Gramm, Wendy

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see philomg ted cruz 2016mercatus, OMB graham (tozzi?)promoted to primary and evil, since she trashed the world economy and helped roll back green regs. see bakhouston chron 12/17Conservatives are not usually considered champions of criminal justice reform.But since 2010, a right-leaning policy organization in Austin has quietly risen to prominence as advocates for wide-ranging changes including closing state prisons, reducing punishment for parole violations and clearing the way for community drug treatment, an approach still occasionally derided as "hug-a-thug" liberal ideas.It's called Right on Crime, and in a state known for its "tough on crime" agenda, the innovative ideas being proposed are shaping criminal justice reforms typically embraced by Democrats."They have really made the discussion much broader than it would have been because they bring in that fiscal responsibility," said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who was a long-time Democratic legislator. He said he worked with the group through the years because of their pragmatism. "Obviously, they have a deep concern for public safety, but they knew the system got so one-sided, we couldn't afford to keep financing it."Right on Crime is a national project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that partners with the American Conservative Union Foundation, a political group for conservative legislators, and the Prison Fellowship, a Christian outreach to incarcerated inmates.Texas Public Policy Foundation was established by James Leininger, a San Antonio doctor, businessman and longtime supporter of Gov. Rick Perry. Leininger is well-known as an advocate for school vouchers and the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Texas.
'Man bites dog' storyThe organization's board includes conservative stalwarts like Wendy Lee Gramm, who is former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm's wife, and George Strake Jr.; former Republican state representatives Talmadge Heflin and Arlene Wohlgemuth are directors at the foundation.
Marc Levin, vice president of criminal justice policy at Right on Crime, said conservatives don't typically make headlines for initiatives like drug courts or keeping parole violators out of prison, but they have the credibility to implement good ideas when they see them.
"It's kind of the 'man bites dog' story, but it's probably not as surprising as it would have been 10 or 15 years ago," he said. "(Governors Rick Perry and Greg Abbott) have had success reducing the prison population and reducing crime. That's the magic of it: You have to do this in a way that enhances public safety."
The organization relies heavily on data and analytics to see what works and what doesn't, then pursues policies they can back up with statistics.
"If you look at it from 2005 to 2016, the incarceration rate fell by more than 20 percent and crime fell more than 30 percent," Levin said. "In the past, the assumption was that the best way to reduce crime was to build more prisons, but the research shows that, particularly with non-violent offenders, people with addiction and mental illness, things like drug courts get better results."
Dropping convict population
The group continues to work for more diversion programs, more treatment options and more problem-solving courts. As of December 1, the reforms championed by the organization led to legislators closing eight prisons across Texas. Officials with Texas Department of Criminal Justice said the state now has 104 prisons across the state.In the past few years, Texas' convict population has dropped by about 9,000 prisoners as sentencing reforms and ramped-up treatment programs have cut recidivism and helped keep crime rates low."Prisons are really good at incapacitating people like rapists and murderers for decades so they're not a danger to society," Levin said. "But the more common offender, the non-violent offenders, if they're only in for six months, they actually get worse because that's not enough time to even complete a treatment program."Levin said everyone, not just conservatives, likes the idea of having more people who are productive law-abiding citizens instead of being burdens on society."Saving money is certainly the appetizer," he said. "But the main course is increasing public safety, getting people in the workforce and keeping families together."Briscoe Cain, a state representative who was named the Most Conservative Legislator by political scientist Mark Jones at Rice University, said the advocacy group is leading the way in criminal justice reform across the nation."This is a bipartisan issue which our state has found much common ground on over the last several sessions," he said. "Right on Crime is a very effective organization and is respected by members of both parties and chambers."
Helping 'hug-a-thug' plans
Levin said the roots of the organization started more 10 years ago when Texas politicians decided to stop building more prisons. That decision meant lawmakers either had to release inmates or stem the tide of who was coming in.That led to adjusting sentences to account for exemplary behavior. It also meant initiatives like getting rid of jail time for people who don't pay fines and raising the threshold for felony theft from $500 to $2,500 to take inflation into account, both of which lower jail populations.Levin said the organization is now working with legislators to raise the age of criminal culpability to 18, which would put more accused juvenile criminal suspects in the juvenile court system. The juvenile criminal justice is more intensive with more services, which is more expensive in the short term, but saves money over time.He said the group is also studying graduated sanctions for people on probation and parole who commit minor violations. Instead of sending people back to prison for years for missing court dates, a weekend in jail may be a better alternative, he said.Levin said he would also like to see even more people arrested for drug possession go to treatment instead of jail. Drug courts, now largely accepted across the country, were originally ridiculed by some as "hug-a-thug" programs.
'Bipartisan' criminal justice
Diversion programs were among many of the solutions that Kim Ogg, a progressive Democrat, promised before winning election last year as Harris County District Attorney. She said there are two big reasons that people in both parties care about the operation of the criminal justice system: tax dollars and the human cost.And she applauds Right on Crime for tackling issues that are not typically Republican causes."This is living proof that criminal justice reform is a bipartisan issue," she said. "While the different interests may have different perspectives on why it's important, they agree on the bottom line that it needs to be reformed."Ogg said both sides can agree on issues like over-incarceration for low-level offenses and lack of attention to serious crimes, like untested rape kits.Tarsha Jackson, criminal justice director for the left-leaning Texas Organizing Project, said she is aware of Right on Crime but has yet to be involved with the group's initiatives. She noted that conservative groups worked with liberals during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and said she hopes to work with them soon.
"It's great to have conservatives involved," she said. "We need a diverse group; we need more groups like that. We need more collaboration."=book
<a href="http://kadamaee.ir/payesh/books-tank/04/Bryce%20-%20Pipe%20Dreams;%20Greed,%20Ego%20and%20the%20Death%20of%20Enron%20%282003%29.pdf" style="">http://kadamaee.ir/payesh/books-tank/04/Bryce%20-%20Pipe%20Dreams;%20Greed,%20Ego%20and%20the%20Death%20of%20Enron%20%282003%29.pdf</a>=wow <a href="https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2002/eirv29n20-20020524/eirv29n20-20020524_008-miss_enron_and_senator_shylock_t.pdf">https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2002/eirv29n20-20020524/eirv29n20-20020524_008-miss_enron_and_senator_shylock_t.pdf</a>
Miss Enron and Senator Shylock:The Corrupt Saga of Wendy and Phil Grammby John HoefleIf the ability to learn from one’s mistakes is the test of wisdom, targetted Federal spending on infrastructure and social prothen few couples fail the test more resoundingly than those grams vital to the welfare of the population and physical econ-“demons of deregulation,” Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and his omy. It also, not coincidentally, curtailed spending on Presiwife, Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm. The Gramms have devoted dent Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the brainchild oftheir careers to overthrowing the General Welfare provisions Lyndon LaRouche.of the American System and subjecting the U.S. population At the time, LaRouche warned that the Gramm-Rudmanto the imperial looting this nation was founded to stop. Theirs approach was incompetent as a deficit-reduction act, as itis a remarkable record of self-serving activity, conflicts of would erode the tax revenue base and actually lead to greaterinterest, failed policies, greed, and incompetence; everything deficits. LaRouche was right. According to the U.S. Treasury,they have touched has been a disaster, of which the collapse the Federal deficit for fiscal 1985 was $212 billion, a figureof Enron is but the tip of the iceberg. which jumped to $221 billion infiscal 1986. The deficit shrankWhile Senator Gramm is the more prominent of the pair, to just over $150 billion for fiscal years 1987, 1988, and 1989,Wendy Gramm has also played an important role in the cre- then took off again, jumping to $221 billion in fiscal 1990,ation of the biggest financial bubble in history. Few Senators $269 billion in fiscal 1991, and a record $290 billion in fishave done more damage to the nation than the senior Senator cal 1992.from Texas, who began his Congressional career as a Demo- Under Gramm-Rudman’s spending limits, the Office ofcratic Representative in 1978, switched parties in 1983, and Management and Budget (OMB) became one of the mostjoined the Senate in 1984. Along the way he became one of powerful agencies in government, with great influence overthe most rabid conservative revolutionaries, pushing his anti- which programs survived and which did not. The administragovernment, pro-speculation agenda with remarkable zeal. tor for Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB at the time(Gramm made a run for President in 1995, but his dubious was Wendy Gramm.campaign was derailed by revelations that he had invested ina soft-core sex movie, causing the New York Post to dub him Miss Enron Rewarded“Porno Gramm.”) While Senator Phil was busy pushing imperialism in theWendy Gramm, who like her husband has a PhD in Senate, Wendy was pushing it in the Executive branch, aseconomics—they met while teaching at Texas A&M Univer- executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulasity—has also made a career out of bubble-building, pushing tory Relief, a pet project of then-Vice President George H.W.deregulation as the director of a White House deregulation Bush. The goal of the Bush task force was to sweep away thetask force in the 1980s, after which she opened the Pandora’s so-called “regulatory burdens” which prevented the financialBox of energy derivatives speculation while head of the speculators from seizing control of the economy. Of particuCommodity Futures Trading Commission; having done so, lar distaste to the Gramms were two measures implementedshe cashed in by joining the board of directors of Enron. under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Glass-Steagall Actof 1933 and the Public Utilities Holding Company ActNation-Busting (PUHCA) of 1935. Both acts were intended to break theSenator Gramm made his name with the Gramm-Latta power of the financiers, led by the House of Morgan, over theand Gramm-Rudman-Hollings laws in the 1980s, legislation U.S. economy, and the goal of deregulation was to restore thedesigned to reduce the power of the Federal government and financiers to what they considered their rightful place. Theincrease the power of the financial markets. In the name of Gramms were happy to participate, and were rewarded acbalancing the budget, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Bal- cordingly.anced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of...=<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/04/clarence_thomas_female_supporters_in_the_iwf.html">http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/04/clarence_thomas_female_supporters_in_the_iwf.html</a>Confirmation Bias

How “Women for Judge Thomas” turned into a conservative powerhouse.
By Barbara Spindelclarence thomas anita hill.
Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her is credited for ushering in the Year of the Woman. But it also has another, less visible legacy.

Right on the heels of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson, the HBO film Confirmation offers another opportunity to relive a depressing ’90s spectacle—in this case, Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearings. Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her, and her poor treatment at the hands of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, are often credited with raising awareness of the issue of workplace sexual harassment and ushering in the so-called Year of the Woman, the 1992 election of four women to the Senate. (Confirmation premieres April 16 and stars Scandal’s Kerry Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas.)

But the Thomas hearings have another, less visible legacy. A small group of prominent Washington women rallied around the nominee; they were headed by the late Ricky Silberman, a friend of Thomas’ who, like Hill, had worked with him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Calling themselves Women for Judge Thomas, they pointedly demonstrated that not all women, simply by virtue of their sex, were ready to don an “I Believe Anita Hill” pin. This ad-hoc bunch—which included Anita Blair, Barbara Ledeen, and the late Barbara Olson—went on to form the Independent Women’s Forum, a D.C. nonprofit devoted to waging war on mainstream feminism.
Stills of Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce in Confirmation.Kerry Washington as Anita Hill and Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas in Confirmation.

Back in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies had whipped up fears of unisex public bathrooms and female military conscription in order to help kill the Equal Rights Amendment. After that, groups such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America railed against reproductive rights and gay rights and championed traditional gender roles. But among conservative women’s groups, the IWF was something new. If you squinted, its members—enterprising, educated professionals—looked like they could belong to the National Organization for Women. Instead, they had an extreme loathing for the feminist movement.

