It would seem that former Texas Dem Congressman, GOP Congressman and GOP Senator, Phil Gramm, is in the running for Most Hated Person of All Time:
“The most dangerous place in Washington is between Phil Gramm and a camera” — something reporters say
“Anybody with $2.1 billion has to be taken seriously.” — Gramm, about Ross Perot
“If you’re willing to pay the price, you can beat anybody at anything.” – Phil Gramm
“He’s always willing to rise above principle. He’s got every quality of a dog except loyalty.” — Dave McNeely, political columnist for the Austin, Texas American-Statesman
“You can love him or hate him, but when you’re dealing with him, there are 2 things you’ve got to remember: #1, he’s smarter than you are. #2, he’s meaner than a junkyard dog.” — Marvin Leath, former Gramm colleague
“I’m carrying so much pork [home to Texas] I’m beginning to get trichinosis.” — budget hawk Phil Gramm
“Voters vote for people they like. Now Phil, I know his mother likes him. I know Wendy likes him. I think his dog likes him. And I like him. I’ve named four.” — Buddy Roemer
From What Happened to My Country?
Gramm, who prides himself on meanness, once wrote a vanquished opponent, “I feel sorry for your many problems, but you deserve them.”…
Elected as a tight-fisted Texas conservative in 1984, over time he was shown to be all sermon and no scripture…. “Gramm spoke of belt-tightening, but forced it only on folks he didn’t need, notably immigrants and the poor. He began his career railing against corporate subsidies, but he never pulled the trigger. Instead he became one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from energy, banking, health-care, and insurance companies.” (Slate)
We might be related:
“What killed Gramm in ’96 was not that he’s hypocritical or too ambitious or ugly (one of his talking points) or even condescending. What killed him was that he has a deeply gloomy view of the world. Gramm lives on fear. We’re on an escalator to hell….. He sees enemies everywhere.”
There hasn’t been a scandal in modern times Gramm didn’t involve himself:
In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company’s energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm’s campaign.
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.
From Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:
McCain’s most successful gambit has been to tell conservatives that he is submitting himself to the tutelage of Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm. The odd thing is that Kemp and Gramm, while both fervent and longstanding economic conservatives, inhabit opposite poles of right-wing fiscal thought. Kemp is a utopian supply-sider, so utterly convinced that tax cuts cause revenues to rise that he ceaselessly evangelizes to liberals, blacks, and the poor, whom he sees as the GOP’s natural constituency. Gramm, on the other hand, is a pitiless spending hawk whose animus toward social programs is so strident that it often bleeds over onto the recipients themselves. (He once suggested that poor people are all fat, and another time advised an elderly widow concerned about Medicare cuts to find a new husband to support her.)
From the September 13, 1995 NYT:
When Senator Phil Gramm was asked to explain an entry in Bob Packwood’s diaries suggesting he may have illegally delivered $100,000 to help Mr. Packwood’s 1992 re-election campaign, he told the Senate Ethics Committee it was just a big misunderstanding. But that will not do. The provocative comments demand a rigorous, independent assessment of whether Mr. Gramm and Mr. Packwood deliberately violated the campaign finance laws.
From the November 29, 1992 NYT:
Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who is a leading member of the Senate Banking Committee, helped guide a troubled Dallas savings and loan operator in dealings with Federal regulators one year after the executive had picked up nearly half of about $117,000 worth of building expenses on the Senator’s waterfront vacation home in Maryland.
Back in 1987, Jerry D. Stiles, then a prominent homebuilder and developer in the Dallas area, took on a project for Mr. Gramm and his wife, who together had bought more than 35 acres on a remote part of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and needed a contractor to finish construction on the shell of a two-story house. Mr. Stiles also owned three Texas savings and loans, which later failed and which regulators say will cost taxpayers more than $200 million.
