Growing up in Texas, has allowed me to see the entire crop of slimy republicans rise to national prominence (Almost as quickly as they have fallen.)
Gramm, however, hold a special place in my heart. Never has there been a nastier, evil, ugly human, both inside and out.
McSame considers Gramm his economic guru. Let's take a few minutes to meet Johnny's friend and confidant of over 20 years.
Jerk, bully, savage, asshole are the words that come to my mind to describe him best.
From this New York Times Article in 1995.
During the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, Gramm accused Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy of cheating in college.
"The American people know what the people who cheated in college think."
He also sent a defeated foe from Texas a card saying.
"I feel so sorry for your many problems, but you deserve them."
Phil is a hypocrite when it comes to government handouts. He was a major beneficiary of federal assistance to get him through college, but for the last 20 years he has been one of the biggest opponents of government programs.
Gramm is also another chickenhawk republican who received college deferments to keep him out of Vietnam. He later criticized a democrat mocking him for having never served in the military.
His fiscal conservative bona fides are extremely suspect as well. From this slate article in 2001.
Phil Gramm once bragged that he steered so much government spending to Texas that he was getting trichinosis.
He is on weak ground when it comes to social conservatism as well.
Gramm has no interest in social conservatism. He tried to invest in a soft-core porn movie in the early '70s, and he once told religious right leaders, "I ain't running for preacher."
Of course, he was all too happy to exploit those same religious people by making a constitutional ban on abortion the centerpiece of his 1996 campaign.
Let us not forget that his second wife Wendy was in on the Enron scandal as well. The Gramms personally profited from the disaster to the tune of $276,912.
Here's a lovely picture of her with the rest of the gang.
Finally there's McCain's economic guru's imprint on the current housing crunch. Gramm has been a tireless advocate for the deregulation of financial institutions. He lobbied congress to pave the way for the predatory lending practices that got us into this mess.
From the politico.
"A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed," the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. "But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework."
Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.
A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.
Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.
During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.
For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.
The republicans have gifted us this guy. They're drowning. Let's throw 'em a anchor.