The IWF argued that second-wave feminism had solved the problem of sex discrimination. In a 1997 interview with now-defunct conservative magazine Insight, Blair, who was by then IWF president, said that current feminists were “playing out their own Freudian drama on the policy stage, saying, ‘Well, my first husband walked out on me, or I never had dates in high school, so all men are bad.’ ” A 1997 IWF press release called National Pay Inequity Awareness Day “a cruel hoax … designed to brainwash girls and young women into believing that they are victims.” The IWF’s Elizabeth Larson, in the organization’s Women’s Quarterly magazine, called sexual harassment an issue drummed up by “a growing number of women, many spurred on by Anita Hill’s example … [who] find it more profitable to litigate than to work.” After the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act—spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden in what was widely seen as atonement for his mishandling of the Thomas hearings—the IWF argued that the legislation should be repealed or receive zero funding; IWF spokeswoman (and ’90s right-wing It Girl) Laura Ingraham referred to VAWA as feminist “pork” with a “tear-jerker” title. The group also took on affirmative action, headlining a Women’s Quarterly article on the topic “That’s No White Male, That’s My Husband”—a phrase that revealed a lot about IWF constituents’ racial identities and loyalties. (“You can’t have white guys saying you don’t need affirmative action,” Ledeen told the Washington Post when asked why the anti-feminist IWF had organized as women in the first place.)
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Laura Ingraham appears with Sen. George Allen at a fundraiser on Oct. 7, 2006, in Maidens, Virginia.

In 1995, NOW President Patricia Ireland, in a considerable understatement, called it “a little startling” that the new and tiny conservative upstart IWF, with fewer than 2,000 members, was garnering media coverage to rival that of Ireland’s mass-membership organization. It surely helped that stalwart right-wing donors including Richard Scaife and the Koch brothers were funding the IWF, and that its well-connected roster included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman (and wife of Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney, Who Stole Feminism? author Christina Hoff Sommers, neoconservative writer (and wife of Norman Podhoretz) Midge Decter, and Wendy Lee Gramm and Mary Ellen Bork, married, respectively, to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

Hill was often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.

While much of the IWF’s campaign against feminism was waged in the media, the group also took the fight to Capitol Hill; the IWF testified before Congress against the Violence Against Women Act and affirmative action, and filed amicus briefs opposing the enforcement of Title IX and the coeducation of the Virginia Military Institute. After the election of George W. Bush, the IWF’s clout grew as its members received posts within the new administration, among them Elaine Chao as labor secretary, Diana Furchtgott-Roth as chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Blair as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. Most absurdly, two IWF members, then-president Nancy Pfotenhauer and board member Margot Hill, were appointed to the administration’s National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.

Despite engaging in serious business, the IWF’s spokeswomen never appeared to take themselves too seriously; they loved to bait feminists but always with a smile. Blair said, “There’s a telltale way to find a liberal feminist: It’s the nasty wrinkles around her mouth that she gets from frowning. You’ll probably find my side with laugh lines.” “We have no angry agenda,” Grace Paine Terzian, then publisher of Women’s Quarterly, told a journalist in 1995. When Wendy Kaminer wrote on right-wing challenges to feminism in the American Prospect the following year, the IWF’s Elizabeth Lurie responded in a letter to the editor that she had found the piece “howlingly funny.” All of this forced cheer was intended to highlight the contrast between the IWF’s anti-feminism and its caricatured version of feminism, which, according to Hoff Sommers in a 1996 60 Minutes profile of the IWF, had come to mean “that you’re chronically offended, that you’re looking for oppression and bias under every tree.” 

Plenty of people still see Hill as fitting this description, even 25 years after the Thomas hearings. Although she accused Thomas of repeated graphic descriptions of pornographic films, including scenes of rape and bestiality, and of detailed boasts about his own sexual prowess, Hill was and is often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Indeed, IWF managing director Carrie Lukas recently described Hill’s allegations against Thomas as “rather PG-rated.”

Of course, the IWF exists not because its founders thought Hill was overreacting but because, as friends of Thomas, they thought she was lying. In the years since—when downplaying the existence and impact of sex discrimination and of gender-based crimes such as harassment, rape, and domestic violence—the IWF doesn’t suggest that all women are lying. The group has frequently suggested, however, that women who speak out about these issues are whining, and should stop playing the victim, and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense the IWF, whose current mission is to “improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty,” has ties to Thomas that are not merely personal but philosophical as well.

The women of the IWF continue to stand by Clarence Thomas, and he by them. After Silberman’s 2007 death, Thomas sat down with the group’s Michelle Bernard and Charlotte Hays to talk about his friend for the IWF newsletter. “Sometimes at IWF we are accused of being anti-women and anti-feminist, because our mantra is that all issues are women’s issues,” his interviewers noted. “I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Thomas responded, proceeding to describe his own experiences being called “traitor” and “Uncle Tom.” “When I am criticized, I take it as a compliment,” he said. “If I weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t talk about me. Don’t worry about it. You just wish them good health and do it with a smile.”

<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Work at OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)</h2>Tozzi was instrumental in the passage of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act" title="Paperwork Reduction Act" style="text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Paperwork Reduction Act</a> and the establishment of the OMB <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Information_and_Regulatory_Affairs" title="Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs" style="text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs</a> in 1980. Under his directorship, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was the gatekeeper for virtually all proposed regulations dealing with public health and safety.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tozzi#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">[3]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tozzi#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">[4]</a> It quickly became known among watchdog groups as a bureaucratic “black hole” where proposed regulations disappeared.Tozzi was the Deputy Administrator of OMB in charge of the OIRA (and therefore of the regulatory agencies) when he left the organization in 1983 at age 45.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tozzi#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">[5]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tozzi#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">[6]</a> He had also been the head of the Federal Ad Hoc Group on Toxic Torts.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration: none; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">citation needed</a>]Between 1983 and 1986 he was employed as a 'consultant economist' by Beveridge & Diamond, the law firm of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruckelshaus" title="William Ruckelshaus" style="background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: initial; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration: none;">William Ruckelshaus</a>, ex-administrator of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Protection_Agency" title="Environmental Protection Agency" class="mw-redirect" style="background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: initial; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration: none;">Environmental Protection Agency</a>, and now contracted to the chemical industry. The firm's key lobbyist was J Marshall Coleman (ex State Attorney General) who was counsel to Dow Chemical and working in close relationship with the Chemical Manufacturing Association's American Industrial Health Council (AIHC), along with Edison Electric Institute, and the Society of the Plastic Industry.1980-3 tozziFrom 1985 to 1988, Gramm was head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)From 2001 to March 2006, OIRA was headed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Graham(policy_analyst)" title="John Graham (policy analyst)" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">John D. Graham</a>, who departed to accept the deanship of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardee_RAND_Graduate_School" title="Pardee RAND Graduate School" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Pardee RAND Graduate School</a>. The OIRA Administrator from September 2009 to August 21, 2012 was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein" title="Cass Sunstein" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Cass Sunstein</a>, who was succeeded by Acting Director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Bershteyn" title="Boris Bershteyn" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Boris Bershteyn</a>. In April 2013, President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama" title="Barack Obama" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Barack Obama</a> nominated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_A._Shelanski" title="Howard A. Shelanski" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 22.4px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255) none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Howard A. Shelanski</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Information_and_Regulatory_Affairs#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">[8]</a> who started in June 2013.see enron tag for timelines
<div>=</div><div>http://www.citizen.org/cmep/article_redirect.cfm?ID=7104</div><div>
</div><div>Blind Faith: How Deregulation and Enron's Influence Over Government Looted Billions from Americans  Sen. Gramm, White House Must Be Investigated for Role in Enron's Fraud of Consumers and Shareholders  December 2001  Public Citizen'sCritical Mass Energy & Environment Program<hr style="height: 1px; line-height: 14px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="1" /><div style="line-height: 18px;">Summary of Findings </div><div style="line-height: 18px;">
</div><ul style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; line-height: 14px;"><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">The combination of unregulated state wholesale electricity markets and federal deregulation of commodity exchanges has removed accountability and transparency from the energy sector, allowing corporations to manipulate price and supply of electricity and natural gas through the exercise of significant market power. California's recent energy crisis and Enron's bankruptcy would have been impossible under a regulated system.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Enron developed mutually beneficial relationships with federal regulators and lawmakers to support policies that significantly curtailed government oversight of their operations.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Enron's business model was built entirely on the premise that it could make more money speculating on electricity contracts than it could by actually producing electricity at a power plant. Central to Enron's strategy of turning electricity into a speculative commodity was removing government oversight of its trading practices and exploiting market deficiencies to allow it to manipulate prices and supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Dr. Wendy Gramm, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), exempted Enron's trading of futures contracts in response to a request for such an action by Enron in 1992. At the time, Enron was a significant source of campaign financing for Wendy Gramm's husband, U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Six days after she provided Enron the exemption it wanted, Wendy Gramm resigned her position at the CFTC. Five weeks after her resignation, Enron appointed her to its Board of Directors, where she served on the Board's Audit Committee. Her service on the Audit Committee made her responsible for verifying Enron's accounting procedures and other detailed financial information not available to outside analysts or shareholders.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Following Wendy Gramm's appointment to Enron's board, the company became a significant source of personal income for the Gramms. Enron paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in salary, attendance fees, stock option sales and dividends from 1993 to 2001. The value of Wendy Gramm's Enron stock options swelled from no more than $15,000 in 1995 to as much as $500,000 by 2000.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Phil Gramm is the second largest recipient in Congress of Enron campaign contributions, receiving $97,350 since 1989.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Days before her attorneys informed Enron in December 1998 that Wendy Gramm's control of Enron stock might pose a conflict of interest with her husband's work, she sold $276,912 worth of Enron stock. [accidentally insulated from losses?] </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Enron spent $3.45 million in lobbying expenses in 1999 and 2000 to deregulate the trading of energy futures, among other issues.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">In December 2000, Phil Gramm helped muscle a bill through Congress without a committee hearing that deregulated energy commodity trading. This act allowed Enron to operate an unregulated power auction -- EnronOnline -- that quickly gained control over a significant share of California's electricity and natural gas market.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Phil Gramm's legislation was in conflict with the explicit recommendations of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, which is composed of representatives from the Department of Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Working group expressly recommended against deregulating energy commodity trading because the traders would be in strong positions to manipulate prices and supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">From June 2000 through December 2000 -- prior to the bill's passage -- California experienced significant price spikes but only one Stage 3 emergency (requiring "rolling blackouts"). After passage of Gramm's energy commodity deregulation bill in December 2000, Stage 3 emergencies increased from one to 38 until federal regulators helped end the crisis by imposing price controls in June 2001. Phil Gramm's legislation, for which Enron was the primary lobbyist, allowed Enron's unregulated energy trading subsidiary to manipulate supply in such a way as to threaten millions of California households and businesses with power outages for the sole purpose of increasing the company's profits.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Because of Enron's new, unregulated power auction, the company's "Wholesale Services" revenues quadrupled -- from $12 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $48.4 billion in the first quarter of 2001. This remarkable revenue increase came on top of the record revenue gain that Enron posted from 1999 to 2000, when full-year "Wholesale Services" revenues increased from $35.5 billion to $93.3 billion -- a 163 percent increase.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Investigations by state and federal officials concluded that power generators and power marketers intentionally withheld electricity, creating artificial shortages in order to increase the cost of power.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Enron took advantage of lax oversight following deregulation and formed a complicated web of more than 2,800 subsidiaries -- more than 30 percent (874) of which were located in officially designated offshore tax and bank havens.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">President Bush's presidential campaign received significant financial support from Enron ($1.14 million).  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Upon assuming office in 2001, Bush promptly scrapped plans put into place by former President Bill Clinton to significantly limit the effectiveness of these countries as tax and bank regulation havens. This action came at the height of high West Coast energy prices, probably allowing Enron to siphon billions to its offshore accounts.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">At the same time, the Bush administration and certain members of Congress waged a legislative and public relations campaign against the imposition of federal price controls in the Western electricity market. Such price controls remove the ability of companies exercising significant market share to price-gouge by effectively re-regulating the market. Bush's opposition to price controls unnecessarily extended the California energy crisis and cost the state billions of dollars.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">When federal regulators finally imposed strict, round-the-clock price controls over the entire Western electricity market on June 19, 2001, companies operating power auctions (like Enron) no longer had the ability to charge excessive prices and no longer had incentive to manipulate supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">While price controls clearly saved California, Enron suffered because it could no longer manipulate the market and price-gouge consumers. With no significant asset ownership to offset its losses, Enron's unregulated power auction quickly accumulated massive debts. At the same time, the curtailed revenue flow made it more difficult for executives and members of the Board to conceal the firm's accounting gimmicks. Amid the turmoil, CEO Jeff Skilling resigned in August. But shareholders and federal regulators did not learn of the severity of Enron's financial trouble until November 2001. At this time, Enron's top executives continued to receive significant bonuses.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">Due to Wendy Gramm's position on Enron's Audit Committee, she had intimate knowledge of Enron's financial structure and had access to sensitive financial information not available to Wall Street analysts or average shareholders. It is therefore probable that she knew of Enron's possibly fraudulent practices for some time and that her husband would have known as well. Enron's 874 tax haven subsidiaries allowed Enron to funnel billions of dollars to offshore accounts.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(" view.image="view.image" id="429" background-position="background-position" px="px" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat">The Gramms' close involvement with Enron's corporate and legislative activities, the Gramms' possible knowledge and/or connection to criminal misconduct relating to Enron's collapse, and the effects of Enron's layoffs and other economic impacts on Senator Gramm's constituents may have been the leading factor in Gramm's decision on September 4 not to seek re-election to the Senate in 2002.</li></ul><hr style="height: 1px; line-height: 14px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="1" /> Public Citizen Recommendations  </div><div></div>

