Sunday Roundup

Phil Gramm obviously had the quote of the week. Voters dealing with skyrocketing gas prices and collapsing home values just love being called "whiners" by a millionaire. This kind of out-of-touch condescension comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed Gramm's career. He's left his fingerprints on some of the worst economic debacles in U.S. history. He was a champion of energy deregulation, which gave us Enron and blackouts and price gouging. He was a champion of deregulating the savings-and-loan industry, the bailout of which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. And his leadership on banking deregulation helped create the current sub-prime mortgage crisis. Republicans love to talk about Obama's lack of experience. I'll take fresh blood over Gramm's kind of track record any day of the week.

Comments

[festi]

Let me get this straight:
A republican millionaire calls the American people whiners.

But Obama is the elitist?

Can some Republican out there PLEASE explain to me how this works?

[mostlybluedot]

You know, it is astounding that McCain is polling as well as he does. The man is ill informed on almost everything and the Bush republicans are taking this country to the trash heap of history but still so many people prefer them to Obama. Incredible!!!!!!!

[Trolmaster]

Right after McCain tries to restructure his campaign, this clown Graham comes along and makes a stupid arrogrant comment, showing that McCain's reamping of his campaign is just cosmetic and not real.

Any Millionare telling the average America that we're whiners, due to the very real problems facing us shows how out of touch they really are and are totally unfit to govern with such a snob attitude.

McCain is trying to say Graham does not speak for him, but he is his economic adviser so he does speak for him. If McCain does not fire Graham he's giving Americans yet one more reason not to vote for him.

[WhiteHat]

note to Phil Gramm,

Actually, Phil, America is a nation that needs a sincere effort from the people we pay to look after things - and we don't need an attitude like yours in an employee.

[GreatFutureForAll]

This weekend, news agencies reported that the Bush administration is planning to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq as early as September.

If, as John McCain has said, Barack Obama's plan to bring troops home next year is such a bad strategic idea, why is the Bush administration trying to do so months in advance of 2009?

So, if Barack Obama says we should start drawing down troops in Iraq in January, it must be a bad idea. But, if the Bush administration says we should start drawing down troops in September, then it must be a good idea?

Am I missing something here? If Bush thinks we can start to bring troops home, is he not coming to this conclusion after speaking to the Generals on the ground in Iraq?

Remember, one guy told us not go to war with Iraq months before it began (Obama). Bush and McCain believe that we should continue the war in Iraq until "victory" is achieved.

Part of the Bush administration and Pentagon rationale for drawing down troops in Iraq is to buffet the war effort in Afghanistan, which has been Obama's stated position for many months on the campaign trail.

[Kynn]

From what I've seen the "troop withdrawal" is a sham, just like the last time. Any troops that we bring home are already supposed to come home.

Just like when last year Bush said he'd bring some troops home, and the troops that came home HAD to anyway.

[GreatFutureForAll]

Excellent point.

Bush does have an eight year track record of broken promises, esp. in terms of Iraq!

[kfdan]

Phil Gramm is a prime example of the "let them eat cake" variety of Washington politician! His involvement in government has been a disaster for the public and he needs to be targeted as one of the bad guys! The problem in general in doing so is that the mainstream media keeps coming back to such insiders for their opinions and does little or nothing in exposing the corruption they bring to the plate! The privatizing of government programs, engaging in and profiteering from illegal wars and handing out sweetheart, no-bid contracts to large corporations in Iraq show how far corruption has gotten the upper hand in America!
Whiners my ass ~ !!!

[MissKaren]

His wife is on the Board of Directors at UBS, one of the big players in the mortgage debacle and she was also on the board at Enron. Does that tell you anything about them?

[Mojane]

Greed rules. We're doomed.

[SpaceCadet]

Fresh not bitter sez "The bad news: In firing Phil Gramm on the spot - with a humiliating joke about Phil Gramm being unworthy of an appointment as Ambassador to Belarus - John McCain showed the kind of decisiveness that contrasts to his advantage with the recent wishy-washy Obama..."
--------------------------------------------------------

The bad news is that McCain actually did NOT fire Gramm. Gramm is going to continue advising McCain on how to make government better serve corporate interests. He's just not going to do it in public anymore.

