Please spread this far and wide.
David Corn wrote an article about Phil Gramm for Mother Jones recently. Here is the first paragraph, which gives the gist of the article:
Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
More below...
Corn goes on to describe how Gramm has long crusaded for less and less regulation on corporate America. Included in this crusade were last-minute changes Gramm made to a bill before Congress in December of 2000. One such change left unregulated some of the financial activities that are at the heart of the current meltdown.
I highly recommend reading Corn’s article.
But that’s not the end of the story. Today, Politico.com published an article that says that now some foreign companies are being considered for inclusion in the bailout that the government is proposing. And guess what foreign company is among those being considered -- UBS, which is Phil Gramm's company in Switzerland. Can someone PLEASE let the world know about this? This is ridiculous. The very guy who slips a last minute, midnight addition into a bill that directly leads to a cataclysmic financial meltdown, now gets taxpayer money to save him from that meltdown. Can't someone do something about this? It should at least be broadcast as widely as possible. Who is making the decisions about which companies get bailed out and which do not? And what criteria are being used to make those decisions? Are Bernanke, Paulson, and others being lobbied/contacted/influenced by people like Gramm? Why is Phil Gramm’s company included in the bailout? Is the Swiss company he works for really on par with Freddie, Fannie, and AIG as far as the U.S. economy is concerned? If his company is not bailed out, will UBS even collapse? And if it did collapse would the damage really be too much for the U.S. economy to absorb?
And then there’s this little nugget from Politico’s article:
On "Fox News Sunday," Paulson told Chris Wallace that he would resist the Democrats' desired limits on executive compensation.
"If we design it so it's punitive and institutions aren't going to participate, this won't work the way we need it to work," Paulson said.
So, if we try to hold the executives of these companies (executives like Phil Gramm) responsible for their recklessness by reducing some of their millions so that they think twice about acting so irresponsibly in the future, they won’t participate in the bailout? As far as my limited understanding of the bailout goes, the government is going to buy a bunch of companies’ bad assets that those companies are otherwise unable to sell, so that those companies don’t go bankrupt. Is Paulson suggesting that these companies won’t go along with being rescued in this way if we limit their executives’ compensation? I call bullshit.
Then you have McCain, who was all over the map last week, but who finally seemed to settle on a ploy to demagogue the issue by yelling and pounding the podium about those greedy bastards on Wall Street. Fine, Wall Street is partly to blame, no doubt. But Wall Street can only do what the government allows it to do. And the current mess is in large part the result of the Republican philosophy that McCain and Gramm have crusaded on behalf of for decades -- a philosophy that says the less government regulates business the better. Now, of course, after 26 years of preaching the virtues of deregulaton, McCain is trying to change his tune and calling for more regulation.
We can’t let them get away with this.