ubs <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/indivs.php">http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/indivs.php</a>

=fang machine bktim phillips 131 goodlatte, ralph reed, century strategy  xian; rec'd by rove led to 1st big gig: enron 380K$ for energy dereg --> energy crisis /recession 201 DAVIS?! 132 note 15 Public citizen blind faith  http://www.citizen.org/cmep/article_redirect.cfm?ID=7104  see below<div>
</div><div style="line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Summary of Findings </div><div style="text-align: left; line-height: 18px;">
</div><ul style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; line-height: 14px;"><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">The combination of unregulated state wholesale electricity markets and federal deregulation of commodity exchanges has removed accountability and transparency from the energy sector, allowing corporations to manipulate price and supply of electricity and natural gas through the exercise of significant market power. California's recent energy crisis and Enron's bankruptcy would have been impossible under a regulated system.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Enron developed mutually beneficial relationships with federal regulators and lawmakers to support policies that significantly curtailed government oversight of their operations.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Enron's business model was built entirely on the premise that it could make more money speculating on electricity contracts than it could by actually producing electricity at a power plant. Central to Enron's strategy of turning electricity into a speculative commodity was removing government oversight of its trading practices and exploiting market deficiencies to allow it to manipulate prices and supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Dr. Wendy Gramm, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), exempted Enron's trading of futures contracts in response to a request for such an action by Enron in 1992. At the time, Enron was a significant source of campaign financing for Wendy Gramm's husband, U.S. Senator Phil Gramm.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Six days after she provided Enron the exemption it wanted, Wendy Gramm resigned her position at the CFTC. Five weeks after her resignation, Enron appointed her to its Board of Directors, where she served on the Board's Audit Committee. Her service on the Audit Committee made her responsible for verifying Enron's accounting procedures and other detailed financial information not available to outside analysts or shareholders.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Following Wendy Gramm's appointment to Enron's board, the company became a significant source of personal income for the Gramms. Enron paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in salary, attendance fees, stock option sales and dividends from 1993 to 2001. The value of Wendy Gramm's Enron stock options swelled from no more than $15,000 in 1995 to as much as $500,000 by 2000.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Phil Gramm is the second largest recipient in Congress of Enron campaign contributions, receiving $97,350 since 1989.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Days before her attorneys informed Enron in December 1998 that Wendy Gramm's control of Enron stock might pose a conflict of interest with her husband's work, she sold $276,912 worth of Enron stock.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Enron spent $3.45 million in lobbying expenses in 1999 and 2000 to deregulate the trading of energy futures, among other issues.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">In December 2000, Phil Gramm helped muscle a bill through Congress without a committee hearing that deregulated energy commodity trading. This act allowed Enron to operate an unregulated power auction -- EnronOnline -- that quickly gained control over a significant share of California's electricity and natural gas market.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Phil Gramm's legislation was in conflict with the explicit recommendations of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, which is composed of representatives from the Department of Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Working group expressly recommended against deregulating energy commodity trading because the traders would be in strong positions to manipulate prices and supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">From June 2000 through December 2000 -- prior to the bill's passage -- California experienced significant price spikes but only one Stage 3 emergency (requiring "rolling blackouts"). After passage of Gramm's energy commodity deregulation bill in December 2000, Stage 3 emergencies increased from one to 38 until federal regulators helped end the crisis by imposing price controls in June 2001. Phil Gramm's legislation, for which Enron was the primary lobbyist, allowed Enron's unregulated energy trading subsidiary to manipulate supply in such a way as to threaten millions of California households and businesses with power outages for the sole purpose of increasing the company's profits.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Because of Enron's new, unregulated power auction, the company's "Wholesale Services" revenues quadrupled -- from $12 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $48.4 billion in the first quarter of 2001. This remarkable revenue increase came on top of the record revenue gain that Enron posted from 1999 to 2000, when full-year "Wholesale Services" revenues increased from $35.5 billion to $93.3 billion -- a 163 percent increase.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Investigations by state and federal officials concluded that power generators and power marketers intentionally withheld electricity, creating artificial shortages in order to increase the cost of power.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Enron took advantage of lax oversight following deregulation and formed a complicated web of more than 2,800 subsidiaries -- more than 30 percent (874) of which were located in officially designated offshore tax and bank havens.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">President Bush's presidential campaign received significant financial support from Enron ($1.14 million).  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Upon assuming office in 2001, Bush promptly scrapped plans put into place by former President Bill Clinton to significantly limit the effectiveness of these countries as tax and bank regulation havens. This action came at the height of high West Coast energy prices, probably allowing Enron to siphon billions to its offshore accounts.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">At the same time, the Bush administration and certain members of Congress waged a legislative and public relations campaign against the imposition of federal price controls in the Western electricity market. Such price controls remove the ability of companies exercising significant market share to price-gouge by effectively re-regulating the market. Bush's opposition to price controls unnecessarily extended the California energy crisis and cost the state billions of dollars.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">When federal regulators finally imposed strict, round-the-clock price controls over the entire Western electricity market on June 19, 2001, companies operating power auctions (like Enron) no longer had the ability to charge excessive prices and no longer had incentive to manipulate supply.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">While price controls clearly saved California, Enron suffered because it could no longer manipulate the market and price-gouge consumers. With no significant asset ownership to offset its losses, Enron's unregulated power auction quickly accumulated massive debts. At the same time, the curtailed revenue flow made it more difficult for executives and members of the Board to conceal the firm's accounting gimmicks. Amid the turmoil, CEO Jeff Skilling resigned in August. But shareholders and federal regulators did not learn of the severity of Enron's financial trouble until November 2001. At this time, Enron's top executives continued to receive significant bonuses.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Due to Wendy Gramm's position on Enron's Audit Committee, she had intimate knowledge of Enron's financial structure and had access to sensitive financial information not available to Wall Street analysts or average shareholders. It is therefore probable that she knew of Enron's possibly fraudulent practices for some time and that her husband would have known as well. Enron's 874 tax haven subsidiaries allowed Enron to funnel billions of dollars to offshore accounts.  </li><li style="list-style: none; padding-left: 10px; line-height: 18px; background-image: url(http://www.citizen.org/view.image?id=429); background-position: 0px 7px; background-repeat: no-repeat;">The Gramms' close involvement with Enron's corporate and legislative activities, the Gramms' possible knowledge and/or connection to criminal misconduct relating to Enron's collapse, and the effects of Enron's layoffs and other economic impacts on Senator Gramm's constituents may have been the leading factor in Gramm's decision on September 4 not to seek re-election to the Senate in 2002.</li></ul><div>http://www.citizen.org/cmep/article_redirect.cfm?ID=7104</div>

<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil">http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil</a>

...

But PHIL  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."

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 potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are 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."

---

So, even today accounting firms can accept jobs as consultants to their clients. Meanwhile, companies like Enron, working with their accountants and consultants, were able to doctor quarterly reports, bamboozle investors, and scam consumers - in Enron's case, California energy consumers - into paying higher electricity prices to cover their losses elsewhere.

One result of this free-market perfidy was the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis, who was taken down by voters after an electricity crisis was manufactured by Enron energy traders in league with top executives there.

Too many companies created phony assets,transactions, and profits, assisted by accountants enticed by large consultant fees to look the other way. In the end, together with thousands of other businesses, Enron crashed, taking their costing investors - including pension funds - many billions.

Few of the transgressors were punished, though Enron's leading executive, Ken Lay, received a stiff jail sentence before he died. In the last 10 years, private enterprise found new ways to scam consumers and investors, leading to the worst world-wide recession since the Great Depression.

It was actually the wife of well-known, right-wing U.S. Senator Phil Gramm who is said to have inspired the present crisis. We are told Mrs. Gramm - associated with Enron's crash and the bankruptcy of a large managed health-care company - came up with the idea of "credit default swaps" - i.e., insuring bad mortgages to minimize risk and generate long-term income. [?!]

Bad private sector decision-making led to the closure of hundred of banks and the death, for all practical purposes, of "investment banking." Trillions of dollars of investment wealth evaporated.

