This McCain-Phil Gramm UBS mess reminds me of the Wendy Gramm-CFTC-Enron screwjob

[swag]

It's all so very Grammish, isn't it?

Wendy Gramm Flashback:

Jan 28, 2004 | More than two years after its spectacular bankruptcy, Enron remains synonymous with the wave of corporate scandals that torpedoed stock prices and investor confidence. Guilty pleas from Andrew and Lea Fastow notwithstanding, Enron executives have mainly remained silent. But one key Enron director has spoken out -- to defend the practices that left her rich and Enron shareholders broke.

Wendy Gramm, a member of the Enron audit committee that approved Fastow's shady partnerships, filed one of the reported record 12,000 public comments on the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal to tweak the rules for choosing corporate boards of directors. The SEC proposal grew out of a consensus that, thanks to a Soviet-style election system that effectively sidelines shareholders, directors were neglecting their legal duty to investors to oversee managers, creating a climate conducive to corporate scandals. For example, the failure of Enron's board of directors in general, and its audit committee in particular, led to the company's stunning bankruptcy, vaporizing stockholdings once valued at $90 billion.

You'd expect Wendy Gramm, now head of the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, to recognize that the Enron board's extraordinary failure indicated a dire need for reform. You'd be dead wrong.

Gramm thinks the system works just fine. After all, she pocketed an estimated $2 million as an Enron director.

Gramm joined Enron's board after chairing the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, where she issued regulations that legalized the type of electricity trading that helped Enron make millions in illegal profits (on Gramm's watch as a director). As a member of Enron's audit committee, Gramm found nothing wrong with accounting tricks that inflated earnings and siphoned money to selected executives in violation of company rules, if not federal laws. Coincidentally, Enron also delivered campaign cash to Gramm's husband, former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, and now provides that arch opponent of big government with his first private-sector job in decades at the Swiss bank UBS, which owns the rump of Enron's energy trading operations.