public service is hostility to regulationin almost every form.”

Cruz is aligning himself here with a man whose actions were one of the direct causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Gramm played a key role in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby allowing huge banks to start gambling with everyone’s money, which threw the global financial system into chaos when the bets went bad in 2008. Thank you for that Phil! As if that’s not enough, Gramm also ensured that the government did not regulate derivatives, the wildly abused financial instruments that made the crisis so, so much worse. Thank you for that also, Phil! Barry Ritholtz explains:

The damage caused by rolling back Glass-Steagall pales compared with what resulted from the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Gramm was a co-sponsor of the legislation, which exempted many derivatives and swaps from regulation. Not only was the law problematic, but it veered into potential conflict-of-interest territory.

At the time the legislation was under consideration, Gramm’s wife, Wendy, was on the board of Enron, which as we now know was one of the greatest accounting fiascos in history... At Wendy Gramm’s urging, then-Senator Gramm inserted what became known as the Enron loophole into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. This allowed Enron to avoid most regulation in its energy-trading business. Enron, coincidentally, was a major campaign contributor to the senator.

So, Ted Cruz has selected as an economic adviser a man who was a direct cause of the global financial crisis and helped to blow up Enron, as well as being thoroughly corrupt.

That’s what America is all about.

==

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

25 to blame:

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

==

  ===

omg

Former GOP Sen. Phil Gramm: “It Was an Outrage” That “Exploited” AT&T CEO Got Only $75 Million at Retirement

Jon Schwarz

July 29 2015

Phil Gramm, a former three-term Republican senator from Texas who once ran the Senate Banking Committee, told the House Financial Services Committee yesterday that “it was an outrage” that his friend Edward Whitacre, the CEO of AT&T, only got “$75 million” when he retired in 2007.

“If there’s ever been an exploited worker” it was Whitacre, said Gramm, testifying on the fifth anniversary of passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Gramm appeared genuinely aggrieved by Whitacre’s shabby treatment and literally pounded the table while speaking.

Whitacre actually received a retirement package totaling $158 million.

Gramm attributed public anger at CEOs like Whitacre to “the one form of bigotry that is still allowed in America,” which is “bigotry against the successful.”

This is a clearly a long-standing belief of Gramm’s, who said almost the same thing, word for word, in 2001.

Gramm was co-chair of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and McCain’s top economic adviser until he was forced to resign after calling the U.S. “a nation of whiners.”

Transcript:

GRAMM: It’s the one form of bigotry that is still allowed in America, and that’s bigotry against the successful … My friend Ed Whitacre at AT&T, if there’s ever been an exploited worker,even though they made a big deal about him getting $75 million when he retired, the man added billions of dollars of value, he was exploited, it was an outrage!

https://theintercept.com/2015/07/29/former-gop-sen-phil-gramm-outrage-att-ceo-got/

==

==

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.

==

Phil Gramm, the former right-wing senator from Texas, has surprised me.

I had assumed he had zero charitable instincts, for he kept trying to kill such poor people's programs as food assistance: "We're the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat," he smirked.

But Phil seems to have developed a new empathy for people who're demonized. Although he's now a Wall Street operative, Gramm returned to Capitol Hill in July to express solidarity with victims of bigotry in our country. Wow! Gramm standing with Black Lives Matter and oppressed immigrants!

No, no... not "them." The former senator was testifying against a new rule requiring corporations to reveal the spread between their CEO's pay and what their workers get. It's "demagoguery," Phil grumped. Then he lurched into the abyss of absurdity by wailing that overpaid corporate chieftains are actually – get this – victims of public bigotry. The multimillionaire snarled that "The one form of bigotry that is still allowed in this country is bigotry against the successful."

To prove this bizarre claim, Gramm cited the specific case of his buddy, Ed Whiteacre, who retired as CEO of AT&T in 2007. Ed was widely condemned for grabbing a $158-million retirement package for himself as he went out the door. Gramm practically wept as he related the sad story of Whiteacre's heartache. The guy was actually underpaid, wailed Gramm – "If there's ever been an exploited worker, he was exploited. It was an outrage!" Odd since the former senator, had never previously expressed the slightest concern about exploited workers.