===

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 public 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 (AYN R FAN, INVIS HAND --> "VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS" 96

oct 26 2008 recant [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 has enron loophole to exempt from oversight ed to exclude derivs from regs

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

dereg --> consol --> up prices

patr acts

===

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 extremism and interstate protectionism more than common sense " 98

enron lobbied to get out of Coomidity  Exchange Act req report to Commod Futures trading Comission 99  week after b1 defeated, wendy gramm brought petition,

passed 2 to 1 p 99  Phil big enron recipeint.  shiela blair dissent, "dangerous precendent" wendy resigned 5 wks later, went to enron bd---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Grammoddly short and neutral?
<div id="mw-content-text" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" style="direction: ltr; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); line-height: 22.3999996185303px;" lang="en">Wendy Lee Gramm (born 1945) is an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans" title="Americans" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-position: 0% 0%; background-clip: border-box; background-origin: padding-box; background-size: auto auto;">American</a> economist and a distinguished senior scholar at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University" title="George Mason University" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-position: 0% 0%; background-clip: border-box; background-origin: padding-box; background-size: auto auto;">George Mason University</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-position: 0% 0%; background-clip: border-box; background-origin: padding-box; background-size: auto auto;">Mercatus Center</a>, a free-market think tank based in Washington D.C. She is also the wife of former United States Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm" title="Phil Gramm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Phil Gramm</a>. Gramm has gained notoriety for her role in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal" title="Enron scandal" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Enron scandal</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[1]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[2]</a><h2 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Biography</h2>Wendy Lee Gramm was born in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii" title="Hawaii" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Hawaii</a> and is of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea" title="Korea" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Korean</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Hawaiian" title="Native Hawaiian" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Native Hawaiian</a> ancestry. She received a B.A. degree in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics" title="Economics" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">economics</a> from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellesley_College" title="Wellesley College" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Wellesley College</a> in 1966 and a Ph.D. in economics from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_University" title="Northwestern University" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Northwestern University</a> in 1971. In her role at the Mercatus Center, Gramm generally calls for deregulation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_United_States" title="Energy policy of the United States" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">energy industry</a>. Previously, Gramm held several positions in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_Administration" title="Reagan Administration" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Reagan Administration</a>, including heading the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Trading_Commission" title="Commodity Futures Trading Commission" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Commodity Futures Trading Commission</a> from 1988 to 1993. After a lobbying campaign from Enron, the CFTC exempted it from regulation in trading of energy derivatives. Subsequently, Gramm resigned from the CFTC and took a seat on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron" title="Enron" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Enron</a> Board of Directors and served on its Audit Committee. While on the board of directors she received donations from Enron to support the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Mercatus Center</a>.After the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal" title="Enron scandal" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Enron scandal</a>, Gramm and the other directors of the energy company were named in several investor lawsuits, many of which have been settled. In particular, Gramm and other Enron directors agreed to a 168 million dollar settlement in a suit led by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California" title="University of California" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">University of California</a>. As part of that settlement, the directors agreed to collectively pay $13 million to settle claims of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading" title="Insider trading" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">insider trading</a>. The remainder of the settlement was to be paid by insurance.From 1985 to 1988, Gramm was head of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Management_and_Budget" title="Office of Management and Budget" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Office of Management and Budget</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Information_and_Regulatory_Affairs" title="Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs</a> (OIRA). In 2002, OIRA solicited public recommendations for regulatory reform. Mercatus made 44 recommendations.Gramm also serves as chair of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Public_Policy_Foundation" title="Texas Public Policy Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Texas Public Policy Foundation</a> and a director of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Women%27s_Forum" title="Independent Women's Forum" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Independent Women's Forum</a>, a conservative women's group.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-ronnee-3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[3]</a> She has sat on the boards of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corporation" title="Enron Corporation" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Enron Corporation</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Beef_Processors" title="Iowa Beef Processors" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Iowa Beef Processors</a>, Invesco Funds, Longitude, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Mercantile_Exchange" title="Chicago Mercantile Exchange" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Chicago Mercantile Exchange</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Farm_Insurance_Companies" title="State Farm Insurance Companies" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">State Farm Insurance Companies</a>.For eight years, Gramm taught in the Department of Economics at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_A%26M_University" title="Texas A&M University" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Texas A&M University</a> and later served on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_A%26M_University_System" title="Texas A&M University System" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Texas A&M University System</a> Board of Regents.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[4]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[5]</a>She has two sons: Jeff, who heads the indie-rock outfit Aden, and Marshall, a professor of economics at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian" title="Presbyterian" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Presbyterian-affiliated</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_College" title="Rhodes College" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Rhodes College</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128);">Ronald Reagan</a> once said Gramm was "my favorite economist."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[6]</a><h2 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">References[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wendy_Lee_Gramm&action=edit&section=2&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: References" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><ol class="references" style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/01/28/wendy_gramm/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; word-wrap: break-word; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/01/28/wendy_gramm/</a></li><li id="cite_note-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/040126/26eewhere.htm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; word-wrap: break-word; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/040126/26eewhere.htm</a></li><li id="cite_note-ronnee-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-ronnee_3-0" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Ronnee Schreiber, 'Pro-Women, Pro-Palin, Antifeminist: Conservative Women and Conservative Movement Politics', in Crisis of Conservatism? The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, & American Politics After Bush, Gillian Peele, Joel D. Aberbach (eds.), Oxford: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University_Press" title="Oxford University Press" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Oxford University Press</a>, 2011, p. 134</li><li id="cite_note-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.law.upenn.edu/academics/institutes/regulation/papers/wendyLeeGrammBio.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 18px; word-wrap: break-word; background: url(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif) 100% 50% no-repeat;">http://www.law.upenn.edu/academics/institutes/regulation/papers/wendyLeeGrammBio.pdf</a></li><li id="cite_note-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.theeagle.com/editorial/Gov--Perry-is-doing-irreparable-harm-to-A-amp-amp-M2011-05-22T14-07-13" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; word-wrap: break-word; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://www.theeagle.com/editorial/Gov--Perry-is-doing-irreparable-harm-to-A-amp-amp-M2011-05-22T14-07-13</a></li><li id="cite_note-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm#cite_ref-6" style="text-decoration: none; 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font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">External links[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wendy_Lee_Gramm&action=edit&section=3&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: External links" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20version%3D%221.1%22%20width%3D%225%22%20height%3D%2213%22%3E%0A%3Ccircle%20cx%3D%222.5%22%20cy%3D%229.5%22%20r%3D%222.5%22%20fill%3D%22%2300528c%22%2F%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://mercatus.org/wendy-gramm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">Gramm's bio</a>, Mercatus Center</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">Critical report</a> on Wendy Gramm from the Clean Air Trust, January 2002</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2005/jan07.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">UC press release on Enron settlement</a></li></ul><table class="navbox" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); border-image-source: initial; 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border-color: rgb(253, 253, 253); border-left-width: 2px; border-left-style: solid; width: 1222px; padding: 0px; background: transparent;"><div style="padding: 0em 0.25em;"><ul style="margin: 0px; padding: 0.125em 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20version%3D%221.1%22%20width%3D%225%22%20height%3D%2213%22%3E%0A%3Ccircle%20cx%3D%222.5%22%20cy%3D%229.5%22%20r%3D%222.5%22%20fill%3D%22%2300528c%22%2F%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A);"><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_International_Authority_File" title="Virtual International Authority File" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">VIAF</a>: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://viaf.org/viaf/21213283" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">21213283</a></li></ul></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div id="catlinks" class="catlinks" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 5px; margin-top: 1em; 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<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">Wendy Gramm</h1>

<h3 id="siteSub">From SourceWatch</h3>

<div id="jump-to-nav">Jump to: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#column-one">navigation</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#searchInput">search</a></div>

Wendy Lee Gramm is chairman of the "regulatory studies program" at the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center">Mercatus Center</a> of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_Mason_University" title="George Mason University">George Mason University</a>, generally calling for deregulation of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Energy_industry&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Energy industry (page does not exist)" class="new">energy industry</a>. She was on <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Enron" title="Enron" class="mw-redirect">Enron</a>'s board of directors before its collapse. Enron had been a financial backer of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center">Mercatus Center</a>.

Previously, Wendy Gramm held several positions in the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reagan_Administration" title="Reagan Administration" class="mw-redirect">Reagan Administration</a>, including heading the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Commodity_Futures_Trading_Commission" title="Commodity Futures Trading Commission">Commodity Futures Trading Commission</a>, when it exempted from regulation Enron trading in energy derivatives.

She has also previously been head of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Management_and_Budget" title="Office of Management and Budget" class="mw-redirect">Office of Management and Budget</a>'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 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center">Mercatus Center</a>.

Wendy Gramm is married to Senator <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Phil_Gramm" title="Phil Gramm">Phil Gramm</a>.

<h2>Contents</h2>

</div>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#Positions_held">1 Positions held</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#Government">1.1 Government</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#Thinktanks">1.2 Thinktanks</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#Private_companies">1.3 Private companies</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wendy_Gramm#References">2 References</a></li>

</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

<h2>Positions held</h2>

<a name="Government" id="Government"> </a>wendy

<h3>Government</h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Management_and_Budget" title="Office of Management and Budget" class="mw-redirect">Office of Management and Budget</a>'s (OMB) 'Information and Regulatory Affairs', Director (1985-1988)</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Commodity_Futures_Trading_Commission" title="Commodity Futures Trading Commission">Commodity Futures Trading Commission</a>, Director (1988-1993)</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mercatus_Center" title="Mercatus Center">Mercatus Center</a> Regulatory Studies Program, Chairman</li>

</ul>

<h3>Thinktanks</h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Texas_Public_Policy_Foundation" title="Texas Public Policy Foundation">Texas Public Policy Foundation</a>, Chair, 2000-</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Independent_Women%27s_Forum" title="Independent Women's Forum">Independent Women's Forum</a>, Director</li>

</ul>

<h3>Private companies</h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Enron" title="Enron" class="mw-redirect">Enron</a>, director</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Iowa_Beef_Processors" title="Iowa Beef Processors">Iowa Beef Processors</a> (IBP)</li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Invesco_Funds&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Invesco Funds (page does not exist)" class="new">Invesco Funds</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Longitude&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Longitude (page does not exist)" class="new">Longitude</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Chicago_Mercantile_Exchange&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Chicago Mercantile Exchange (page does not exist)" class="new">Chicago Mercantile Exchange</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_Farm_Insurance_Companies&action=edit&redlink=1" title="State Farm Insurance Companies (page does not exist)" class="new">State Farm Insurance Companies</a></li>

</ul>

<h2>References</h2>

<ul>

<li>Clean Air Trust, <a href="http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html" title="http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html" rel="nofollow" class="external text">Trust names Wendy Lee Gramm The Clean Air 'Villan of the Month'</a>, January 2002</li>

<li>"<a href="http://www.mercatus.org/people.php/35.html?menuid=" title="http://www.mercatus.org/people.php/35.html?menuid=" rel="nofollow" class="external text">Wendy Gramm</a>", Mercatus Center</li>

<li>Bridget Magnus, <a href="http://www.shortwoman.com/archives/000036.html" title="http://www.shortwoman.com/archives/000036.html" rel="nofollow" class="external text">The Problem with Wendy</a>, ShortWoman blog, August 20, 2003.</li>

</ul>

</div>

<a href="http://">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/gramm.html</a>

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.COI

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.

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.

