I don't know a lot about Phil Gramm.

Without simply posting links and advising me to "go read them", can someone please post relevant excerpts from websites that explain the man behind the money mess we're in now.

Maybe we can steer the national conversation toward the GOP/neocons and how they created the messes we find ourselves in.

Also, maybe bumper sticker-length explanations of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Glass Steagall Act would be nice too.

Thank you.

(you've got to imagine it in Gramm's Texas Drawl)

"I have more guns than I need, but I don't have as many guns as I want."

Five (5) deferments from the draft during that war, which like so many Repubs, he supported, but from afar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act

bottom line, what is happening today is exactly what happened in 1932, a lack of financial transparency which led to self-dealing. The Glass Steagall Act (both Democrats) created the separation of commercial banking and investment banking. The repeal of that Act, Phil Gramm, is what created the same toxic conditions.

... separate commercial banking from investment banking?

Investment banks deal in speculation while depository banking is supposed to be non-risky. This was accentuated when the FDIC was set up to guarantee deposit accounts. When the two get mixed the risk is allocated fairly, i.e., people who had no intention of risking their money get screwed.

So, was there a law that separated the two? Or was that traditional business practice?

Which Gramm undid.

The government had to come in (with Glass-Steagall) and prevent them from putting risk where there was none.

Is that about right?

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bankers and brokers were sometimes indistinguishable. Then, in the Great Depression after 1929, Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. Hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud in some banking institutions’ securities activities. A formidable barrier to the mixing of these activities was then set up by the Glass Steagall Act.<3>

Gramm was one of five co-sponsors of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000<3>. One provision of the bill was referred to as the "Enron loophole" because the House Agriculture Committee drafted it and it was later applied to Enron. Some critics blame the provision for permitting the Enron scandal to occur.<4> At the time, Gramm's wife was previously on Enron's board of directors.

Later in his Senate career, Gramm spearheaded efforts to pass banking reform laws, including the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which served to reduce government regulations in existence since the Great Depression separating banking, insurance and brokerage activities.

Years later, critics of Gramm point out that this same legislation may have been pivotal in encouraging the corporate practices that led to the 2008 mortgage crises in America.<5>

Between 1995 and 2000 Gramm, who was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, received $1,000,914 in campaign contributions from the Securities & Investment industry.<6>

Later, as lobbyist for Swiss bank UBS, Gramm pressured congress ease it's restrictions on predatory lending tactics by mortgage brokers. For his efforts, Gramm received $750,000 from UBS in a one year period starting in 2007.<7>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm


As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/09/9718_mccain_lehman_crisis_gramm.html

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Pub. L. No. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338 (November 12, 1999), is an Act of the United States Congress which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate. For example, Citibank merged with Travelers Group, an insurance company, and in 1998 formed the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking and insurance underwriting services. Other major mergers in the financial sector had already taken place such as the Smith-Barney, Shearson, Primerica and Travelers Insurance Corporation combination in the mid-1990s. This combination, announced in 1993 and finalized in 1994, would have violated the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Acts by combining insurance and securities companies, if not for a temporary waiver process <1>. The law was passed to legalize these mergers on a permanent basis. Historically, the combined industry has been known as the financial services industry.

In fact Republicans have very few good ideas for the common folk. They have great ideas for accumulating wealth to the very top.

Seriously though, why should the two be separate?

If you want to be informed and knowledgeable about the impact Phil (and his wife) have had on our country, it's not enough to read pithy excerpts and one-liners. You, as an intelligent Democrat, are duty-bound to know everything you can about the people who brought us to where we are today.

Read about him. He's part of our modern history, and you need to know about him. Especially now, given his influence on and proximity to McPOW.

You'll be glad you did.

... we can post short cuts for the longer, more detailed meaty stuff.

It can be of benefit for people who want to respond to those pesky emails that get sent around and for new DUers looking for information.

:D

Stop whining America!

