I Knew It. I Just Knew It.
I know you people from foreign states think I am completely obsessed with the thought that every bad thing that happens – from the financial markets tanking to Sandra Bullock’s really bad botox – on Phil Gramm, a former congressman and senator from the State of Texas.
Phil Gramm - Noted Problem Causer
Come to find out, I am right. I am dead solid perfect right.
Phil Gramm is not only the cause of sequestration, he invented the term.
Phil Gramm is the Forrest Gump of financial calamity. Time and again, his face appears at key moments in history. Unlike Gump, Gramm is usually planting the seeds of future disaster whenever he pops up.
Former Texas Senator Gramm is best known for his fine work dismantling financial regulations in the 1990s, which helped bring us the financial crisis of the mid-to-late-2000s. But he is also the intellectual father of the latest nightmare deviling the economy: the sequester.
And then after that, he went to work setting up illegal tax havens for rich Americans at UBS.
When I tell you to pay Texans no mind and for God’s sake don’t let them near money, you need to listen to me. They are financial magicians – they can make money disappear from your pocket.
You know when you find gum on your new shoes and you cannot get that crap off? That was Phil Gramm’s gum. I can prove it.
Thanks to Texas Ellen for the heads up.
I heard once that Phil Gramm owned a house on my street while he was working for Texas A&M in some capacity, and I thought that was pretty cool–for about 20 minutes. Since then, I’ve pretty much thought of him as a snake in the grass, even before he’d had time to begin much of the damage he has done.
1A family of fiscal miscreants: Remember Phil’s wife, Wendy, was on the board (and audit committee) of Enron. She was given that position after deregulating energy derivatives while she was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Phil is so low he’s smothered in whale poop.
2Phil Gramm is the father of the Credit Default Swap, which he decided would be just like insurance, only not regulated, and he stuffed it through Congress in December 2000 and dared Clinton not to sign it because he had enough votes to override a veto. Clinton ultimately caved because there actually was some non-Gramm stuff in the bill that would be beneficial. But there is a special place in the bottom ring of Hell reserved for Phil Gramm and his crowd. I just wish the bastard would finally die and take all his great ideas with him.
3I wish all of the REPIG shills would just die~yeah, I really really hate ALL OF THEM.
4@Eykis, I’m with you. There is no good reason for them to be upright and walking around leaving disaster in their dust.
5My late FIL, rest his soul, was the retired managing partner in a “white shoe” law firm on Wall Street–and a more Liberal Democrat didn’t exist. I never heard him complain–I mean, not ever–about paying taxes. His contempt for Gramm (which he pronounced as ” Grommmmm”) knew no bounds. I believe he knew what he was talkin’ about.
6“Weeee’ve beeecommmmmmme a nashunnnn o’ whiiiiinerrrrs.– Phil Gramm (noted whiner)
Don’t forget the Gramms’ love of the revolving door, plus positions with UBS (helping the wealthy hide money from the tax man) and the CFTC.
As James K. Galbraith put it in 2009:
It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be a Texan, our own distinguished former Senator Phil Gramm. I’d cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act-the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act-in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933. I’d also cite the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, slipped into an 11,000-page appropriations bill in December 2000 as Congress was adjourning following Bush v. Gore. This measure deregulated energy futures trading, enabling Enron and legitimating credit-default swaps, and creating a massive vector for the transmission of financial risk throughout the global system. When the Washington Post caught up with me at an airport in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a year ago to ask for a comment on Gramm’s role, I said very quickly that he was “the sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” They put that on the front page. I do have to give Gramm some credit: When the Post called him up and read that to him, he said, “I deny it.”
7“You know when you find gum on your new shoes and you cannot get that crap off? That was Phil Gramm’s gum.”
When I find something else on the bottom of my shoe, that’s Phil Gramm too.
8This is off-topic, but since JJ has ignored Ted Cruz, I’ll just have to park this comment posted in the NYTimes (new SecDef article) right about here…
Look Ahead – WA
9Biggest loser in this is Ted Cruz who wins the Joe McCarthy Tailgunner Award for innuendo, slander and character assassination.
Feb. 26, 2013 at 7:13 p.m. recommended 55
It is totally not fair to blame every bad thing that happens on Gramm. Not while Gohmert and Cruz are around.
10LynnN, who do you think Gohmert and Cruz learned from?
And for that matter Rick Perry? And many other Texas politicians?
Remember all those old 1950s and 1960 novels that had a Communist in a college or university, recruiting innocent young students without their awareness and feeding them into the pipeline to become Evil Communist Agents? (OK, I’m that old, I admit it.) Well, Phil Gramm was and is the real life evil right-wing equivalent of those fictional guys…teaching generations of Texas youth that rich white men are God’s own anointed to lead the nation by way of no taxes, no regulation, and no mercy. Like the fictional villains, the real Phil Gramm chuckled merrily on his way to his own private payoff.
11check this You-Tube video of Phil Gramm whining about Obama, with a baby crying in the background! Gramm comes in at the :14 mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HabIoeqzL40
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