This is Jim Hightower saying... Perhaps Gramm could do a telethon to support ex-executives like Ed, who suffer such soul-crushing bigotry. Please give 'til it hurts... and don't laugh, for Phil really feels the pain of the rich.

"Former Texas Senator: CEOs are the real victims," http://becausefinanceisboring.com/post/125292445379/former-texas-senator-ceos-are-the-real-victims

"GOP: Deregulate Wall Street, or The Roman Empire Will Fall," Huffington Post, July 28, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gop-wall-street-roman-empire_55b7a661e4b0224d8833f37c

The Committee on Financial Services, http://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=399397

http://jimhightower.com/node/8691#.VdNgm_lViko

ubs http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/indivs.php

dark $ donors; Gramm, Phil & Wendy L.

Lone Star Global Acquisitions

Helotes, TX

==

strat ignor; parks pop, so B2 promised to fully fund Land and Water Conserv fund that buys land for US but Phil Gramm said dangerous to churches, schools and orphanages and distorts the mktplace !? ; prop rights wacko called a land grab 211

GOLDMAN  est 1869, gave us head of nyse, world banks pres advisors

rubin and paulsson  (old pals came up w/ bailout plan?  helped eg AIG 89

fdr; if pvt power > gov = fascism

abe; $ power preys, denounces as pubic enemy any that question or throw light on actions.

1982 dereg of S&L, RR said most imp finance regs in 50 years, a jackpot; 7 yrs later collapsed 95

volker objected, citi VP said SEC and rating agencies wd check (SEC lost power ,B2 HAD TO GO TO KINKOS, and co's captive)

THEN GREENSPAN TOOK OVER (ANY FAN, INVIS HAND --> "VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS" 96

oct 26 2008 recent [but then 180?]

phil gramm (enron) 1999 finance mod act; linked banks and insurance to wall st.  1998 citi said wanted to buy travelers ins. ignored rules, paid $300M in lobbying,  r cmfa, also hassenron loophole to exempt from oversight eg to exclude derivs from regs

gramm head of sen bank comm, slipped amend on deriv? into big appropriation bill; wife, ex head of comodity Fut exge, joined enron bd to head AUDIT committee

dereg --> consol --> up prices

patriot acts

==

Here we are, surrounded by still-smoldering financial wreckage, and almost everyone in Washington is falling over themselves to repeat exactly the same kinds of actions that got us into this mess. Last time around it was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, introduced by Republican Sen. Phil Grammand enthusiastically signed by President Clinton in the presence of Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

This time it's the deceptively named "JOBS Act," introduced by the far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members of both parties. The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a deregulating frenzy. Some of those protections were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which sociopathically unscrupulous business people conducted a hoax that ruined thousands of families and deprived many of their life's savings....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/the-dumbest-bipartisan-mo_b_1374301.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

ENRON: 12/7/2000 1st of 40x outages in 6 mos p 98 regs blamed: pres elect b2: if any environ regs preventing CA from getting 100% output at plants then we need to relax them. phil gramm (TX) blame " those who valued enviro exrtemism and interstate protectiomnism more than common sense " 98

enron lobbied to get out of Commodity  Exchange Act req report to Commod Futures trading Comission 99  week after b1 defeated, wendy gramm brought pertion, passed 2 to 1 p 99  Phil big enron recipeint.

current

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?lname=UBS+Americas&year=

lobbied for sullivan & cromwell?

US Senator from Texas, 1985-2002

[1] Democrat until 1983, Republican thereafter.

Father: (career soldier)

Mother: (nurse)

Brother: Don

Wife: Tracy Reed (div.)

Wife:Wendy Gramm

Son: Marshall

Son: Jefferson

    University: Georgia Military Academy, Atlanta, GA (1961)

    University: BA Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA (1964)

    University: PhD Economics, University of Georgia (1967)

    Professor: Texas A&M University (1967-78)

    Member of the Board of UBS

    US Senator, Texas (3-Jan-1985 to 30-Nov-2002, resigned)

    US Congressman, Texas 6th (12-Feb-1983 to 3-Jan-1985)

    US Congressman, Texas 6th (3-Jan-1979 to 5-Jan-1983)

    Bush-Cheney '04

    DeMint for Senate Committee

    Elizabeth Dole Committee

    Friends of Phil Gramm PAC

    John McCain 2008

:{    McCain-Palin Victory 2008

    National Republican Senatorial Committee}:

    Santorum 2006

    Steele for Maryland

    Draft Deferment: Vietnam (5 total)

    Funeral: Richard Nixon (1994)

    FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR

    American Casino (2-May-2009) Himself

    Gods and Generals (10-Feb-2003)

Phil Gramm's wife, ex-Enron board member

http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil

MoJo corn

Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm.Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

...

