See The Trickle-Down Gentlemen Wilting, Dear

The Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6007788.html Phil Gramm's fingerprints are all over market mess By FROMA HARROP Sept. 17, 2008, 11:22PM McCain's former economic adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors. And that, my friends, is why everything's falling apart. That is why the taxpayers are now on the hook for the follies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns and now the insurance giant AIG to the tune of $85 billion. Trickle-Down Economics was always recognizable as a scam. George H.W. Bush, the President's father, saw it for what it was, and immediately called it "voo-doo" economics. This is the same economic theory we have referred to as "vampire" economics. It also answers to "zombie" ec., "frankenstein" ec., and "alien vs. predator" economics. It trickles at the rate of molasses in the middle of winter. It is an ignorant theory, propounded by fools. There is absolutely no hidden and magical mechanism existing in the market to make the investments of the rich become benefits for the poor. It is all probabilities, or a pig in a poke. Republicans, the quaint species which pretends to find High Truth buried in their own selfish interests, however, was won over to the tawdry theory. It was so much to their liking that it could have been propounded by Alfred Rosenberg, and they still would have gone for it hook, line, and sinker. After the brief, all too brief reign of public service pursuant to the Contract With America, the Republicans turned back to what American politicians do best: maximize the take for good old Number 1. By 1999, the bizarre charlatan Phil Gramm had laid the ground work for deregulation of the financial industry, apparently laboring under the misapprehension that the financial sector had somehow learned to temper profits with public service. Even the Savings & Loan debacle ten years earlier - a circus in which John McCain was very much a center ring act - did not temper the rush to deregulation. The bald evidence of the tendency to act foolishly and illegally was a lesson of recent history we could only choose to gloss over. Somehow it was an aberration, not a basic human frailty; greed which destroys is overcome miraculously by the invisible hand of the free market, an idol which only rewards good greed, not bad greed. If that sounds fatuous and nonsensical, I submit it makes more sense than Republican economics. Obama was not in the Senate in 1999. McCain was. I bet you dollars to doughnut he voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and approved of everything that Gramm has done. The great irony in it all is that, as billions of value are being destroyed, it is the billions of the rich whom Bush exempted from taxation. What goes around, comes around.