Occasionally, I get very interesting emails from the blogger who posts here under the tag, The Engineer of Knowlege. Today he sent me an anecdote regarding his personal knowlege of the man who would run our economy under John McCain and the man who also ruined our economy with the legislation he has proposed and supported in his years in Republican Administrations, Phil Gramm.
In Mr. Engineers own words:
Please let me tell you a story about Phil Gramm. In the early 1980’s Phil Gramm had a house built here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in Dorchester County close to the Chesapeake Bay. Phil did not use a local contractor, NOOOOOO, he use a contractor from Texas. (Quite the daily commute I would say) Anyway, the Texas contractor under estimated the cost to build the house by over $100,000 dollars (in 1980 dollars when he was bashing the tax and spend Democrats and putting together the Gramm / Rudman bill to make sure government worked on a balanced budget) but the contractor continued and completed the house per the contract. Yes the contractor lost over $100,000 on building Phil his house in Dorchester County, Maryland.
When asked why he did not use a local contractor to build the house Phil’s reply was, “The local contractors did not have the quality of workmanship for any of them to build him a house so he had to go with the Texas contractor.” Well gentleman, I know many of the local contractors and none of them would have messed up and under bid the job by $100,000.
Now the real question was, who was padding Phil Gramm's wallet and what did they get for it?
2 comments:
I put Phill Gramm in the same toxic box as Dick Cheney: they are two of the worst traitors that this nation has ever witnessed. Absolutely toxic for this democracy: anathema to the very meaning of the Constitution.
Both should be hanged on public gallows on the mall in DC.
Thanks to Uncle Phil, we have the Commodity Futures Moderization Act of 2000. This, togther w/ the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 in 1999, are responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown.
The repeal of the the latter allowed commercial banks to enter the securities industry and act like investment banks. This ban was in situ since the Great Depression and w/ good reason.
The latter allowed for the deregulation and lack of supervision of energy traders (see ENRON and the California energy trading fiasco) plus the trading of all of those mysterious securities consisting, inter alia, of collateralized debt obligations, regulated by no one, whose existence, trading of, and collapse has led to the subprime mortgage meltdown.
mud_rake is correct regarding Phil Gramm being toxic.
TLGK
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