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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (391675)	6/17/2008 12:38:24 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573420

"But nooooooo, it had to be the Senate......" It is worse than that. He is the only one to get kicked out of the Democratic party for espionage. He was elected as a Democrat until the Dems got tired of him feeding the Republicans information about what the Dems were planning. So, they kicked him. Which meant there had to be a special election. Which, he won. Primarily because he convinced the legislature to schedule the election as quickly as possible. So there was little time for a challenger to make their case. All I can say is that I way too naive.

To: combjelly who wrote (391675)	6/17/2008 1:52:01 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1573420

Remembering Sen. Phil Graham texaslawyerblog.com ( McSame's economic adviser. I always thought he looked like a turtle. ) A recent article illustrates how legislation is crafted and how those little known provisions slipped into a bill that no one had time to read can impact us years later. Quote: 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. … 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. Link: motherjones.com Michael