[omg]

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.),the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."

[Subprime 1-2-3

Don’t understand credit default swaps? Don’t worry—neither does Congress. Herewith, a step-by-step outline of the subprime risk betting game. —Casey Miner

Subprime borrower: Has a few overdue credit card bills; goes to a storefront lender owned by major bank; takes out a $100,000 home-equity loan at 11 percent interest

Lending bank: Assuming housing prices will only go up, and that investors will want to buy mortgage loan packages, makes as many subprime loans as it can

Investment bank: Packages subprime mortgages into bundles called collateralized debt obligations, or cdos, then sells those cdos to eager investors. Goes to insurer to get protection for those investors, thus passing the default risk to the insurer through a “credit default swap.”

Insurer: Thinking that default risk is low, agrees to cover more money than it can pay out, in exchange for a premium

Rating agency: On basis of original quality of loans and insurance policy they are “wrapped” in, issues a rating signaling certain slices of the cdo are low risk (aaa), medium risk (bbb), or high risk (ccc)

Investor: Borrows more money from investment bank to load up on cdo slices; makes money from interest payments made to the “pool” of loans. No one loses—as long as no one tries to cash in on the insurance.]]

It didn’t quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron’s energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company’s board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoescompared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash.Credit default swapsare essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It’s like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm’s bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street’s biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm’s earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. “Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark,” says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. “No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing.” Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: “So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages.” Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc‘s division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, “were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets.”

These unregulated swaps have been at “the heart of the subprime meltdown,” says Greenberger. “I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don’t think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause.” In 1998, Greenberger’s division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, “all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder.”

Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in—but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm’s collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.

No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it’s no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, “You’re going around saying this was my fault—and it’s not my fault. I didn’t intend this.”

Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland’s largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis’ top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring—an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations—securities backed largely by subprime instruments—and that credit default swaps had been “key to the growth” of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)

Gramm’s record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm’s flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he’s hailed McCain’s love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. “If McCain gets in,” frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, “we’ll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn’t vote for McCain.”

As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there’s no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.

slate

http://www.slate.com/id/114972

...

quits

Gramm rose from a hardscrabble Georgia childhood to an economics professorship at Texas A&M. In the mid-'70s he thrust himself forward into Democratic politics on a platform of "Government Is the Enemy." (Why Democratic politics? Because that was the way to get ahead in Texas.) He bulled his way into Congress in 1978. He came as close to libertarianism as party politics permits, arguing that all Americans needed to wean themselves from the public teat. He would make rich and poor suffer so that all might live in greater freedom. When Reagan was elected president, Gramm—the brain behind the conservative "Boll Weevil" Democrats—allied with him to chop the (non-military) budget and cut taxes. In 1983, Democrats enraged with Gramm's treachery booted him from the House Budget Committee. Gramm quit the Democrats, resigned his seat, joined the GOP, and won his seat back in a special election, thus making himself a Republican hero.

Once established in the GOP, Gramm won a Senate seat in 1984. He has barely campaigned since, facing very weak opposition in 1990 and 1996. Gramm became one of the most compelling champions of Reagan conservatism, setting those "pulling the wagon" (us hardworking Americans) against those "riding in the wagon" (those lazy no-goodniks). Gramm told stories of his friend, a Texas printer named Dickey Flatt, and vowed that he would not support any government program unless it was worth taking money out of the pocket of ol' Dickey. Gramm came up with the automatic deficit-cutting mechanism of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act and marshaled Republicans to defeat the Clinton health plan. Gramm, who believes you catch more flies with a grenade than with sugar, quickly learned to use the rules of the Senate to stymie rivals, and his willingness to hold up the occasional spending bill and vituperate against big government solidified his reputation as a man of principle.

