Quote:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show. [See sidebar.]

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman.

News of Gramm’s involvement as a paid advocate for the banking industry, simultaneous with his unpaid work on McCain’s economic policies, comes as McCain’s campaign continues to reel from the purge of four other lobbyists. Two weeks ago, McCain banned lobbyists from advising him on the same subjects covered by their lobbying work.

As early as October, 2006, RealClearPolitics.com reported that Gramm was advising McCain on economic issues. Politico.com quoted McCain advisors saying that Gramm had input on McCain’s March 26 policy speech about the mortgage crisis. McCain himself has often cited Gramm’s influence as a way to establish his bona fides with economic conservatives.

When Gramm chaired the Senate Banking Committee, he wrote and passed deregulatory legislation in more than one industry, establishing himself as a pre-eminent foe of government regulation. McCain’s March 26 speech recommended further deregulation of the banking industry as his response to the mortgage crisis.

McCain and Gramm have been friends for more than a decade. McCain chaired Gramm’s 1996 presidential run and Gramm says the two men speak every day. McCain reportedly has hinted Gramm might serve as his Treasury secretary.

Last summer, Gramm was widely credited with saving McCain’s presidential campaign.

But even before lobbying emerged as an issue, some of his own advisors told the Washington Post last month that they questioned how Gramm’s legislative record might affect McCain’s campaign.

After Gramm passed a law easing regulation of energy-commodity trading, California experienced a sharp run-up in energy costs. The energy-trading company Enron was blamed and soon collapsed.

In 1999, Gramm successfully undid the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, removing the decades-old wall between commercial banking, which was heavily regulated, and investment banking, which was not. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not extend significant new regulation to investment banking.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said that Gramm is "not benefitting from John McCain's plan." He also said that McCain preferred to focus on homeowners "truly in need" and opposed bailouts for affected banks, an aspect of the crisis that was not addressed in "Countdown"'s report.

Some economists fault Gramm’s deregulatory successes, as well as lax enforcement of remaining oversight powers, not just for the subprime mortgage crisis, but for its spread to other sectors of finance. Even Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has expressed interest in toughening regulations.

Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute told the Washington Post, “McCain is counting on people having very short memories and not connecting some pretty obvious dots here.”

The final UBS form listing Gramm’s work as a lobbyist says he was lobbying the Senate in the second half of 2007 regarding the Helping Families Save Their Homes in Bankruptcy Act. The bill would have let bankruptcy judges rewrite mortgage terms for Americans facing foreclosure so they could repay their loans and keep their homes.

The banking industry opposed this measure. The bill failed.

---

Quote:

John McCain has gleefully pounded Barack Obama in recent days for having traveled to Iraq only once since he entered Congress. But his arguments virtually mirror those used in a new attack ad by an independent conservative group, adding to the perception that there is a coordinated effort between McCain and the outside groups that his campaign has sought distance from.

On Wednesday, McCain ripped into Obama during an appearance in Reno, Nevada, claiming the Illinois Democrat lacked the leadership to navigate international waters in times of war. The language he used was telling (emphasis added below).

"Senator Obama has been to Iraq once. A little over two years ago he went, and he has never seized the opportunity, except in a hearing, to meet with General Petraeus, with General Petraeus! My friends, this is about leadership and learning," McCain said. "Now, why is it that Senator Obama wants to sit down with the President of Iran, but hasn't yet sat down with General Petraeus - the leader of our troops in Iraq?"

Last Friday, the organization Vets for Freedom, a non-partisan pro-Iraq war organization, released an advertisement attacking Obama with the same language.

"Obama wasn't available to meet with us [combat veterans]," Sgt. Garrett Anderson (Ret.) of Illinois' Army National Guard says to the camera. "But we weren't surprised. Because he hasn't once, sat down one-on-one with our in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus. Worse, he hasn't been to Iraq in two-and-a-half years. He's unwilling to get the facts on Iraq, yet he is willing to travel to Iran to meet with their leader or anyone else who hates our country. The question for America is, if Barack Obama won't listen to us, who will he listen to?"

Message coordination between like-minded candidates and interest groups is hardly a novel concept in politics. In fact, around the same time as McCain's speech, the Republican National Committee started a clock tracking the number of days it has been since Obama visited Iraq.

But the Arizona Republican has positioned his campaign as a decidedly distinct entity from groups that dabble in attack politics. He has even implemented an internal campaign ethics policy that restricts campaign officials from collaborating or serving with these very organizations.

"No person with a McCain Campaign title or position may participate in a 527 or other independent entity that makes public communications that support or oppose any presidential candidate," the new policy reads.

Already there are questions about the firmness of that pledge. As the Huffington Post reported last week, Sens. Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, both of whom hold chairs for the McCain campaign, are also on the board of advisers of Vets for Freedom.