[SpaceCadet]

After all the gaffes and blunders committed by McCain and his surrogates this week, Time Magazine's Mark Halperin has declared McCain the "winner" of the week in the presidential race. Halperin then seemed to contradict himself when he was on CNN by blaming the Democrats for McCain's bad week, which kind of suggests that McCain actually "lost," but only because the Democrats weren't playing fair (waaaahhhh). If you think Halperin sounds suspiciously more like a paid Republican operative than an objective journalist, consider that Time is owned by Time-Warner and that John McCain has been one of the best friends the telecommunications industry ever had in the Senate.

[jail4wncrew]

Phil and Wendy Gramm: Sorcerer's Apprentices or Financial Sociopaths?

A commentator in a story in the Houston Chronicle or perhaps the the Texas Observer indicates that Gramm does not really understand the legislation that he has introduced. Even if that is the case, he should be able to see the harm and financial disaster his and his wife's incompetence or negligence has caused. She at least had to pay extra beyond the Director's and Officer's insurance policy for her lack of oversight in Enron. Do they otherwise accept responsibilty for all the harm they have caused? Perhaps some of the efforts have been intentional.

[youcannotbeserious]

Phil Gramm, got his fortune from the day he was born from the government teat.
He was born to Army parents and never left one government program or another.

So he doesn't know what it is to struggle.

Comparing Obama to McCain is proving to be an exercise in futility, both are bad.
Why must America choose between the lesser evil?

I'm not going to put the "x" over either of those come election time. The US is had anyway, thanks to GWB.
Anybody who has the foolish notion that being president has the same prestiege it once had is the greater fool. Again thx to GWB.

Talk about those who would value experience, over a candidate who will most likely call for a draft should he be elected, and thus put the last nail on the US coffin, GWB showed us that his experience was at failing businesses and whadayaknow -- he put that to use as president.

[hypnotoad72]

Bull.

The US makes a lot of income and, despite its current debt load, won't collapse.

I myself once had a huge debt load, and managed to pay it off.

Don't be so negative.

[tbrnotb]

Perfect. You said it all. This is the message we need to get across. We need to flood the MSM with this, as well as our representatives and we need to talk about this in political discussions.

Self-serving Republican leadership like this is what we need to fight. He throws a monkey wrench into our economic policies and then walks away into a cush lobbying position, with enormous clout, I might add. He and his wife (Board member of Enron after leading a Government/Political Energy group) have both pillaged our economic system to their and their co-horts great advantage.

The Gomez and Morticia Addams of our coutry's economic policies

[MetryJen]

How do we get out the facts about McCain's advisers to the general public, rather than just us junkies that read the blogs? I'm going crazy watching the likes of Fiorina and McCain babble on television without anyone questioning their history and credentials. McCain's campaign is full of these types, that made filthy money with questionable tactics, and nobody blinks. What's up with that?

[ldsrapha]

Thank you! Fiorina was a joke on Meet the Press. She seems to have NO clue what McCain's positions are or else she is outright lying.

[MissKaren]

Carly may do for McCain what she did for HP.

[realiybased2]

All of you MUST understand, these politicians, news anchors, regular news personality, all have very NICE SALARIES. OF COURSE, they don't think there is a recession, but remember, the majority of AMERICANS are every day working people who depend on their paychecks to take care of their families. WE REGULAR people, economically, make the world go round. But when you talk about how gas prices, loss of homes, less food, loss of jobs, taxes (which we regulars pay the bulk of), we are in a RECESSION. FOR GOD'S SAKE,,,,Phil Gramm is RICH.

Do you believe for one minute that these political people, news people that on TV everyday, have a hard time filling up their gas tank and trying to decide whether cut back on groceries to fill the gas tank. ...NO!!!!!!!

[daddysboy]

That's why I'm for canceling government funded health-care for legislators.

[azcamp]

Thanks for this article.

In a week when there was a run on a bank, and Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac asked for a government bailout, some old guy from Texas tries to tell us to relax because these economic facts are a mirage. That is the old same guy whose wife sat on the board of Enron. That the Republican who hired him for economic advice has fashioned a platform around the economy according to Phil Gramm, should scare Wall Street and global market managers. That some Americans were distracted by Jesse Jackson speaks volumes about the media.

Can't wait for next week. We certainly do live in interesting times.

[chappelforpres]

Better yet, Phil Gramm was the Republican instrumental in deregulating banking. One would have to guess that during this entire time he has never fully understood or cared about the downside ramifications of Texas style capitalism.

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

" Mother Jones - May 28, 2008