But Gramm's reputation was never very deserved. At the start of his career, as my Slate colleague William Saletan argued in a 1995 Mother Jones story, Gramm preached a conservatism in which all Americans would have to sacrifice. But over time, Gramm has shucked any pretense of libertarianism. Gramm spoke of belt-tightening, but forced it only on folks he didn't need, notably immigrants and the poor. He began his career railing against corporate subsidies, but he never pulled the trigger. Instead he became one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from energy, banking, health-care, and insurance companies.As an economist, Gramm knows that farm subsidies grossly waste taxpayer money, but he has never moved against them. And Gramm became one of Congress' leading pork dealers: He once bragged that he steered so much government spending to Texas that he was getting trichinosis. Gramm, who once claimed that all Americans needed to sacrifice, excluded anyone who gave him money, voted for him, or lived in Texas: They never had to get off the wagon. (One of his rivals coined a term for Gramm's habit of going home to Texas to take credit for spending bills he has nothing to do with: "Grammstanding.")

Gramm has always been more passionate about the presidency than policy. He is a pure political calculator: Before he switched parties, he polled to make sure he would win re-election as a Republican. Gramm tailored his economic conservatism in order to build a national base of supporters. He rejiggered his views on social issues for the same reason. Gramm has no interest in social conservatism. He tried to invest in a soft-core porn movie in the early '70s, and he once told religious right leaders, "I ain't running for preacher." He doesn't really care about abortion, homosexuality, or school prayer. But Gramm exploits them happily. In his 1984 Senate race, he made the fact that his Democratic opponent accepted a contribution from a gay group the centerpiece of his strategy. Gramm endorsed a constitutional ban on abortion in his '96 presidential campaign.

Gramm's presidential campaign was meticulously planned. He raised a fortune. He carefully positioned himself as the only alternative to Robert Dole. And he utterly flopped. Gramm ended up spending more than $20 million to win eight delegates, and accomplished the impossible: He made Steve Forbes handsome, Pat Buchanan compassionate, and Bob Dole jolly. "He was really uniquely unsuited to be a presidential candidate," says Rutgers political science professor Ross Baker. "He is diabolically smart, but he makes no concessions to small talk and does not do well communicating with people he feels are his intellectual inferiors."

What killed Gramm in '96 was not that he's hypocritical or too ambitious or ugly or even condescending. What killed him was that he has a deeply gloomy view of the world. Gramm lives on fear. We're on an escalator to hell. His presidential campaign was premised on the notion that America would be unrecognizable in 20 years unless he was elected president. He was not capable of explaining how he would inspire America to magnificence, only how he would prevent disaster. Raised in miserable economic circumstances by a chilly, ambitious mother, Gramm never trusts that anything will get better. He sees enemies everywhere. This was a fine world view for the Senate, which is the great negative body in American politics. In the Senate, one man has the power to stop the world from turning, if he tries hard enough. It is heaven for a naysayer like Gramm.

But negativism may cripple Gramm outside the Senate. Gramm wants to go run something. He has been touted for the presidency of Texas A&M. He also seems interested in replacing Alan Greenspan at the Fed or in running a company or a Cabinet department. All these jobs seem deeply unsuitable. A CEO or college president has to inspire. The Fed chairman needs to instill confidence. But Gramm's specialty is deflating and destroying confidence.

The editorial pages of the Washington Post and New York Times—America's political newspapers of record—have so far ignored Gramm's departure. They have bestowed on him none of the grand reckoning that is usually due to national figures. He is almost forgotten already. He has a rare quality in a successful politician: He is a man smaller than life.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

Former Texas Senator Phillip Gramm is a Democrat turned Republican. He spent much of his career advocating deregulation and tax-cuts. He is married to Wendy Gramm of the Mercatus Center and previously of Enron.

Contents

* Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act*

Gramm, as chairman of the Banking Committee, led passage of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, making changes in the banking, insurance and securities laws which Congress had kept at bay for sixty years.

Presidential campaign

In 1996, Gramm spent $20 million seeking the Republican presidential nomination, but failed.

The top contributors were:

Articles and resources

See also

References

External resources

Wendy Gramm

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Wendy Lee Gramm is chairman of the "regulatory studies program" at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, generally calling for deregulation of the energy industry. She was on Enron's board of directors before its collapse. Enron had been a financial backer of the Mercatus Center.