From David Segal in the March 1994 Washington Monthly:
U.S. News & World Report reported that last year, when Senators Dave Durenberger and James Jeffords voted in favor of a campaign finance reform bill, Gramm entered the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he heads, looked at the portraits of the 44 Republican senators in the lobby, and ripped the photographs of Durenberger and Jeffords off the wall. “They’re not Republicans anymore,” he told onlookers…
The party’s ornery apostle of freer markets and lower taxes, Gramm’s sermons invariably conclude that government should be scaled back–not because it doesn’t do anything right, but because it can’t do anything right. This irredeemable incompetence means there are no ways to improve government, so the more we dismantle, the better, and the sooner we choke off its supply of funds–the sooner, in other words, that we cut spending and reduce taxes–the better. With characteristic lack of subtlety, this message is often animated by class resentments. Gramm likes to say he’s for “the people who pull the wagon,” while the Democrats keep piling the wagon with more freeloaders. “We’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat,” he said in a speech about recipients of federal aid…
When you turn down the volume, parse his plans and check his votes, you realize that much of what Gramm wants would expand the government, sometimes in ways that are worth considering, and invariably in ways that contradict what he claims are his fundamental beliefs. The key, it turns out, is to watch what he does rather than listen to what he says, and to understand that Gramm’s overriding ethos has little to do with Dickey Flatt or fiscal conservatism or any principle larger or more dignified than his own political ascendance…
In 1990, once Congress realized it couldn’t keep pace with G-R’s schedule–and realized how ugly across the board cuts would be–it voted itself out of the Gramm-Rudman noose…
Gramm may be the guy with the gun to Congress’ head screaming “Diet!” but there aren’t many lawmakers in either chamber better than he is at raiding the fridge. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation’s survey of all bills sponsored by members during an 18 month period starting in January of 1991 found that there were only three representatives in either chamber who had failed to sponsor a single bill which cut spending. Gramm was one of them, and the only Republican (Bob Kerrey and Robert Byrd were the other two). The bills he did back, if enacted, would have added a total of $8.3 billion to the deficit. (These facts so clearly gave the lie to Gramm’s public posings that the senator’s staff summoned the authors of the study up to the Hill for a stern chat and suggested they never publish anything like that again–advice they ignored.)
“People would be hunting Democrats with dogs by the end of the century” if Clinton’s health plan passes, Gramm warned at a September press conference unveiling an alternative of his own…
“He would create a new national health care system for high risk people,” says Stuart Butler, director of policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. “It would have far less choice and far deeper federal involvement than Clinton’s plan…
One of Gramm’ s gifts is repackaging this kind of pandering as heroism. On the Hill, where he’s notorious for stealing credit for bills and ideas he didn’t think of, there’s a word for it: Grammstanding.
From the October 7, 2002 CNN/Money:
The Texas Republican, who is retiring at the end of his current term after 24 years in Congress, will “advise clients on corporate finance issues and strategy,” according to a UBS Warburg news release.
“Senator Gramm’s experience gained from more than 35 years in academia and government make him uniquely suited to assist our clients to meet the challenges presented by today’s business environment,” UBS Warburg CEO John Costas said in a release.
Gramm drew criticism for being one of the few legislators who objected to the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform bill, passed this summer and signed into law by President Bush.
The act was the most sweeping reform of corporate accounting since the Great Depression, and it came in response to a series of corporate accounting scandals that began with the collapse of Enron Corp., once the seventh-largest U.S. company. Gramm’s wife Wendy was a member of Enron’s board of directors and a member of the board’s auditing committee.
U.S. shares of UBS (UBS: down $1.68 to $36.00, Research, Estimates) fell in early trading.
From the 2-7-08 WSJ:
Mr. Bernanke met separately with the chief executive of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants, and at least twice with former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, now the vice chairman at UBS Investment Bank.
From today’s NYT:
Analysts noted that the write-downs at Credit Suisse remained far below those of UBS, its bigger rival in Zurich. Credit Suisse’s total write-downs have reached $4 billion, while those at UBS exceeded $18 billion. On Jan. 30 UBS reported a fourth-quarter net loss of 12.5 billion francs ($11.4 billion).
From Reuters:
Swiss bank UBS (UBSN.VX) could face billions of dollars more in subprime-related write-downs in 2008, which could tip it into a second year of losses, analysts warned investors, sending its shares tumbling again…
The Swiss bank, the world’s largest manager of affluent people’s money, is already Europe’s biggest casualty of the credit crunch by far.
It has replaced nearly all its top management and watched its share price more than halve since June, when the force of the subprime crisis began to register.
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