McCain, Gramm, the Farm Bill, and sustaining high gas prices

[deminks]

I think this has been posted before with a little notice, but I wanted to bring it to the light again because this is more important than Snotty's epiphany. Don't let this sink. You don't have to recommend again, but don't let it sink. Keep it in the news. I think this is an important key. This is only one of 2 or 3 articles about Gramm in all of Yahoo over the last week.

http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml

May 19, 2008—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.

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.

(snip)

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.

(end snip)

Remember the California rolling black outs? Raised electricity bills, didn't it? Electricity shortages??? Gas shortages? Or rumors of gas shortages? Unregulated commodities trading? All ring a bell, don't they? Where there is a Gramm will, there is a way. Enron lives.

[jpak]

1. "Remember the California rolling black outs?" - excellent fodder for CA campaign commercials

Gramm = McCain = blackouts

[predfan]

2. We need actual Enron employees doing commercials with Gramm

and McCain in the background.........show that famous shot of Ken Lay telling employees to buy more stock, as he was secretly selling his. Let that Enron employee give America a little Straight talk about how he or she lost everything as Phil, Wendy, and by extension John McCain, sold them down the river.