Folks knock Republicans because they appear to be insensitive to the poor and the middle class. But this week’s outrageous scandal regarding John McCain’s adviser, Phil Gramm, takes the cake. Here is how the Dallas Morning News put it:
Phil Gramm is known for shooting first and aiming later. So we’re a nation of whiners, huh?. There’s a huge difference between whining and worrying about the future., i.e. potential loss of jobs, homes, retirement savings, energy costs and overall standards of living.
It’s sure hard for Republicans to paint Obama as elitist and out of touch when folks like Gramm simply dismiss real economic uncertainty as all mental. AMAZING.
Gramm has no excuse for saying that our current recession is a “mental recession.” And try as he may, McCain won’t be able to outrun those words.
The question is, do Republicans really feel this way? Do they really think there is no recession?
I wonder. I was a Republican for most of my life. I served on both the OC GOP and the CA GOP Central Committees. I ran Republican campaigns. I served as the OC GOP Hispanic Outreach Director. As such I am uniquely qualified to judge this party. And I hate to say it but the GOP is indeed out of touch with the working poor and the middle class.
Just take a look at how the OC GOP conducts Latino outreach. They take a bunch of rich “Hispanics” and start a group called the “Hispanic 100.” Then they tout these people as endorsers of white candidates that hate Mexicans. And they appoint them to lofty positions locally and in Sacramento.
Case in point, Santa Ana Clowncilman Carlos Bustamante. He has been the OC GOP’s golden boy in the Latino community for some time. He has NO CLUE as to what the poor people of Santa Ana are going through. He is an overpaid manager at the County of Orange. Yet Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to TWO state commisions. Luckily Bustamante’s “booby” scandal resulted in him quitting the state commissions this week.
Others who have benefited by being token Latinos include Rosario Marin, who is in charge of a whole slew of state agencies in Sacramento, and John Cruz, another Hispanic 100 member, who is Schwarzenegger’s appointments secretary. Cruz is the one who thought appointing Bustamante to two state commissions was a good idea. You’re doing a great job Johnny!
All of these folks are out of touch with those who don’t make over six figures a year. Like Gramm they simply have no clue. Fortunately when Schwarzenegger is replaced by a Democrat in a few years they will all be out of work. Maybe we will get lucky and they will all move to Texas and keep the retired G.W. Bush company.
This November the nation’s working poor and middle class voters have only one true choice for President. His name is Barack Obama.
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Because the best way to help the poor and middle class is by raising taxes and expanding government control over the economy!
Matt/Jubal,
Your boy Bush increased the size of our federal government far beyond what any previous administration in modern history has done. And he is blowing $14 billion a month in Iraq.
So yes, it is better to go with Obama, who says he is raising taxes only for the “rich,” than to vote to extend the Bush regime under McCain.
The “rich”? What a laugh. You mean anyone making more than $100K? Lifting the cap on Social Security taxes is going to do wonders for the economy. A nice tax hike whammy on the entrepreneurial class will really create a lot of jobs.
As for Bush’s growing of government: since when do two wrongs make a right?
Matt/Jubal,
“As for Bush’s growing of government: since when do two wrongs make a right?”
Exactly! Voting for McCain will simply continue the 8 lost years under Bush. Vote for Obama and if he stinks it up you can replace him 4 years hence.
Remember Carter? Who beat him? Only the greatest Republican president we have ever known. You have four years to find the next Ronald Reagan.
One thing I can assure you of is that McCain is NOT that man.
My point was if you object to the growth of government under Bush, why vote for the candidate who will grow it even more?
The line that McCain will be a 3rd Bush term is total horse manure — and I suspect you know as much.
Jubal, No. The best and only way to help the poor, the middle class and our Country is to oust Republicans who have made the poor poorer, ruined the middle class and our Country. But you wouldn’t know about these people.
CJ
I received this in an email discussion and I think it pretty much sums up that damn Gramm:
Phil Gramm’s wife was on the board of Enron. She and he are prime examples of rich folk who gamed the system to benefit themselves at the expense of hard working Americans.
If you believe in Gramm’s viewpoint, then the words of the Declaration of Independence are the words of a yet to form nation of whiners.
When you see your beloved country going off the rails, it’s smart and prescient to list those transgressions which are taking the country down. To sit back and say Americans who see great wrongs are “whiners” only shows how the critic, in this case Phil Gramm, is running a mental defecit in his thinking.
