Obama for President......... VICTORY!!!!!!!!!! ( Archived) (767)

Yeah in your kind of american Dream , no home less deserves being a part of his or her countries destiny, and only the rich and almost rich and super rich and those with a house or a job and of course preferly Republicans only ..... must be allowed to vote

You are not even "kidding" Indy

Good to see you Fallingman!

Ireland for Ever!!!!!!!

This black, Stinkey Stuff........ and all these Repubes taking a bath in it every single morning........

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McCain's Enron Problem - it goes deeper
by Mercutio
Mon May 19, 2008 at 01:18:40 PM PDT
From Jason Leopold, at consortiumnews.com:

Sen. John McCain says he opposes the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also wants to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.

Mercutio's diary :: ::
try democracy's excellent diary, "McCain: We're all tainted" posted today got into McCain's acceptance of Enron campaign funds, but when you bring Phil Gramm into the mix, things start looking much, much worse. As Jason Leopold states, McCain is looking to one of the primary architects of the Enron mess to be his "econ brain". Remember the good old days of rolling blackouts? Well, it turns out that Phil Gramm was a senator from Texas back then...

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...

... Less than a month later, California began to experience rolling blackouts due to artificial electricity shortages which, according to documents later released by federal energy regulators, were the result of manipulative trading practices employed by Enron.

The California crisis centered on Enron’s energy trades through a new platform called EnronOnline, which had been freed from regulatory oversight by the legislation pushed by Gramm.

Just in case you were wondering about any possible conflict of interest Gramm might have had:

Gramm received more than $34,000 in campaign contributions from Enron and served as one of the company’s key legislative allies in Washington, including his help in 2000 removing federal oversight from energy trades on electronic platforms.

and:

Gramm’s wife, Wendy, also had played a role in the anti-regulatory policies that contributed to the Enron scandal.

On Jan. 14, 1993, in the final days of the first Bush administration, Wendy Gramm – as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – pushed through a key regulatory exemption removing energy derivatives contracts and interest-rate swaps from federal oversight.

countinues.......

part two........

That was a major financial boon to Enron, where Wendy Gramm landed five weeks later as a member of the board of directors. She also became a member of the audit committee that signed off on another one of Enron’s fraudulent schemes, partnerships that hid the company’s growing debt.

So aside from this being a sordid piece of American economic history, how does this affect us today? How about this:

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."

So, while he holds out a flimsy $.18/gallon "gas tax holiday" to voters, McCain is voting against help for America's farmers (during a freakin' food crisis!) so that we can relive the Enron days every time we go to fill up at the pump.

So, rural America, still feel like voting Republican?

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Oil Fruit???????????

Nice Reading:

Another Nice one:



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McCain's Fannie and Freddie Connections John McCain railed against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the campaign trail today, saying that the CEOs that led the lenders to ruin "deserve nothing" and should have to pay back their severance packages. In an Wall Street Journal op-ed co-bylined by his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, McCain suggested bold reforms for Fannie and Freddie that would "terminate future lobbying, which was one of the primary contributors to this great debacle."

If that's the case, McCain should look first to his campaign staffers as the cause of that debacle. One of them was Fannie Mae's head of lobbying, and spread tens of millions of dollars around Washington in the form of lobbying contracts. A number of McCain staffers were on the receiving end of those contracts, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each from the lenders to rep their interests. And McCain's campaign manager served as president of a lobbying association that fought to protect Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from the sort of regulation that McCain is now proposing.

In McCain's op-ed in the Journal, he and Palin wrote:

For years, Congress failed to act and it is deeply troubling that what we are seeing is an exercise in crisis management rather than sound planning, and at great cost to taxpayers.
We promise the American people that our administration will be different. We have long records of standing up to special interests…
But McCain's own campaign staffers are those special interests, a fact that casts doubt on both McCain's hiring judgment and his ability to pursue tough reforms of Fannie and Freddie.

Aquiles Suarez, listed as an economic adviser to the McCain campaign in a July 2007 McCain press release, was formerly the director of government and industry relations for Fannie Mae. The Senate Lobbying Database says Suarez oversaw the lending giant's $47,510,000 lobbying campaign from 2003 to 2006.

And other current McCain campaign staffers were the lobbyists receiving shares of that money. According to the Senate Lobbying Database, the lobbying firm of Charlie Black, one of McCain's top aides, made at least $820,000 working for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004. The McCain campaign's vice-chair Wayne Berman and its congressional liaison John Green made $1.14 million working on behalf of Fannie Mae for lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations. Green made an additional $180,000 from Freddie Mac. Arther B. Culvahouse Jr., the VP vetter who helped John McCain select Sarah Palin, earned $80,000 from Fannie Mae in 2003 and 2004, while working for lobbying and law firm O'Melveny & Myers LLP. In addition, Politico reports that at least 20 McCain fundraisers have lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pocketing at least $12.3 million over the last nine years.

countinues........

part two.........

For years McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was head of the Homeownership Alliance, a lobbying association that included Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, real estate agents, homebuilders, and non-profits. According to Politico, the organization opposed congressional attempts at regulation of Fannie and Freddie, along the lines of what John McCain is currently proposing. In his capacity of president of the group, Davis went on record in 2003 and insisted that no further reform of the lenders was necessary, in contradiction to his current boss's sentiments. "[Fannie and Freddie] are subject to an innovative and stringent risk-based capital stress test," Davis wrote. "The toughest in the financial services industry."

At a campaign rally Wednesday morning in Fairfax, Virginia, John McCain said that the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ought to give back the millions of dollars they've earned. What about the lobbyists who helped Fannie and Freddie game the system? Maybe McCain can ask them — at the next campaign strategy meeting.

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Take a good look at the picture of McCain over there..... it says a lot in deed!!!!