<a href="http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html">http://www.cleanairtrust.org/villain.0102.html</a>

Gt Unravel  p 130

exempted enron from regs while wife on bd; then went to work for UBS Warburg, that bought enron trading op blog but looks legit:some links below
Friends of Rick Perry: Mr. and Mrs. Gramm 3/4by NomadA Close look at Wendy GrammIn this the third in the series, I want to take a moment to examine the life and deeds of the wife of Phil Gramm, Wendy Lee Gramm. I think you will find it- for want of a better word- breath-taking, but not in a good way.Getting StartedUnder normal circumstances, the wife of a senator would hardly be worth a second glance. However, Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm is no ordinary wife of no ordinary senator. As a study of modern politics, in all its corruption and ambition, perky Wendy Gramm is a fair enough study in her own right.First let’s cover the early history, collected from various sources.Wendy Gramm’s Korean grandfather immigrated to Hawaii as a sugar plantation laborer. Like her grandfather, Wendy’s father had originally started out as a laborer in the sugar fields. According to the story, he selected his bride from a series of photos of Korean women and sent her money to join him in Hawaii. He married in 1939 at age 25.During the Depression, he left Hawaii for a university in Indiana where he earned an engineering degree. He later returned to Hawaii and found a job at a sugar processing plant where he eventually worked his way to the top of the company, later becoming a vice-president of a sugar company.Born in 1945 in Hawaii, Wendy Lee got her education during the '60s, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics from Wellesley in 1966. She then received her economics doctorate from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, five years later.As the Houston Press notes:When she took a teaching post at A&M in 1970, she has said, Wendy Lee planned to spend only five years in Aggieland..then go teach at a small liberal arts college somewhere. That same year, she and Gramm were married. Gramm was promoted to Associate Professor in 1974 and also served as the Department's Director of Undergraduate Programs. In all, Dr. Gramm taught economics at Texas A & M for more than eight years and has published articles in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Law and Economics.The Gramms first met in 1969 when Wendy Lee was interviewing for a job in the economics department at Texas A&M, where Phil Gramm was already on the economics faculty.  They married about four months after her arrival. After her husband became a Congressman in 1978, Dr. Gramm was able to parlay her husband’s connections to find a string of increasingly important posts. When Democrat Phil Gramm resigned his House seat on January 5, 1983 and returned in a special election held on February 12, 1983 as a new and improved Republican Phil Gramm, it was met with smiling happy faces from the Republican crowd. And of course, it was bound to do wonderful things for both of the Gramms. Her political ambitions soared in the Reagan administration because ostensibly, she saw eye-to-eye with many of the core principles that Ronald Reagan espoused. As the Houston Press article notes:She has regularly espoused an unfettered market as the solution to almost any of the nation's problems you'd care to name. The answer for struggling mothers who need day care so they can support their families? Forget government programs or parental leave, she says, and look to free markets and a strong economy. What about helping minorities climb the economic ladder? Forget affirmative action or quotas, she says. The answer is free markets and a strong economy. Federal deficits? Environmental protection? Free markets and a strong economy.Wendy continued to rise higher in the ranks when her husband switched hats once again, leaving the House of Representatives and took a seat in the US Senate in 1984. In that year, Dr. W ]Gramm served as the Executive Director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief and as Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics. From 1985 to 1988, Dr. Gramm was administrator for Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan named her chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a position she held until 1993. (President Reagan called her "my favorite economist." ) Conflicts and ObstructionsIt was here that her habitual pattern of conflicts of interests truly began. As both CFTC head and the wife of an influential senator, she would have found herself in a difficult position. (Whether Wendy herself recognized or appreciated this fact, is a different matter.)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.Clearly the proper ethical response would have been to choose one or the other. After all, in cases where the public trust is involved, where a fair and open arbitration is essential, even the appearance of improper influence is frowned upon. (Ask Clarence and Virginia Thomas.) But the Gramms were never a couple weighed down by charges of impropriety or held back by ethical concerns.In fact, it was in that position that we have the first glimpse of the future Wendy Gramm. As a Washington Post article revealed back in 2010, one of two administrative law judges presiding over investor complaints at the CFTC, George H. Painter, claimed that Judge Bruce Levine, longtime colleague, had a secret agreement with a Dr. Wendy Gramm, chairwoman of the agency, to stand in the way of investors filing complaints with the agency."On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor," Painter wrote. "A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow," Painter wrote.Painter continued: "Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case."The CFTC oversees trading of the nation's most important commodities, including oil, gold and cotton. The agency's administrative law judges handle cases in which investors allege that trading professionals or financial firms violated the rules.Was this the kind of “unfettered market” that Wendy Gramm sought? If her later record is any indication, the answer is quite clear. Anything it takes to get the prize is enough justification for Wendy. However, this is an obvious case of Obstruction of Congressional or Administrative Proceedings (18 U.S.C. 1505) could have conceivably ended Wendy Gramm's career early on. The effect on the system was to prevent a necessary oversight which might well have helped to prevent many clear cases of fraud in the whole sub-prime disaster.
After all, the stated mission of the CFTC is to protect market users and the public from fraud, manipulation, and abusive practices related to the sale of commodity and financial futures and options, and to foster open, competitive, and financially sound futures and option markets. Under Gramm's supervisor, the exact opposite was achieved.
When Wendy Gramm left the CFTC in 1993, she began to explore the private sector by accepting directorships on the boards of several corporations, Invesco Funds, State Farm Insurance Companies.An PBS Frontline investigation uncovered this excellent bit of foreshadowing, which occurred around the time Phil Gramm made his unsuccessful bid in the 1996 presidential election.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 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.Small potatoes. There was another corporation where Wendy Gramm sat as a director. And its name was Enron.
Lessons of the Past and for the FutureOn the one occasion that Phil Gramm and wife, Wendy paired up, the scale of the damage that followed was absolutely stunning, especially for the investors who lost more than $60 billion in the spectacular collapse of Enron.The Village Voice, citing a report by a non-profit research organization, Public Citizen, explains the dubious Gramm involvement in the Enron affair.In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's campaign.This decision also came about after intense lobbying by Koch Industries, several oil companies and Wall street speculators. This group has formed a coalition called “The Energy Group” which pressed the CFTC to allow oil derivatives to be traded outside of government regulation. As Think Progress notes:On the final day of the [George H.W.] Bush administration, January 21, 1993, [CFTC chairwoman] Wendy Gramm … approved the rule exempting key energy futures contracts from government regulation and returned a great chunk of the energy market to the grand old days of unregulated futures trading,” writes author Antonia Juhasz in the book Tyranny of Oil. The move mirrored the demands made by Koch’s lobbying coalition, The Energy Group.One might think that Wendy Gramm would have wanted to take a break from all that scheming. One would be wrong. The audacity of Phil Gramm is second only to his wife.A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor—and according to Public Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed Gramm just under $100,000. In 1998, Wendy Gramm cashed in her Enron stock for $276,912. There's nothing unusual about a Washington regulator quitting the government and going to work for a private company she was regulating. And people often get rich in the process. Wendy Gramm, whose office didn't return Voice calls, has told reporters she sold the stock expressly to avoid any hint of a conflict of interest.So, to recap: wearing her hat as a regulator, she gives one company an exemption, and then quits her job and becomes a director in that company. That company then delivers a contribution to her husband and then she quits before the whole she-bang collapses, with a tidy profit from her stock sell-out. Is that how this pretty little scheme worked?By cashing out at this time- using the alibi of conflicts of interest, Gramm was able to profit just before Enron collapsed.As Salon reports:When Enron went over the cliff, the Gramms even portrayed themselves as victims: Wendy’s stand on her imaginary moral high ground led her to sell before Enron’s price peaked, they whined, so she forfeited some potential profits. Enron employees lacking Gramm’s finely tuned ethics, and the rest of the investing public lacking her inside knowledge of the company’s twisted finances, were left holding worthless paper.Astounding, isn’t it? But the Voice article has even more:But that's not the end of the story. In June 2000, Senator Gramm co-sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a measure aimed at deregulating certain kinds of futures trading, but not energy futures. That bill never made it to the floor, and thus quietly died.Six months later, on December 15, Gramm curiously turned up as co-sponsor of a bill with the same name, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which did deregulate energy futures and which, without undergoing the usual committee hearings and preliminary votes, was immediately attached as a rider to an 11,000-page appropriations bill. It passed and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton six days later. Few lawmakers had likely perused the rider carefully, if they even knew it was there. And at any rate, Enron had given to the campaigns of over 200 legislators.
Enron DirectorsSo apparently, Phil Gramm successfully slipped this crafty bit of legislation unnoticed by other members of Congress or the president.In the end, some cheap imitation of justice was offered to the public. Wendy Gramm did not escape unscathed. After the Enron scandal, Gramm and the other directors of the energy company were named in several investor lawsuits. In particular, Gramm and other seventeen Enron directors agreed to a $168 million dollar settlement in a suit led by the University of California.Speaking to the BBC regarding the Enron scandal, Robert McCullough - a consultant from Oregon and a professor at Portland State University- drew a parellel to events of the past. The emerging shape of the Enron scandal was almost identical to one of 70 years ago, which prompted the setting up of the first regulators to govern the way companies report their performance, he said. Following the collapse of Anglo-American innovator and investor Samuel Insull’s financial empire during the Great Depression,The US set up the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate companies' financial reporting. "At the time, regulatory practices were set in force to avoid its repetition," Mr McCullough said. "Their enforcement has been eroded over the intervening years, and today we are almost exactly reproducing that scandal. That regulation had been chipped away to the point where it is no better than it was in the 1920s, Mr McCullough said.
Enron's Compensation (courtesy of Public Citizen)Future historians will most likely look back at the Enron collapse as merely a small-scale rehearsal of the financial meltdown of 2008. Some analysts have said that Enron was a wake-up call in our era of postmodern capitalism, if so, clearly somebody hit the snooze button. The same elements were in play, corporations taking substantial risks, cooked books to hide losses and secret partnerships with those paid to oversee operations. Behind both of these disgraceful episodes, Senator Phil Gramm and his helpful wife. However, with Enron, it was the investors that lost their life savings, with the later events, it was to be the entire financial system of the West that took the blow.----------------------How Quaint the Ways of ParadoxReturning to the life of Wendy Gramm’s father, the sugar plantation worker turned vice-president of the company, a glaring paradox emerges.Conditions on the sugar plantation where he grew up and worked were every bit as dire as any Brazilian slum of today. It was only through the concerted unionization of workers, culminating in the Great Sugar Strike of 1946 that conditions improved.According to a report produced by University of Hawai‘i - West O‘ahu, Center for Labor Education and Research,Before 1946, Hawai‘i's economy, politics and social structures were completely dominated by a corporate elite known as the Big Five (Alexander & Baldwin, American Factors, Castle & Cooke, C. Brewer, & Theo. Davies). The leaders of these factor companies exercised absolute control over Hawai‘i's plantation workers and the majority of the islands multi-ethnic workforce. The 1946 strike forever changed the balance of power between workers and the plantations. No longer would living and working conditions be set unilaterally by the plantation owners or their parent corporations..The legacy of the great Hawaiian sugar strike of 1946 is the success we can see today of Hawai‘i's multi-ethnic workforce to bridge ethnic differences and build trust based on worker solidarity. Hawai'i's diverse workforce united in 1946 and began for the first time to form a single working class culture, unique to Hawai'i. Like today, the issues of housing, medical care, pensions and wages were key issues for the 1946 sugar workers. Previously the quality of housing, medical care and old-age pensions depended upon the whim of individual plantations. As a result of the 1946 sugar strike, the ILWU negotiated a new era for labor relations, establishing these important issues as contractual rights of workers, rather than as favors the plantations could wield to force worker compliance. Thus, the 1946 sugar strike is an event whose impact reaches beyond the sugar fields, into the lives of every worker in Hawai‘i.Interestingly, according to an oral history interview conducted with Wendy Gramm’s father back in 1976, Joshua Lee recounts how, during the Great Depression, he found work through a government-sponsored work program. The National Youth Administration (NYA) was a New Deal agency in the United States that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. Without that offer of support at a crucial time in his life, it is possible that Wendy’s father might not have been able to better himself and allow his family the stability they needed to rise out of poverty.Given her family history, one can only speculate how Dr. Wendy Gramm- who owes much to both unions and to government regulations and social programs, can reconcile her work on behalf of exploitative corporations. I suppose she has not given it a moment’s thought.After all, she’s a very busy woman.--------------------------------------- In the fourth- and last part of this investigation, we shall be taking a close look at Wendy’s ties to Rick Perry, their shared friends and shared interests. Friends of Rick Perry: Mr. and Mrs. Gramm 4/4by NomadA Close look at Wendy GrammIn this the final part of my investigation into the Gramms, I’d like to deal with Wendy’s relationship with Rick Perry and another influential power broker. 
Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm The Mercatus Center As if Wendy Gramm’s role in the Enron scandal wasn’t enough to qualify her as one of the notable villians in a saga filled with some pretty odious characters, she’d really only just begun. After her jaunt through the world of academia and through the infested jungle of the private sector, Wendy now found herself stepping back into academia (or something very much like it).If Phil Gramm represents one side of corruption, then some might claim his wife to be an example of a newer but far more insidious indirect kind.Koch Industries- along with other corporations have developed a long term strategy to use think-tanks, paired with prestigious universities, to give support - with studies and surveys and expert opinions- to their agenda. In exchange, the universities benefit from large-dollar corporate support.The Mercatus Center of George Mason University, where Wendy Gramm is a director of the “regulatory studies program”, is a case in point. Mercatus is an increasingly influential anti-regulatory voice-machine created and subsidized by Koch Industries. Over the years, the university and its associated institutes and centers has received more funding from the Koch Family Charitable Foundations than any other organization—a total of $29,604,354. Of that sum, The Mercatus Center has received $1,442,000.Previously known as the Center for the Study of Free Market Processes, the Mercatus Center was founded by Richard Fink (an apt name if ever there was one)—with a grant from Charles Koch. Koch currently serves on the center’s Board of Directors—as does Fink, who is also an executive vice president and a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries, Inc.Wendy Gramm’s ties to the Koch brothers go way back. Koch has had a cozy relationship with Wendy ever since she played a key role in deregulating oil speculation. As Lee Fang reported in Think Progress:Like many oil companies, Koch uses legitimate hedging products to create price stability. However, the documents reveal that Koch is also participating in the unregulated derivatives markets as a financial player, buying and selling speculative products that are increasingly contributing to the skyrocketing price of oil. Excessive energy speculation today is at its highest levels ever, and even Goldman Sachs now admits that at least $27 of the price of crude oil is a result from reckless speculation rather than market fundamentals of supply and demand. Many experts interviewed by ThinkProgress argue that the figure is far higher, and out of control speculation has doubled the current price of crude oil.(The next time you fill up your gas tank and your wallet feels lighter, you can thank Wendy Gramm.)Mercatus, however serves a different function in the Koch machine.Koch Industries has had a long battle with agencies that are charged with protecting the common property, the air and the water and natural resources in general. That, given its extensive commitment to oil and lumber harvesting should come as no real surprise.A CBS investigation in March 2011 revealed that:Pollution into an Arkansas waterwayA Koch Industries paper mill is violating the Clean Water Act by pumping out massive amounts of pollution into an Arkansas waterway, according to an EPA enforcement complaint to be filed tomorrow by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Ouachita Riverkeeper.The complaint alleges that a Georgia-Pacific paper mill on the Coffee Creek in Arkansas - owned by the billionaire Koch Brothers -emits 45 million gallons of paper mill waste including hazardous materials like ammonia, chloride, and mercury each day.  Coffee Creek then flows into Louisiana's Ouachita River where the pollutants have left the formerly pristine water speckled with odorous foam, slime and black pockets of water, said Jerry Johnson, who has been visiting the Ouachita River for 35 years."People used to swim in it," said Johnson, who now lives along the river. "In the summertime, it was the place to go."And this is by no means an isolated incident. Another report from 2000 in the New York Times,A federal grand jury returned a 97-count indictment against Koch Industries today, charging the company, a subsidiary and four employees with environmental crimes at a Texas oil refinery.The defendants were charged with violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws at the Koch Petroleum Group's West Plant refinery near Corpus Christi, Tex., conspiracy and making false statements to state environmental officials, the Justice Department said.And, one more example, which is more important perhaps -given the links to the controversial ties to Koch and Governor Walker, Wisconsin.Koch Industries operates twelve industrial facilities in Wisconsin: Georgia-Pacific and its wholly-owned subsidiaries in Green Bay (4 plants), Oshkosh, Phillips, and Sheboygan; and Flint Hills Resources in Green Bay, Junction City, McFarland, Milwaukee, Stevens Point and Waupun... (T)he data reveal that over the course of those three years, Koch Industries' facilities emitted over 5.4 million pounds (PDF) of toxic discharges into Wisconsin's air and water. Of these discharges, nearly 100,000 pounds (PDF) were of substances known or suspected to cause cancer.The pattern is clear. But what’s this got to do with Wendy and Mercatus? Joining forces with other Koch-supported organizations, Mercatus has been a leader in the roll back of environmental regulations. Greenpeace has cited Mercatus as a chief source for climate change denying efforts. Moreover, Mercatus has specifically targeted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its de-regulatory drive. Jane Mayer from a revealing New Yorker article on the Koch brothers examines the role this group plays:Thomas McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”As a Businessweek headline proclaimed:"Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype."Wendy Gramm’s pedigree- if you don’t look too closely- adds weight to her opinions to all of the Mercatus calls for de-regulation. That, coincidentally, ties in quite nicely with what the top donors to Mercatus expect.
As Chris Bowers, blogger for DailyKos, notes:It is important that you realize who funds the Mercatus Center. Since 1985, the Mercatus Center has received 513 grants totaling $45,347,884. Their top donors have been as follows:Koch Family (Includes Claude Lambe Foundation): $24,258,797Olin Foundation: $7,530,824Scaife Family (includes Carthage Foundation): $5,031,000Bradley Foundation: $2,5544,050Barre Seid: $2,212,000Earhart Foundation: $996,348McKenna: $265,000Jacquelin Hume Foundation: $260,000Smith Richardson: $254,315The Walton Family (Wal-Mart): $120,000JM Foundation: $85,000Castle Rock Foundation (Coors Family): $75,000Evidently unsatisfied with the work she has done unfettering markets, scrubbing regulations and ignoring the ethical codes and laws, all of which in one or another has lead to the meltdown, Wendy Gramm is now looking forward, on behalf of the corporations, to destroying the environment as well.
Wendy and the Pious Hospital Bed MakerWith so many fingers in so many pies, it’s often difficult to keep up with Dr. Wendy Gramm. In addition to Mercatus Center, she serves as the chairman of the board of another conservative organization “whose positions on issues can make the difference between life and death for major legislation.”The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) “501(c) non-profit, non-partisan research institute” is run by a man Texas Monthly called “the most influential Republican in Texas” and probably a person most people have never heard of.Austin Democratic political consultant George Shipley once called the shy and unassuming Dr. James Leninger, “ the sugar daddy and godfather of the Republican right wing in Texas.”Besides the many groups with a local political interest, Leininger has funded national social conservative organizations, including the American Family Association (considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) , Christian Pro-Life Foundation, Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family.Molly Ivins reports:Leninger tends to give his PACs and foundations innocuous names — Texans for Justice, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Texas Justice Foundation, Children’s Economic Opportunity Foundation, Texans for Governmental Integrity, the A PAC for Parental School Choice, etc. According to the Current (a weekly alternative paper), Leininger is also a major donor to, or plays a leading role in, at least a dozen major right-wing groups. Politically, he has given not only to Christian-right school board candidates and right-wing legislative candidates but also to Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Phil Gramm, and he was Rick Perry’s largest campaign contributor ($500,000) in Perry’s race for lieutenant governor.The mission of TPPF, founded by Leninger in 1989, is to “promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation by educating and affecting policymakers and the Texas public policy debate with academically sound research and outreach.”A conservative and devoutly religious Republican businessman, Leininger made his personal fortune through Kinetic Concepts, based in San Antonio, which makes and rents therapeutic beds for patients who are paralyzed or suffer from serious illnesses. As humble as that might sound, take note, KCI Revenue for 2008 was $1.88 billion, increasing to $1.99 billion in 2009 and in 2010 increased to $2.02 billion.Incidentally, Rick Perry, before he ran for lieutenant governor developed a lucrative relationship with Leininger. According to a Houston Chronicle piece dated September 21, 1997:On Jan. 13, 1995, Perry bought $38,875 worth of stock in Kinetic Concepts, a company owned by Jim Leininger, a San Antonio physician, conservative activist and major Perry campaign donor. Perry invested an additional $35,167 in the company on Jan. 24, 1996 — the same day he spoke at a luncheon that Leininger attended. Later that day, an investment firm bought 2.2 million shares of Kinetic Concepts stock, driving up its price. Perry sold his Kinetic Concepts holdings a month later for a $38,382 profit. Leininger and Perry acknowledged they spoke at the luncheon but denied discussing the stock.Just a terribly fortunate coincidence? Back in 1997, Wendy Gramm also (coincidentally) had ties to Leininger’s company. Gramm earned a miniscule $25,000 a year as a member of the Kinetic Concepts board of directors. She also held stock options in the company when Kinetic Concepts Inc. agreed to sell most of the company to two San Francisco investor firms in a deal worth $850 million to $875 million.It is no exaggeration to say that Rick Perry owes a lot to Leninger. There is the new report issued by Texans for Public Justice, a money-and-politics watchdog group.Perry might never have been governor — nor now be a presidential candidate — but for James Leininger. In a game-changing 1998 race then-Texas Agriculture Commissioner Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor. That victory secured Perry’s automatic promotion to governor two years later when President-Elect Bush abandoned the Governor’s Mansion. Perry narrowly won his fateful 1998 race against Democrat John Sharp, capturing just 50.04 percent of the vote. This squeaker victory was secured by an eleventh-hour media blitz that Perry paid for with a last-minute, $1.1 million loan. Leininger and two other Texas tycoons guaranteed the loan, which supplied more than 10 percent of the $10.3 million that Perry raised for that election. Leininger’s family and company PAC contributed $62,500 to that Perry campaign. Leininger also was the No. 1 contributor at the time to the Texas Republican Party (then chaired by former Leininger employee Susan Weddington), which sank $82,760 into that Perry campaign. “I congratulate Leininger,” Perry opponent John Sharp said at the time. “He wanted to buy the reins of state government. And by God, he got them.”Through the TPPF, Leininger has used his wealth to promote his own conservative-religious agenda in a variety of ways. Karen Olsson writes in Texas Monthly, Leininger was the driving force back in 2002 to influence the Texas Board of Education to re-write school textbooks.... TPPF aimed to influence policy by publishing research reports on state issues; its early preoccupations mirrored several of Leininger's own: tort reform, vouchers, and reduced government. Working in tandem with the new SBOE [State Board of Education] members, the TPPF began objecting to textbook material deemed liberally slanted or morally suspect. The Legislature retaliated in 1995, forbidding the SBOE to question any aspect of textbook content other than "factual errors." Despite the restriction, the TPPF continued to analyze proposed books, hiring researchers to ferret out errors both of fact and of insufficient patriotism. Last winter the group helped bat down an environmental-science textbook (in large part because of a poorly written sentence linking democracy to pollution); this summer it criticized proposed social science and history textbooks for failing to disavow socialism.While the TPPF’s involvement in Texas textbooks may seem like a very narrow agenda, its policy interests, in fact, are wide-ranging, covering many conservative causes. Teddy Wilson, progressive political activist and blogger notes:The TPPF supports the predictable conservative line on a whole host of issues. The TPPF disputes the scientific evidence of climate changes and claims that the “scientific consensus has never been as broad as proclaimed,” and the compromised emails of climate scientists showed “data manipulation and fundamental errors now discredit a once broadly accepted body of science.” The “private sector can bring innovation and competition to the criminal justice system” is how the TPPF frames its advocacy of the private prison industry, despite that there has been no evidence to support that the privatization of the prison industry has provided any public savings. The TPPF even has an entire center dedicate to “Tenth Amendment Studies,” which is a favorite Constitutional Amendment among the Tea Party faithful.If any of this sounds depressingly familiar, then there’s a good good reason. Two long time supporters of TPPF are foundations associated with Koch Industries (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation) which contributed contributing $383,125 in 2005-2009 and nearly a half million dollars between 1997 and 2009. Rick Perry’s Wrong ApproachIn Perry’s campaign book, Fed Up! the governor says that he knows of no other organization that is better positioned than Texas Public Policy Foundation to help “foster a national conversation” about “the proper role of government in our lives."However, last May, TPPF might have pushed its agenda a bit too hard. Its attempts to influence educational policy created quite a controversy. Seven breakthrough solutions to problems with the Texas’ high educational system were drafted by TPPF in its think-tank capacity, and promoted by Governor Perry.It did not go over as well as expected. In response, five A&M faculty members from various disciplines drafted a letter to Richard Box, the chairman of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, laying out their concern regarding the lack of transparency in the board's apparent intention to implement seven proposed "breakthrough solutions" promoted by the TPPF. The seven recommendations advocated “a business-style, market-driven approach under which colleges and universities would treat students as customers, de-emphasize research that isn't immediately lucrative, and evaluate individual faculty by the tuition revenue they generate.”Within a few days of the letter being posted online, more than 530 faculty members had added their names. The A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney eventually resigned.
