Know why McCain wants to distance himself from former Senator Phil Gramm? It is not just because of Gramm's recent obnoxious remarks calling Americans "a nation of whiners" and that unemployed Americans are in "a mental recession." In fact, those remarks were so obnoxious that I wonder if they were engineered just to provide McCain an excuse for publicly distancing himself from Gramm. This issue is a lot deeper than it looks on the surface.
When Gramm was a Senator he was chair of the Committee on Banking, and in that capacity he was able to push through the legislation now known as the "Enron Loophole." This loophole allowed US investment banks to bypass the Federal regulations governing futures trading, and is the reason why the investment banks were able to falsely inflate the prices of oil, wheat, corn and other commodities through massive futures trading, causing your costs of gas, heating oil and food to go through the roof.
Gramm was a member of McCain's campaign team, but now Gramms' name is turning to mud. In addition to the Enron loophole, Gramm pushed through the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act in 1999, which got rid of the laws that seperate banking, insurance and brokerage activities in America. Essentially, this Act did away with all of the good laws written after the Great Depression to protect us from another Wall Street/Banking Industry collapse. That's right, Gramm stripped the system of it's safe guards nine years ago, and guess what? The value of the dollar has nose-dived, Wall Street is highly unstable, and we are in the midst of a recession.
Now you could say that this is not Gramm's fault, that he didn't know what the outcome of his actions would be. However, it turns out that the same investment banks that benefited from the Enron loophole and from the Gramm Act gave more than a million dollars to Gramm's campaign. Uh oh. A Congressional hearing is going to be convened to investigate this. And McCain wants to have noting to do with Gramm, wants us to forget that Gramm has been a key player on McCain's campaign team. Gramm was McCain's campaign CO-CHAIR and LEADING ECONOMIC ADVISER. Previously, McCain had said that he planned to appoint Gramm as SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY. It looks like McCain is scratching that idea, now that the public is finding out about Gramm. Didn't McCain's team bother to find out about Gramm before publicly considering him as Secretary of the Treasury?
With Gramm in the driver's seat as McCain's leading economic adviser, now you know why economists and analysts are saying that McCain's economic policy plans are untenable.
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In the Driver’s Seat
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How much do you think your own multicultural background has shaped your ability to move from culture to culture?
It's fundamental, like learning a language when you're a kid. You're going to have a mastery when you're an adult that you'll never have for a language that you are learning as an adult. Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.
Many business people talk about going from
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good
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to
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great.
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What
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s the difference between a good leader and a great leader?
You see the difference after the leader is gone—that's when you can make the distinction. Good is somebody who delivered and allowed the company to overcome obstacles, without leaving a profound impact on its culture. Great is somebody who leads his company to achievements and performance and value that nobody was expecting it had. But ordinarily you cannot measure it during the [tenure]. You always measure after the fact.
You had success at an early age, but are you a different manager today than you were in your early days at Nissan?
Yes. You gain in maturity. You gain in experience. In certain ways you're more confident because you've seen the ups and downs. You've seen the very positive, and sometimes you've had some frustration and seen results not coming as fast as you want them to come. So I've gained experience, and probably more comfort.
What
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s it like to have a comic-book superhero based on you?
If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.
© 2008
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