In response to the onslaught of attacks, the Obama campaign - taking the hook of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book - shot back.

"On the day after the former White House press secretary conceded that the Bush administration used deception and propaganda to take us to war, it seems odd that Senator McCain, who bought the flawed rationale for war so readily, would be lecturing others on their depth of understanding about Iraq," said Obama press secretary Bill Burton in a statement. "Senator Obama challenged the President's rationale for the war from the start, warning that it would divert resources from Afghanistan and the pursuit of Al Qaeda and mire us in an endless civil war. Senator McCain stubbornly insists on pursuing the failed Bush policy..."

---

Quote:

http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml

May 19, 2008—Sen. John McCain says he opposes the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also wants to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.

Clearing the way for that California price gouging, Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.

Then, over the next year, Enron – with Gramm’s wife Wendy serving on its board of directors – worked to create false electricity shortages in California, bilking consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.

Gramm left the Senate in 2002 but now has emerged as what Fortune magazine calls “McCain’s econ brain,” not only filling the Arizona senator’s acknowledged void on economic expertise (“I don’t know as much about the economy as I should”) but recognized as one of McCain’s closest friends in politics. The two men talk daily.

---

Newer...

Quote:

Let’s stop the whining. I mean it. It is ruining the country.

If we all stopped whining, the economy would recover, the banks would stop failing, the stock market would go up, the value of your home would rise and you could fill your gas tank for less than the cost of a diamond tiara.

OK, so maybe that last one is optimistic. But good things would happen.

And that is because almost all problems are mental.

Phil Gramm says so. And when it comes to mental, Phil Gramm knows a thing or two.

Gramm, a former U.S. senator and congressman and now a wealthy banker, has been a close friend and economic adviser to John McCain.

And Gramm said recently that we are not in a real recession, just a “mental recession,” and that our real problem is that we have become “a nation of whiners.”

He caught a lot of flak for this, but why not give his theory a test?

The average cost of regular gasoline is about $4.11 per gallon right now. (It is much higher than that in my neighborhood, but my neighborhood is filled with whiners.)

Ask yourself, however, why it costs that much. Isn’t it because your mental attitude stinks?

What if you drove into your local gas station and said to the mopey guy in the glass booth who is just there to sell cigarettes to teenagers, “Top o’ the morning to you! Isn’t it a great day? I think so. And, gee, you’re looking great. You been working out?”

Then you could say, “So can I get my gasoline for $3 a gallon today? Like I did a year ago?”

And you know what? This will work! The pump price will drop before your very eyes!

This is Phil Gramm’s Stop-Whining-Be-Happy Theory of Life that states that if you just stop whining about things, they will get better.

Gramm knows what he is talking about. He ran for president in 1996, raising $20 million, which was more than anybody else and real money in those days. (In today’s dollars, it would be about $12.95.)

At every campaign stop, Gramm reminded people that he had “flunked the third, seventh and ninth grades,” which means he was certainly smart enough to become a U.S. senator, but I guess people felt he needed to flunk a few more grades before he could become president.

Gramm decided to spend his money losing two contests that few people had ever heard of — the Alaska and Louisiana caucuses — so he could have a solid record of two losses even before he got to Iowa, where he came in fifth.

(John McCain was his national campaign chairman, and McCain learned a valuable lesson: Lose nothing before you lose Iowa.)

Gramm dropped out of the presidential race, but did he whine? No! Instead, he continued as a U.S. senator, retiring in 2002 and going on to become vice chairman for UBS Investment Bank, where he lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department on banking and mortgage issues.
You can see how successful he was at that.

And there is no reason to limit Gramm’s theory to economics. It is all about attitude and how that affects everything.

Take the Iraq war. Sure, it has lasted longer than World War II. Sure, it has lasted longer than World War I. Sure, it has lasted longer than the Korean War and the Civil War.

But the Revolutionary War lasted longer and the Vietnam War lasted longer. And we batted .500 for those two!

So quit yer whining.





http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11744.html

---

Quote:

...what Fortune magazine calls “McCain’s econ brain",

---

?

I wouldn't trust Phil Gramm with my
daughter's piggy bank...certainly not with
the finances of the entire country!



Reminds me of Cheney's role with Halliburton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney#Private_sector_career

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton#Iraq_controversy

Mr.Al said:

Old fuckers also are much more likely to push the "War on Drugs" bullshit.  Goddamn old fuckers need to hurry up and die so I can eat my drugs w/o any paranoia.  Fucking old people smell, too.
EDIT
Black people smell funny too though.

I don't know...

---

Coaster said:

naw obama wont allow biden to do that

---

Coaster said:

naw obama wont allow biden to do that

---