Previously, Wendy Gramm held several positions in the Reagan Administration, including heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, when it exempted from regulation Enron trading in energy derivatives.

She has also previously been head of the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) 'Information and Regulatory Affairs'. During 2002, the OMB drew up a "hit list" of existing federal environmental regulations it believes should be changed or rescinded. Of these, 44 had been suggested by the Mercatus Center.

Wendy Gramm is married to Senator Phil Gramm.

Contents

Positions held

wendy

Government

Thinktanks

Private companies

References

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/gramm.html

If Wendy Gramm has her way, she will replace Hillary Clinton in the White House next year. Like Mrs. Clinton, Wendy Gramm is the smart, ambitious wife of a smart, ambitious politician. Her husband Senator Phil Gramm of Texas is a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination. Like Clinton, she too is a graduate of Wellesley College near Boston. Gramm also holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University in Illinois and has had a successful career apart from her husband.

This phenomenon -- spouses with professional careers of their own paired with political candidates -- not only reflects the changing role of women but also creates new ethical dilemmas and ambiguities in election campaigns. Mrs. Gramm is the granddaughter of a laborer in the Hawaian sugar cane fields and the daughter of the first Korean-American officer of a U.S. sugar cane company. Mrs. Gramm declined to be interviewed by FRONTLINE.

She and Phil Gramm met in 1969 when the future senator was a professor of economics at Texas A&M University. He interviewed her for a job at the school. "As a single member of the faculty, I'd be very interested in having you come to Texas A&M," she quotes him as saying at the time. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mrs. Gramm recalled her initial response to his subsequent marriage proposal: "Yuck." Gramm persisted, and the couple wed in 1970 (it was Gramm's second marriage). They have two sons, Marshall and Jeff. In 1979, Phil Gramm, then a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Five years later in 1984, he switched his party affiliation to the GOP and won the Senate seat that he still occupies. The move to Washington began a succession of appointed federal jobs for Mrs. Gramm. She headed the economics bureau of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Consumer Protection and served as administrator of information and deregulatory affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. In 1987 The New York Times described her as "one of the Reagan administration's most vigorous deregulators." President Reagan called her "my favorite economist," naming her chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the powerful regulatory agency which oversees the nation's commodities and futures exchanges.

Her dual roles as CFTC head and Senator's wife put her in a difficult position. There were times when Senator Gramm sought the support of some of the same agricultural and business interests that she was regulating. On trips to Texas during his 1989 Senatorial campaign she worked both on CFTC business and for her husband's reelection. After leaving the CFTC in early 1992, Wendy Gramm accepted lucrative directorships on the boards of several corporations she had regulated. Several of these corporations were also financial supporters of her husband's Presidential campaign. One of the boards on which Mrs. Gramm sits is Enron Corporation, a Texas natural gas company, which has given almost $35,000 to Phil Gramm over the years. She was named to the company's board, just five weeks after stepping down from the CFTC, which around the same time, exempted Enron and a group of other oil and gas companies from federal regulation on some of their commodities trading. The move was a big financial boon to Enron.

Enron pays Wendy Gramm $22,000 a year for her service on its board, plus $1,250 for every meeting she attends. The CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, is regional chair of the Gramm for President Campaign. When Senator Gramm kicked off his campaign last February with a record-setting fund raising dinner, Lay and his wife were present.

schlosser chain never stops: Another board Wendy Gramm sits on is that of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), a large meat processing company. Based in Dakota City, Nebraska, IBP is a powerful corporation next door to a key election- year state, Iowa. Support for Senator Gramm at IBP came in handy last August at the Iowa straw poll in Ames. IBP sent a memo to its management level employees encouraging them to attend the straw poll, which is not restricted to Iowa residents, and informing them that $25 tickets and bus transportation would be provided by the Phil Gramm-for-President campaign. Gramm campaign buses picked up the IBP employees at eight separate locations in the states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois and transported them to the straw poll, where their votes helped Gramm tie front-runner Bob Dole and gave the Gramm campaign an important boost.

In a written statement to FRONTLINE, an IBP spokesman said, "Many of the campaigns provided tickets and bus transportation to the event, some bringing in people from as far away as Kansas. While the Gramm campaign paid the way for the IBP employees who attended, our people were not told to vote for Senator Gramm or any other candidate."

