Free Republic

Charles Calomiris has a splendid WSJ review of a great book, "The Myth of American Inequality" by by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early. It is a "'a truth universally acknowledged,' according to the Economist magazine in 2020" that little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising Most of all the last one. All of this is false. Most of all the last...

Full Title: Sen. John McCain's pallbearers to include Warren Beatty, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, plus billionaire Michael Bloomberg and FedEx CEO while his ushers include health and telecom execs McCain's office announced his pallbearers and other aspects of three days of services for hero Actor Warren Beatty will be among those serving as pall bearers Vice President Joe Biden, a friend from the Senate, also will be there Former Sens. Gary Hart, Phil Gramm, and Russ Feingold will join, as well Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Among those paying tribute to McCain at his memorial services will be Jeff Flake, Joe...

Marco Rubio got a nod from another politician who previously ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1996, told U.S. News and Report that Rubio's "got a Reaganesque quality to him. He can state strong positions and still smile. His optimism shines in an era where people are not very optimistic." While he said his vote would go to Rubio, if Gramm were a betting man, he would invest his money in Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

It's over — we're officially, royally $ucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's...

There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House. Reports say that the head of GM is quitting under duress from the Obama administration:

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part.In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump,Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with...

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...

Barack Obama wants to tell a tale about turbulence in the financial markets, and like any good melodrama this story needs a villain. Sen. Obama believes he has found his mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash in the person of Phil Gramm, the candid-to-a-fault former senator from Texas who presided over a major reform of American banking laws a decade ago. Obama here displays a signal failure to understand the convulsions in the markets. And he also fails to identify the guilty parties — which is odd, since some of them used to sign his paycheck back in his community-organizing days and others...

There is no one explanation of what went wrong with the financial markets. Simply put, it is a case of many people deciding that age old rules need not be followed anymore – combined with breathtaking corruption. Both political parties share some blame in some stupid things that happened, although the Democrats seem to be well in the lead as far as corruption and stupidity goes. Let’s trace some history.

WASHINGTON - Republican Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas lawmaker who attracted a devoted following in the GOP primaries, said Wednesday he rejected an appeal to endorse John McCain's presidential bid. Paul said the request came from Phil Gramm, the former McCain adviser and ex-senator whom the campaign jettisoned after he said the country was a "nation of whiners" about the economy. Gramm defeated Paul in the Republican primary for the Senate in 1984. Speaking to reporters at a news conference, Paul said Gramm called him this week and told him, "You need to endorse McCain." The Texas congressman said...

Former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Wednesday that former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, called him on Tuesday urging him to endorse John McCain, sparking charges from Democrats that the former McCain adviser is still active on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee. "I got a phone call yesterday and it was a bit of a surprise to me because their request was that I endorse John McCain. The argument was, 'he would do a little less harm than the other candidate,'" said Paul.

Of all the themes that recur in this column, one fills my inbox with angry e-mails like no other. It is the notion that you can and should take control of your own life and your economic destiny. It’s my deeply held conviction that if you learn how to do the right things and make good decisions, you will never need to participate in any “recession.” People hate this. Every time I say it, I get barraged with indignant feedback from people who tell me I don’t understand how tough it is. This was never more true than after my...

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline," Phil Gramm told the Washington Times in an interview last week. "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession." And then he walked away from the microphone. You know what else could be said? We also have a bunch of leaders who thrive on image and political correctness to guide their words and decision making. Since when is it not alright to say what you think or tell the truth? Since now! What was...

I read today that Sen. Phil Gramm [R-Tex] resigned under pressure from the McCain campaign because the media was having a field day over his comment that America "had become a nation of whiners". Once again we have allowed these charlatans of television news and print media to dictate what goes and what doesn't go in a presidential campaign. I mean it was bad enough that we let them saddle us with two of the three worst candidates in history [hillary clinton was terrible too]. A decent man or woman wouldn't dare subject himself and his family to the type...

Federal regulators should consider revoking the US banking license of the giant Swiss Bank UBS because of its role in helping wealthy Americans evade billions of dollars in taxes, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) told ABC News today. "I don't think that any bank that goes to the extent that UBS has gone through to avoid doing what their agreements with the United States require them to do, should be allowed to continue to do business unless they clean up their act," Levin said. UBS's role in arranging "undeclared" accounts for an estimated 19,000 US citizens was one focus of a...

How are you doing, financially? You’ve probably got a better job than you did five years ago, and you’ll probably have a still better job (or at least better pay) five years from now. Unless, of course, you retire. In that case, your income goes down, yet you have an opportunity to live for your final 20 or 30 years (with help from Social Security and Medicare) without working. Retirement is a prospect today’s Americans take for granted. But it’s a recent invention. It wasn’t all that long ago that most people worked their entire lives. Most jobs were physically...

I was reading how Phil Gramm couldn’t be more pleased with the economy while he upset John McCain greatly by saying so being McCain’s top economic advisor. Its funny but if Phil Gramm had stayed in the senate, he would likely be the Republican nominee for this presidential election cycle because he was such a favored senate leader until he quit a few days before September 11, 2001, 911. I remember his announcement about not going to seek reelection coming as kind of a shock to me personally, but not really. It was like when Enron crashed a few months...

Economy: Barack Obama is making hay out of McCain adviser Phil Gramm's unpolitic claim that "we've sort of become a nation of whiners." But Gramm is right that America's economic stature is underappreciated.Gramm, a former senator from Texas, is a Democrat-turned-Republican who was a pivotal figure in making Ronald Reagan's economic policies a reality. The Gramm-Rudman automatic budget-cutting mechanism worked beautifully in the 1980s until Congress dismantled it. When Gramm gave a videotaped Q&A to the Washington Times last week, his sophisticated insights on America's economic role in the world were just what you would expect. Unfortunately, Gramm, for the...