All this is rather ironic of course since Wendy Gramm served on the board of Regents from 2001 to 2007, (as mentioned in Part 1) and serves as chairman in TPPF. Coincidence can quickly be discounted.
A concise assessment of TPPF’s market-oriented recommendations makes a fine case for rejection.Put simply, this is the wrong approach... the classroom is not a marketplace. The proposals reviewed here will not promote effective learning or the responsible use of resources inside a laboratory, library or seminar room. The University of Texas at Austin's bottom line is to provide a first-class education while spending our resources responsibly and efficiently. Separating those two goals is like separating research from teaching: it serves the wrong bottom line. Similarly, treating students as customers, offering them a "product" designed to win positive reviews and then rewarding the most popular instructors will neither challenge students in meaningful ways nor foster the deep learning and skills they will need throughout life.Many feel the Perry’s close association with TPPF has damaged the university. This is turn has damaged the governor’s image. He would have Wendy Gramm, its chairman, to thank for that.As the editors of The Eagle Bryan-College Station remark:Texas A&M University has the support of its former students that is the envy of many universities. Aggies love their alma mater and it shows in many ways. One Aggie, however, should love his school less and, in fact, should stay out of its business. Gov. Rick Perry's obsession and interference in A&M has caused great harm, damage some observers feel could take a generation to undo. From his appointment of regents with greater fealty to him than to the university system they are supposed to represent to his constant meddling in the day-to-day operations of the flagship university to his infatuation with the Texas Public Policy Foundation -- an ultraconservative think tank that seeks to insinuate itself into every corner of state government -- Perry has proven not to be a friend of A&M, but rather a hindrance.Never before has a governor of Texas had such deadly influence on a major state university, and Perry's meddling blocks the way of A&M's oft-stated efforts to achieve greatness.The Texas Public Policy Foundation seems harmless on the surface, with its stated goals of limited government, individual liberties, free markets, personal responsibility and private property rights. Most Texans probably would subscribe to those goals. Dig below the surface, however, and you see just how radical its efforts are.Founded by arch-conservative physician James Leininger, the foundation board is chaired by Wendy Gramm, former Texas A&M regent and wife of former Sen. Phil Gramm. Current Regent Phil Adams of Bryan is a board member, a clear conflict of interest to his responsibilities to A&M.The foundations website says, "The public is demanding a different direction for their government, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation is providing the ideas that enable policymakers to chart that new course."Unfortunately, thanks to Perry's influence, those ideas become mandates, without discussion and input from the people of this great state....Perry has been in thrall to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and its backers since he began accepting generous contributions from them in his first statewide race. Texas cannot, however, be run by contribution and those most able to spend big bucks to help buy elections, no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on.A&M is well on its way to achieving greatness. It would be a shame to let Rick Perry and his cohorts derail that with their interference.Rick Perry can love Texas A&M more by meddling less -- preferably not at all. Beyond appointing the best regents he can find -- no matter who they contributed to in the last gubernatorial election -- and attending football games at Kyle Field, Perry should leave A&M alone.Rick Perry Phil Gramm NexusA graph of the relationships mentioned in the posts.[dl 7/31/15]EpilogueIn researching and writing this post, I was astonished at how much harm two people can do to the country. One would think that our system would be stronger than that. That our long established system of checks and balances would prevent people like the Gramms from ever inflicting too great a harm to the nation. But then the underlying purpose of all the de-regulation that the Republicans have called for (and have achieved) is really just a means to an end, a method of abolishing the safety checks that had, for the most part, protected our institutions. Once those have been removed, anything is possible.Even this list of all of the misdeeds of Mr. and Mrs. Gramm, as comprehensive as it might seem, is partial. Still I should think this is enough information about Perry and the friends of Rick for most intelligent voters to help them decide who the governor of Texas owes his allegiance to.I began this investigation with a quote from the first president of the United States and I shall end it with two quotes by its fourth, James Madison.“All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree” And this is especially true when those that wield the power are partially hidden behind masks and puppets. When it comes to peoples like the Gramms- whose working relationship with a presidential candidate is not only acknowledged but applauded- it is simply not possible to be as vigilant as necessary. Since justice has apparently failed- not once but repeatedly in this case, the only option is to make sure than any candidate connected with such people is not elected to high office. We literally cannot afford it. Now is the time to make sure that Perry doesn't come any closer to the White House than he is at this minute.
When reflecting on the various attempts by Phil and Wendy Gramm to by-pass, ignore or remove the regulatory powers of our government to protect its citizens, it is helpful to recall this other quote by Madison:“If men were angels no government would be necessary” And when you are dealing with a pair like the Gramms (along with so many other less-than- angelic types), it's all the more reason that we need more regulations in place, not less. Ironically, despite having waved the flags of deregulation at every opportunity, Mr. and Mrs. Gramm themselves provide the best proof of the necessity, the vital importance of having tight regulations and the power to punish those that violate them. 
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http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/11/friends-of-rick-perry-mr-and-mrs-gramm_14.htmllinks:...With so many fingers in so many pies, it’s often difficult to keep up with Dr. Wendy Gramm. In addition to Mercatus Center, she serves as the chairman of the board of another conservative organization “whose positions on issues can make the difference between life and death for major legislation.”<div style="color: rgb(25, 25, 25); line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Texas_Public_Policy_Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Texas Public Policy Foundation</a> (TPPF) “501(c) non-profit, non-partisan research institute” is run by a man Texas Monthly called “the most influential Republican in Texas” and probably a person most people have never heard of.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Austin Democratic political consultant George Shipley once called the shy and unassuming <a href="http://www.texscience.org/reform/leininger.htm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Dr. James Leninger</a>, “ the sugar daddy and godfather of the Republican right wing in Texas.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Besides the many groups with a local political interest, Leininger has funded national social conservative organizations, including the American Family Association (considered a hate group by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Poverty_Law_Center" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>) , Christian Pro-Life Foundation, <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/family-research-council" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Family Research Council</a>, and <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/focus-family" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Focus on the Family.</a></div>Molly Ivins reports:</div><div style="color: rgb(25, 25, 25); line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: justify;">Leninger tends to give his PACs and foundations innocuous names — Texans for Justice, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Texas Justice Foundation, Children’s Economic Opportunity Foundation, Texans for Governmental Integrity, the A PAC for Parental School Choice, etc. According to the Current (a weekly alternative paper), Leininger is also a major donor to, or plays a leading role in, at least a dozen major right-wing groups. Politically, he has given not only to Christian-right school board candidates and right-wing legislative candidates but also to Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Phil Gramm, and he was Rick Perry’s largest campaign contributor ($500,000) in Perry’s race for lieutenant governor.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The mission of TPPF, founded by Leninger in 1989, is to “promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation by educating and affecting policymakers and the Texas public policy debate with academically sound research and outreach.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">A conservative and devoutly religious Republican businessman, Leininger made his personal fortune through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_Concepts" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Kinetic Concepts</a>, based in San Antonio, which makes and rents therapeutic beds for patients who are paralyzed or suffer from serious illnesses. As humble as that might sound, take note, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_Concepts#cite_note-18" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">KCI Revenue for 2008 was $1.88 billion, increasing to $1.99 billion in 2009 and in 2010 increased to $2.02 billion.</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Incidentally, Rick Perry, before he ran for lieutenant governor developed a lucrative relationship with Leininger. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_380803150" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">According to a </a><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/perry-supplemented-wealth-profitable-deals-070714581.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Houston Chronicle piece dated September 21, 1997:</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ae/KCI_Company_logo.PNG/150px-KCI_Company_logo.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82); clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ae/KCI_Company_logo.PNG/150px-KCI_Company_logo.PNG" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); position: relative; padding: 8px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 20px; border-radius: 5px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);" border="0" /></a>