FRONTLINE learned that the request for IBP's help in the straw poll came from the late Alec Courtelis, the former finance chair of the Gramm-for-President campaign. (Courtelis, long a leading Republican fundraiser, died this winter) Courtelis also sat on IBP's board of directors and was responsible for bringing Wendy Gramm onto IBP's board.

While no one has accused Mrs. Gramm or anyone else of breaking any laws, the IBP case nonetheless shows how questions can arise when a candidate's spouse is appointed to a well-paying corporate directorship and when that company helps promote the husband's candidacy.

They all involve Wendy Lee Gramm, named today by the nonprofit Clean Air Trust as its "villain of the month" for January.

Gramm is director of the "regulatory studies program" at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. Mercatus is an increasingly influential, anti-regulatory "think tank" created by and subsidized by polluter money.

We are not singling out Wendy Gramm because of any connection she may have to the Enron scandal. ^1 (The Washington Post reports that she may be subpoenaed by a Senate committee to determine her role, if any, in the company's epic collapse. In 1992, Wendy Gramm headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, when it exempted from regulation Enron trading in energy derivatives -- which later became Enron's most lucrative business. After leaving the government, Gramm was named to Enron's board. Enron has been among the financial backers of the Mercatus Center.)

The wife of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), Wendy Gramm has a long track record of opposing regulations, including those involving health and environment. In the Reagan administration, she was executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget's regulatory review office, and director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics.

In this case, our attention was triggered by Gramm's role in a recent "hit list," compiled by OMB, of existing federal environmental regulations it believes should be changed or rescinded. OMB's regulatory czar, John Graham, conceded to USA Today that this review of existing federal rules is unprecedented.

Rules in the OMB bulls-eye include EPA's so-called "new source review," which is designed to keep polluters from increasing pollution when they make major changes to existing refineries, electric power plants and other factories. Major oil and power companies are pressing the Bush Administration to weaken current requirements, and an announcement is expected as soon as next week. There is no doubt that OMB is a major player in the upcoming clean air rollback. OMB noted that Gramm's Mercatus Center had instigated inclusion of new source review on the regulatory hit list.

Indeed, Gramm's Mercatus Center was responsible for no fewer than five of the eight EPA rules singled out by OMB for "high priority" treatment -- including standards for arsenic in drinking water. Altogether, OMB noted, Mercatus had called for a re-assessment of no fewer than 44 federal regulations -- including national public health standards for smog and soot, as well as standards for tailpipe pollution from cars and sport utility vehicles, low-sulfur gasoline, big diesel trucks and diesel fuel -- in other words, Gramm would like to pull the plug on virtually every effective air pollution cleanup measure adopted in recent years.

In effect, the OMB office is becoming a conduit for regulatory bashers such as Mercatus. And no wonder: Wendy Gramm actually ran the same OMB office during much of the Reagan administration. And Gramm's Mercatus Center and Graham's former employer -- the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis-- even had common financial backers. ^2

It's worth a moment to explore the connection between Wendy Gramm and one of those key financial backers: Koch Industries, Inc., the largest independent oil company in America. Charles G. Koch is chairman of the board and CEO of Koch Industries. If you've ever heard of Charles Koch, it's probably because he was sued by his brother, Bill, for allegedly stealing oil from federal lands (they settled the suit last year), or because the U.S. Justice Department indicted Koch Industries in 2000 for "environmental crimes" at a Corpus Christi, Texas, refinery. A Koch subsidiary agreed to a settlement in the case last year, admitting that -- to save a few bucks -- it disconnected pollution controls and vented cancer-causing benzene directly into the air from the refinery.

Listed by Forbes as one of the 100 wealthiest Americans, Charles Koch also is a major mover and shaker in reactionary political circles. He runs the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which collectively doles out millions of dollars each year to reactionary groups including the previously mentioned Harvard center; the American Legislative Exchange Council (right-wing state legislators who receive their marching orders from industry); the Federalist Society (a reactionary legal fraternity that has placed numerous people at high levels in the Bush Administration, including DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham); and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), a Montana-based group that underwrites propaganda junkets for reactionary federal judges. ^3

Which brings us back to Wendy Gramm and the Mercatus Center, which Charles Koch also chairs. Indeed, Koch helped launch the center with a $3 million contribution to George Mason University in 1997. The University proudly notes on its web site that Koch gave an additional $10 million multi-year grant "to support programs focused on market-based solutions to social and economic problems." In other words, Koch basically rents the university's name to give a patina of credibility to Wendy Gramm's anti-environmental agenda.