If you want to learn to be enlightened, to understand your country's contemporary history, to be considered an intelligent, enlightened individual, I applaud that and think it's just what our country needs. Smart, informed people who can translate their knowledge into action in the future, knowing full well what its history has been.

If you want sound bites just to fend off those idiotic charges made by people even less informed, that's a waste of time and does nothing to educate or enlighten, and leaves people just as ignorant as they were before.

Those "pesky emails" don't deserve responses. Why lower yourself? If you don't know enough to respond to them without asking for help with shortcuts and little bits of information that might make you sound like you know what you're talking about, your ignorance is as great as that of the senders of those emails.

Those lies have to be refuted so everyone can see.

If the same person continues lying then that's a different story. Ignoring them would be warranted as far as I'm concerned.

But, if someone unintentionally or ignorantly sends out lies, then they must be corrected.

Too much new information can make some people feel overwhelmed.

Start with a short snippet to whet the appetite so to speak. Then, if there is further interest, more detail can be provided.

I believe we're trying to convince people of the truth, not beat them over the head with how right we are and how misguided they are.

They're best left unanswered, and here's why:

The people who send them have already decided how they're going to vote, and they just send out those nonsense emails to help shore up their unconsciously shaky senses of certainty.

Addressing them is an exercise in pissing up a rope. It certainly doesn't change anyone's mind, and it diverts people like you from the issues that really matter.

As long as you're willing to let the people who send out those emails lead you around by your nose and put you in a defensive posture, I say have a good time. But, as long as you're willing to be their patsy, they're dictating the terms, and they're smarter and more powerful than you are.

Not between individuals.

You know full well that people get things in email, find them interesting and send them along to people in their address book.

If the lies come from one person, I agree with letting them go. But, if they come from people who seem reasonable, but have shown an openness to information, the lies cannot be left unchallenged.

Slave labour

Again, this warning has come true with a vengeance under Governor Bush.
Just listen to Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas), a close crony of Bush. He has
proposed turning prisons into industrial parks.

"I want them to make prisoners work 10 hours a day, six days a week. I want
to enter into contracts with major manufacturers so that we can produce
component parts in prisons ... now being produced in places like Mexico,
China, Taiwan and Korea. We can defray about half the cost of keeping
people in prison."

The savings, $22,000 annually per prisoner, could be used to build more
prisons and train more prison guards, Gramm said. He also proposed doubling
the number of graduates of the FBI Academy to oversee this prison boom.

Rep Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on
Crime, is the sponsor of legislation in the House to speed conversion to
private prisons. McCollum spearheaded the impeachment of President Clinton. More...

http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve3/1025pris.html

McSame's good friend...

Business Behind Bars

The real drive behind prison labor for the private sector is not rehabilitation, but government subsidies which cost Washington state millions per year and eliminate fair-paying jobs for free workers.

http://www.wafreepress.org/29/Prison1.html

Same kind of shit the SS did.

The Masters of Mean-Gramm and Armey

Hail and farewell to two of the meanest guys ever to serve in the U.S. Congress -- Senator Phil Gramm and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, both from Texas. What a barrel of knee-slapping fun they have been. As each winds up his final year in office, we could have a fine time recalling their Meanest Moments: The side-splitting occasion when Armey referred to Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts as "Barney Fag." The rib-tickling time Gramm wanted to deny food stamps to elderly legal immigrants on the splendid grounds that extending aid would only foster dependency, thereby incicting "a new personal tragedy on the most vulnerable among us."

Armey and Gramm represent the last of a certain style of antigovernment politician. Their favorite joke is that the 10 most-dreaded words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." They built their political careers by opposing everything the government does to help people, constantly disparaging and attacking the institutional form of the people's power. Corporate welfare is fine with Gramm, just not anything to help people; Armey, the true-believer ideologue, was at least more consistent, rejecting almost all forms of government spending.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/power_plays/2002/03/mean.html