<div style="text-align: justify;">On Jan. 13, 1995, Perry bought $38,875 worth of stock in Kinetic Concepts, a company owned by Jim Leininger, a San Antonio physician, conservative activist and major Perry campaign donor. Perry invested an additional $35,167 in the company on Jan. 24, 1996 — the same day he spoke at a luncheon that Leininger attended. Later that day, an investment firm bought 2.2 million shares of Kinetic Concepts stock, driving up its price. Perry sold his Kinetic Concepts holdings a month later for a $38,382 profit. Leininger and Perry acknowledged they spoke at the luncheon but denied discussing the stock.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Just a terribly fortunate coincidence? Back in 1997, Wendy Gramm also (coincidentally) had ties to Leininger’s company. Gramm earned a miniscule $25,000 a year as a member of the Kinetic Concepts board of directors. She also held stock options in the company when Kinetic Concepts Inc. agreed to sell most of the company to two San Francisco investor firms in a deal worth $850 million to $875 million.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is no exaggeration to say that Rick Perry owes a lot to Leninger. There is the <a href="http://info.tpj.org/reports/pdf/PerryLeiningerHeavenlyHost.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">new report</a> issued by<a href="http://www.tpj.org/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Texans for Public Justice</a>, a money-and-politics watchdog group.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">Perry might never have been governor — nor now be a presidential candidate — but for James Leininger. In a game-changing 1998 race then-Texas Agriculture Commissioner Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor. That victory secured Perry’s automatic promotion to governor two years later when President-Elect Bush abandoned the Governor’s Mansion. Perry narrowly won his fateful 1998 race against Democrat John Sharp, capturing just 50.04 percent of the vote. This squeaker victory was secured by an eleventh-hour media blitz that Perry paid for with a last-minute, $1.1 million loan. Leininger and two other Texas tycoons guaranteed the loan, which supplied more than 10 percent of the $10.3 million that Perry raised for that election. Leininger’s family and company PAC contributed $62,500 to that Perry campaign. Leininger also was the No. 1 contributor at the time to the Texas Republican Party (then chaired by former Leininger employee Susan Weddington), which sank $82,760 into that Perry campaign. “I congratulate Leininger,” Perry opponent John Sharp said at the time. “He wanted to buy the reins of state government. And by God, he got them.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Through the TPPF, Leininger has used his wealth to promote his own conservative-religious agenda in a variety of ways. Karen Olsson writes in Texas Monthly, Leininger was the driving force back in 2002 to influence the Texas Board of Education to re-write school textbooks.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">... TPPF aimed to influence policy by publishing research reports on state issues; its early preoccupations mirrored several of Leininger's own: tort reform, vouchers, and reduced government. Working in tandem with the new SBOE [State Board of Education] members, the TPPF began objecting to textbook material deemed liberally slanted or morally suspect. The Legislature retaliated in 1995, forbidding the SBOE to question any aspect of textbook content other than "factual errors." Despite the restriction, the TPPF continued to analyze proposed books, hiring researchers to ferret out errors both of fact and of insufficient patriotism. Last winter the group helped bat down an environmental-science textbook (in large part because of a poorly written sentence linking democracy to pollution); this summer it criticized proposed social science and history textbooks for failing to disavow socialism.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">While the TPPF’s involvement in Texas textbooks may seem like a very narrow agenda, its policy interests, in fact, are wide-ranging, covering many conservative causes. <a href="http://www.leftofcollegestation.com/2011/05/who-is-texas-public-policy-foundation.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Teddy Wilson, progressive political activist and blogger notes:</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">The TPPF supports the predictable conservative line on a whole host of issues. The TPPF<a href="http://www.texaspolicy.com/pdf/2011-ClimateScience-CEE.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">disputes the scientific evidence</a> of climate changes and claims that the “scientific consensus has never been as broad as proclaimed,” and the compromised emails of climate scientists showed “data manipulation and fundamental errors now discredit a once broadly accepted body of science.” The “private sector can bring innovation and competition to the criminal justice system” is how the <a href="http://www.texaspolicy.com/pdf/2008-LegeEntry-PrivateSectorPublicSafety-ml.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">TPPF frames its advocacy</a> of the private prison industry, despite that there has been <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19prisons.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">no evidence to support</a> that the privatization of the prison industry has provided any public savings. The TPPF even has an entire center dedicate to “<a href="http://www.texaspolicy.com/publications.php?cat_level=315" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Tenth Amendment Studies</a>,” which is a favorite Constitutional Amendment among the Tea Party faithful.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If any of this sounds depressingly familiar, then there’s a good good reason. Two long time supporters of TPPF are foundations associated with Koch Industries (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation) which contributed <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/texas-public-policy-foundation/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">contributing $383,125 in 2005-2009</a> and nearly a half million dollars between 1997 and 2009.</div> </div><div style="color: rgb(25, 25, 25); line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Rick Perry’s Wrong Approach
<div style="text-align: justify;">In Perry’s campaign book, Fed Up! the governor says that he knows of no other organization that is better positioned than Texas Public Policy Foundation to help “foster a national conversation” about “the proper role of government in our lives."</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, last May, TPPF might have pushed its agenda a bit too hard. Its attempts to influence educational policy created quite a controversy. Seven breakthrough solutions to problems with the Texas’ high educational system were drafted by TPPF in its think-tank capacity, and promoted by Governor Perry.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It did not go over as well as expected. In response, five A&M faculty members from various disciplines drafted a letter to Richard Box, the chairman of the <a href="http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/texas-am-university-system/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Texas A&M University System</a> Board of Regents, laying out their concern regarding the lack of transparency in the board's apparent intention to implement seven proposed "breakthrough solutions" promoted by the TPPF. The seven recommendations advocated “<a href="http://7solutionsresponse.org/index.php?unit=introduction" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">a business-style, market-driven approach under which colleges and universities would treat students as customers, de-emphasize research that isn't immediately lucrative, and evaluate individual faculty by the tuition revenue they generate.”</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Within a few days of the letter being posted online, more than 530 faculty members had added their names. The A&M Chancellor <a href="http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/mike-mckinney/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">Mike McKinney</a> eventually resigned.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">All this is rather ironic of course since Wendy Gramm served on the board of Regents from 2001 to 2007, (as mentioned in Part 1) and serves as chairman in TPPF. Coincidence can quickly be discounted.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://7solutionsresponse.org/index.php?unit=introduction" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(125, 23, 82);">A concise assessment of TPPF’s market-oriented recommendations makes a fine case for rejection.</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">Put simply, this is the wrong approach... the classroom is not a marketplace. The proposals reviewed here will not promote effective learning or the responsible use of resources inside a laboratory, library or seminar room. The University of Texas at Austin's bottom line is to provide a first-class education while spending our resources responsibly and efficiently. Separating those two goals is like separating research from teaching: it serves the wrong bottom line. Similarly, treating students as customers, offering them a "product" designed to win positive reviews and then rewarding the most popular instructors will neither challenge students in meaningful ways nor foster the deep learning and skills they will need throughout life....</blockquote></div>=FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Friday, Jan. 7, 2005
Trey Davis, (510) 987-0056
<a href="mailto:trey.davis@ucop.edu" style="color: purple;">trey.davis@ucop.edu</a>
For investor questions: 800-449-4900 or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080418144722/http://www.enronfraud.com/contact.html" target="_blank" style="color: purple;">www.enronfraud.com/contact.html</a>
UC reaches $168-million settlement with Enron directors in securities fraud caseThe University of California, lead plaintiff for investors in the Enron securities litigation, will move next week for preliminary court approval of a settlement with certain of Enron’s former directors in which the investor class will receive $168 million, consisting of $155 million in insurance proceeds and more than $13 million in personal contributions of insider trading proceeds by the directors.The agreement was reached on October 6, 2004, with the assistance of mediator Eric Green of Resolutions LLC. Pursuant to the agreement, the $200-million remaining balance of Enron’s directors and officers insurance policy has been paid into the registry of the court and the personal contributions of the directors, totaling over $13 million, have been deposited in trust with class counsel, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP.Over the last three months, the plaintiffs, the settling defendants, the insurers and certain of the non-settling insured defendants, have negotiated a complex agreement that provides a framework for court approval by setting aside $13 million of the insurance proceeds for the continuing defense of certain of the non-settling insured defendants in exchange for their agreement not to oppose the settlement. Of the remaining $187 million of insurance proceeds, 83%, or $155 million, goes to the plaintiff class of defrauded Enron securities purchasers. The balance, $32 million, goes to the Enron bankruptcy estate to be distributed to Enron’s creditors. The combination of insurance and insider trading proceeds will provide $168 million for the class. The settlement exhausts all the remaining Directors & Officers liability insurance.There is no settlement with defendants Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, Richard Causey or Rick Buy. The settlement resolves the litigation against those Enron directors who faced liability under the strict liability provisions of Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933, not the fraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Act of 1934.“This is a further significant step toward what we hope will be a substantial recovery for the investor victims of the Enron fraud,” said James E. Holst, UC’s general counsel. “It is especially significant that these outside directors were made to disgorge some of their insider trading proceeds.”“It was important to reach this settlement to staunch the consumption of the Directors & Officers insurance by defense fees and obtain the money for the victims of the fraud – not the lawyers for Enron’s directors,” said William Lerach of Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP, lead counsel for the class. “The settlement is very significant in holding these outside directors at least partially personally responsible. Hopefully, this will help send a message to corporate boardrooms of the importance of directors performing their legal duties.”The agreement marks the fourth settlement in the case, totaling almost one-half billion dollars already recovered for the class. UC reached a $222.5-million settlement with Lehman Brothers in October 2004, a $69-million settlement with Bank of America in July 2004, and a $40 million settlement in July 2002 with Arthur Andersen’s international umbrella organization that released Andersen Worldwide SC and its non-U.S. member firms from liability and dismissed them from the suit. Arthur Andersen’s U.S. arm, which served as Enron’s auditor, remains a defendant in the case. On December 15, 2004, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, sitting in New Orleans, upheld the Anderson Worldwide SC settlement. The settlement announced today is subject to court approval.“We are continuing to prosecute the case against individuals and entities charged with participating in the fraud and we expect even more substantial recoveries from these defendants,” said Lerach.The defendants in the shareholders’ lawsuit include the financial institutions of J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Barclays Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, all considered key players in a series of fraudulent transactions that ultimately cost Enron investors billions of dollars. Other defendants include various former officers of Enron, its accountants, Arthur Andersen, and two law firms.These banks set up false investments in clandestinely controlled Enron partnerships, used offshore companies to disguise loans and facilitated the phony sale of phantom Enron assets. As a result, Enron executives were able to deceive investors by reporting increased cash flow from operations and by moving billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheets, thereby artificially inflating securities prices. Unlike Lehman Brothers, Bank of America and the settling directors, the remaining bank defendants are potentially liable for Enron investors’ entire loss.In February 2002, the University of California was named lead plaintiff in the Enron shareholders’ class action suit previously filed against 29 top executives of Enron Corp. and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP. UC filed a consolidated complaint on April 8, 2002, adding nine banks and two law firms as defendants in the case. In April 2003, U.S. District Court Judge Melinda Harmon completed her rulings on the various defendants’ motions to dismiss and lifted the stay on discovery. Following those rulings, UC filed a second amended complaint on May 14, 2003.Other institutional investors acting as representative plaintiffs on behalf of Enron investors include Washington State Investment Board, the UNITE Family of Funds, San Francisco City and County Employees’ Retirement System, Employer-Teamsters Local Nos. 175 & 505 Pension Trust Fund, Hawaii Laborers Pension Plan, Greenville Plumbers Pension Plan, Archdiocese of Milwaukee and Staro Asset Management.Depositions in the case began in June 2004, with the trial slated to begin on Oct. 16, 2006.More background on the Enron suit is available at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080418144722/http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/enron" style="color: purple;">http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/enron</a>###There are 18 defendants included in the settlement announced Jan. 7, 2005, of whom 10 are contributing from their personal assets a total of $13 million (indicated by asterisk).

DIRECTORS:
Robert Belfer- a director of Enron
Norman Blake- a director of Enron
Ronnie Chan- a director of Enron
John Duncan- a director of Enron
Paulo Ferraz-Pereira- a director of Enron
Joe Foy- a director of Enron
Wendy Gramm- a director of Enron
Robert Jaedicke- a director of Enron
Charles LeMaistre- a director of Enron
Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche- Chairman and CEO of Enron International and later Vice Chairman, and CEO of Azurix
John Mendelsohn- a director of Enron
Jerome Meyer- a director of Enron
Frank Savage- a director of Enron and a member of its Finance Committee
John Urquhart- a director of Enron and was senior advisor to the Chairman in 1998
John Wakeham- a director of Enron
Charls Walker- a director of Enron
Herbert Winokur- a director of Enron

ALSO:
Ken Harrison- Chief Executive Office of Portland General Electric and a director of Enron

* These parties are paying from their personal assets.

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Gramm, Wendy

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