Although his contribution gives us a glimpse of the dark side of modern academia, Koch is by no means Wendy Gramm's only financial backer. The Mercatus Center's web site (www.mercatus.org) proudly displays vulgar pictures of a gathering of the "Founders Circle" -- annual contributors of $10,000 or more to the Mercatus Center -- at a "sunset cocktail party" last March in Naples, Florida.

If you missed last year's Mercatus gala, there's still time to sign up for the next one -- it's Feb. 15-17 at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, CA. Wendy Gramm may need the money -- especially since Enron has gone down the tubes.

http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html

Gt Unravel  p 130

exempted enron from regs while wife on bd; then went to work for UBS Warburg, that bought enron trading op 

realchange hmn

Savings and Loan Scandal

Texas S&L owner Jerry D. Stiles, who has been convicted of bank fraud in the S&L scandals, advanced $117,000 interest free for a construction crew that came from Texas to Maryland to build Gramm a vacation home. There were no written estimates or contracts. Months later, Gramm paid back just $60,000 and Stiles paid the rest. About the same time, Gramm ushered through a bill that allowed sick Texas S&L's (such as the ones Stiles owned) to stay open. He later urged regulators to give Stiles waivers -- even after they found irregularities that led to Stiles' conviction -- and advised Stiles on new banking regulations. The Senate investigated Gramm but ruled that the $57,000 Stiles paid was a "cost overrun", not a payment.

Getting A Drug Dealer Back On the Streets

In 1979, letters signed by Phil Gramm on his congressional stationery were sent to the parole board, asking for an early release for a man, Bill Doyle, who had been repeatedly convicted on drug dealing and weapons charges. Doyle was released soon after Gramm's letter, and has been sent back to prison 3 times since on new drug charges or for failing drug tests.

Gramm first claimed never to have heard of the man. When Mother Jones magazine produced letters with Gramm's signature, his office released a statement by a secretary claiming that she sent the letter out without his knowledge, forging his signature. We find this hard to believe.

Draft Dodger

Like most of the candidates for President this year, Phil Gramm was of age to fight in Vietnam -- and avoided it. Gramm used five deferments for college and marriage to stay in America while the Dickey Flatts of the world were fighting, and getting killed, overseas.

Rival Bob Dornan, a fighter pilot in the 1950s who went to Vietnam as a press photographer, calls Gramm "a Vietnam-era draft evader undeserving of the role of president." Would he call Gramm a draft dodger? "Yeah. Anybody born prior to 1952 who was physically fit had a choice. You either did something or sent someone else there in your place."

Laundering Illegal Campaign Contributions for Bob Packwood:

Gramm was head of the Republican's Senate campaign fundraising effort in 1992. Bob Packwood's diary describes a meeting on March 6, 1992 where Gramm promised to funnel $100,000 in party "soft" money to Packwood's campaign. The limit for party contributions to a candidate, $17,500, had alrea

dy been given at that point. (Packwood narrowly won reelection while vastly outspending his opponent.)

"What was said in that room would be enough to convict us all of something," Packwood wrote in his diary. Packwood now says that the diary entry was "totally wrong." Gramm says the diary "reflects an obvious misunderstanding of the election law..." But the simpler explanation is that Packwood's diary, which he never expected to see the light of day, and fought like a demon to keep private, is telling the truth. In his fight, Packwood warned that making the diary public would ruin senators other than himself -- and no one has reported any other diary allegations as serious as theis one against Gramm.

Gramm's extraordinary success in fundraising was his stepping stone to this presidential campaign -- a lot of Republicans owe him favors. (Just like Jerry Brown did earlier for Democrats). But Gramm owes a lot of favors to big money donors, and his career has been marked by his willingness, even eagerness, to pay back his donors with political rewards

Cloud, David S. "Gramm deal questioned." Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report v50, n48 (Dec 5, 1992):3750.