``In a bottom line sense you're right. Like Gore Vidal said, `there is no conspiracy, they all think alike.' '' Dennis Claxton
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I want to go back to this and write a few things on the implicit problem of singling out individuals as examples of their class.
For those who are leery of this approach, maybe the following on induction will justify the practice.
Consider the dualism of the universal and the particular. I say Phil Gramm is a perfect example of his class. His wheeling and dealling is a particular that illuminates the universal screw job of Capital, and especially financial markets.
Consider two more things. Most people do not routinely think in abstractions. I don't. It took Carrol and Dennis' post to remind me of the abstract relationship between a universal and a particular.
I think in particular instances and then generalize. Phil is a very good example, a particular, of what is rotten about neoliberalism as a generalized ideal economic order, i.e. a universal. And further, that order has been specifically designed and built to economically benefit the elite, to hand over the wealth of the many to be managed, manipulated, and speculated on by the few, for the benefit of the few alone.
The second thing to consider is that in the concrete world, there are no ideals or universals, except on paper. There are only concrete instances. In order to get to the universal, you must demonstrate what could be called an inductive limit. An inductive limit is found, where after a sufficiently numerous quantity of matching examples, one can say, the probability of reaching the universal can be made so likely that we can dismiss the difference between the sumation and the limit, or the ideal or universal. This is a version of an inductive truth by enumeration of instances, and applies a generalized theorem on limits. In this context the limit is equivalent to an ideal or universal. (All of these are tautological, but nevermind for now.)
Induction is a technical version of the everday world of common sense and intuition. I form my concepts of the universal from many particular instances that all seem to share a common characteristic. I infer the common characteristic (or universal) from the series of concrete instances (particulars).
Phil Gramm is a duck because he looks like a duck. I have found that all such ducks are also crooks.
Phil Gramm is so crooked in such wonderfully inventive ways, that he manages almost single handedly to illustrate how financial markets and especially their derivative products are made into vast swindles. The collapse of this system of swindles, risks what C.Wright Mills called the glue that binds the elite class together and therefore the economy as a whole.
As an extra added attraction, filthy Phil also makes a good individual example of corrupt government. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing..., which was supposed to oversee regulation of these markets. Of course he steered through the bills that de-regulated the banks. Here is a quote from the Mother Jones article, in case a lot folks didn't read it:
``Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited-at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms-setting off a wave of merger mania.''
Meanwhile, filthy Phil wrote or helped write bills that promoted development of these unregulated derivatives on everything from energy to housing and credit.
``But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry-friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career-came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead-even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. `Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,' says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.''
Gramm performed these duties for capital, at the same time as his wife was on the board of directors at Enron. Remember Enron started off as private utility company that owned brick and mortar stuff like pipelines and electric lines and turned itself into some fantastic financial speculation firm in derivatives in energy and credit. Wiki here for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
It seems to me that filthy Phil was well informed on how to do all this, and was generously reimburst almost certainly by Enron, and probably sent his money to USB or some other off-shore investment bank, while he was still in public office.
Dirty ducks like Phil simply can not be in so many critical places and at such critical times where huge sums of money are to be found, and not be a crook.
Here's the wiki on UBS:
``UBS AG (NYSE: UBS; SWX: UBSN; TYO: 8657) is a diversified global financial services company, with its main headquarters in Basel & Zürich, Switzerland. It is the world's largest manager of private wealth assets, "the world's biggest manager of other people's money"[1] and is also the second-largest bank in Europe, by both market capitalisation and profitability. UBS has a major presence in the U.S., with its American headquarters located in New York City's Manhattan borough, (Investment Banking); Weehawken, New Jersey (Private Wealth); and Stamford, Connecticut (Capital Markets). UBS's retail offices are located throughout the United States, and in over 50 other countries. UBS is an abbreviation, which originated from a predecessor firm, the Union Bank of Switzerland, however UBS ceased to be considered a representational abbreviation after its 1998 merger with Swiss Bank Corporation.[2]
UBS's global business groups are Private Banking, Investment Banking, and Asset Management. Additionally, UBS is one of the leading providers of retail banking and commercial banking services in Switzerland. Overall invested assets are 3.265 trillion Swiss francs (CHF), shareholders' equity is 47.850 billion CHF and market capitalization is 151.203 billion CHF by end of 2Q 2007.
The AG in the company's name means Aktiengesellschaft, which is the equivalent to a shareholder-based corporation in the USA.
In some ways, UBS has evolved on a similar path to its cross-town rival Credit Suisse. Both are Swiss commercial and retail banks which bought major US investment banks (and in the case of UBS, a leading retail stock broker, PaineWebber).''
Now, get this. Here is the Reuters story on UBS, filed just two hours ago this very Saturday morning 7/26/08...
``CHICAGO (Reuters) - Swiss bank UBS AG has suspended David Shulman, head of its U.S. fixed income unit, amid state and federal probes of sales of auction-rate securities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.
A spokesman for Shulman, who was also UBS's global head of municipal securities, said he was cooperating fully with UBS as it works through the matter, the newspaper reported.
On Thursday, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued UBS, accusing it of committing a `multi-billion dollar fraud' by steering clients into auction-rate securities that became impossible to sell once the credit market tightened. [why put an indictment in quotes, as if it was just pretend? cg]
The long-term securities are issued by municipalities, student-loan companies and mutual funds, with interest rates set through weekly or monthly auctions.
The lawsuit said at least seven UBS executives dumped $21 million in auction-rate securities that they held in personal accounts as the credit market began showing signs of trouble, and that the bank continued to sell those securities.
UBS said it conducted an internal probe of alleged sales of personal holdings of auction-rate debt by its executives and found no wrongdoing.
`While UBS does not believe that there was illegal conduct by any employee, we have found cases of poor judgment by certain individuals and are evaluating appropriate disciplinary measures,' the bank said last week.
Last week, UBS announced a plan to buy back as much as $3.5 billion in auction-rate securities from customers. Cuomo dismissed that offer as insufficient.''
I swear, filthy Phil is in there somewhere. Cuomo's office better get somebody on Phil. As Dennis Franz used to say in the NYPD Blue grilling room, ``We like Phil for some of this...''
The real problem is that Cuomo can only investigate insider trading fraud, when the real problem is the fraudulant way the system is rigged for insiders in the first place. And there is another thing. Notice UBS talks about employees. What about the board of directors? You think they were completely ignorant of how their company was managed? Now we're into plausible deniability. I am telling you, filthy Phil is in there, that's why we like him for this sort of thing.