Following up my submission last week to the Public Forum, the Farm Bill was indeed vetoed by President Bush, and his veto was easily overridden by the House and Senate and is now law. However, many of the commodity futures provisions of the “Close the Enron Loophole Act” will not become effective until after the November election.
Consequently the manipulation of the crude oil futures market by speculators continues unchecked. Fueled by a prediction by one of the speculators, Morgan Stanley, that the price of crude oil could soon hit $150 a barrel, coupled with the continued weakness of the dollar, the price of crude hit almost $139 a barrel last Friday.
And guess who opposed the Farm Bill? Sen. John McCain, following the advice of his chief economic advisor, former Sen. Phil Gramm! And according to the website ConsortiumNews.com, McCain also opposed the enactment of the “Close the Enron Loophole Act” on the advice of Gramm, who in fact was the author of the Enron Loophole.
In 2000, Sen. Gramm headed the Senate Banking Committee and slipped into the Commodity Futures Trading Act the provision that exempted energy trading done on OTC electronic markets from regulatory oversight. Enron helped Gramm write this legislation, which was signed into law in December, 2000, and Enron immediately used it to manipulate the system to create the false energy shortages in California which devastated our economy. And the Bush Administration shielded Enron, a major Bush supporter, from early accusations of market manipulation.
Gramm began advising McCain in 2005, and since that time, McCain has adopted much of Gramm’s anti-tax, anti-regulatory agenda (including his opposition to the bailout of victims of the sub-prime home mortgage debacle, another of Sen. Gramm’s manipulations of the U.S. Government’s regulatory structure in the 1990s,)and his support of Bush’s tax cuts, which McCain had voted against in 2001 and 2003.
It seems that the McCain of 2008 would not have voted for the McCain of 2000 for President.
Ted Vaill