He’s got his. He golden parachuted out of Congress into a cushy UBS job where his former law making is now bankrupting investors. His wife got here hers too. She took her easy winnings from Enron and ran like hell before she went down in flames with the insiders who arranged to overcharge Californians for the rights to “privatized” elecrticity.
Phil Gramm is an anti-American. In the Revolutionary days, he’d been run right out the Republic.
Here is McCain defending the Enron “loophole” -which Gramm was the author of getting that loophole in place. Gramm and his wife, Wendy, profited from the Enron scheme and he was enriched from his efforts to scam the rest of us. Now he’s back as McCain’s economic advisor and possible VP:
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml
Here is a large snip of the article, above. For anyone who finds this kind of subject interesting, then I suggest you go to the link directly and read the rest of the article:
Clearing the way for that California price gouging, Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.
Then, over the next year, Enron – with Gramm’s wife Wendy serving on its board of directors – worked to create false electricity shortages in California, bilking consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.
Gramm left the Senate in 2002 but now has emerged as what Fortune magazine calls “McCain’s econ brain,” not only filling the Arizona senator’s acknowledged void on economic expertise (“I don’t know as much about the economy as I should”) but recognized as one of McCain’s closest friends in politics. The two men talk daily.
A McCain aide told me that the Arizona senator opposes the farm bill because it “rewards lobbyists” by granting rich farmers lucrative subsidies, although he would support “a reasonable level of assistance and risk management to farmers when they need America’s help.”
But the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee also opposes the farm bill because Gramm advised McCain that he should resist its regulatory language on the energy futures market.
Democrats have dubbed that gap in energy futures regulation the “Enron loophole,” but it played a part, too, in the more recent attempt by the Amaranth Advisers hedge fund to corner the national gas market by shifting trades to the unregulated “dark markets” of the Intercontinental Exchange.
The “Enron loophole” also has become part of the debate over the soaring price of oil. Last week, a study sponsored by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, concluded that speculative futures markets were partly to blame for the surge in oil prices that have pushed gas at the pump toward $4 a gallon.
At a May 15 news conference, Levin said the skyrocketing price of oil is “not the result of supply and demand. Speculators have taken over most of the futures market.”
However, the 673-page farm bill, containing the regulatory provisions on electronic energy trading, still faces obstacles amid overall concerns about the bill’s largesse to farmers at a time of rising food prices.
President George W. Bush has vowed to veto the bill, although it cleared the House and Senate by margins wide enough for an override, assuming Republicans don’t rally behind Bush and McCain, their current and future standard bearers.
Gramm and Enron
The battle over the “Enron loophole” also could draw attention to McCain’s dependence on Gramm as his chief economic adviser and Gramm’s key role in passing legislation that let Enron trade commodities on electronic platforms without federal oversight.
In 2000, with the Republicans in charge of Congress and Gramm chairing the Senate Banking Committee, the exemption on electronic trading was approved without a Senate hearing.
Internal Enron documents, which were released in 2002, revealed that the Houston-based company helped write the legislation, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in December 2000.
Freed from regulatory interference, Enron then used manipulative trading practices to game the California electricity market and drive up electricity prices across the state.
While California consumers were getting fleeced, the new Bush administration shielded Enron from early accusations of market manipulation. President Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity, buying additional time for Enron although the company’s house of cards collapsed anyway in fall 2001. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Enron Lies.”]
In 2006, the “Enron loophole” allowed Amaranth Advisers hedge fund to shift its trades from the regulated New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) to the unregulated Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in Atlanta.
That let Amaranth corner the natural gas market, betting that futures prices would rise. The hedge fund lost about $6 billion and imploded as natural gas prices fell to a two-year low in September 2006……………
More at the link.
Jubal,
We’ve had 2 Presidents who tried to give us trickle down economics (Reagan and Bush 2) and the economy was heading south by the end of both of their administrations. Aren’t you capable of learning from history?
*Even President Bush…thinks there is a problem!
Phil Gramm has lost it…..it’s like watching
two head-on collisions and walking up to the
survivors….and saying: “Walk it off!”
Does it really matter whether Obama is right or not? We know McCain in on the other side of the moon…..right along with Dr. Gramm!
Since Obama is asking for donations for the Clinton campaign to help with her debt, maybe McCain, with Jubal’s help, should start raising money for the “Bush/ Chaney legal defense fund.”
I am certain poor people and the middle class will not contribute.
CJ