Top McCain economic advisor lobbied for mortgage bank
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann reported on Tuesday that the co-chair of Senator John McCain's national campaign was lobbying Congress about the US mortgage crisis on behalf of a major Swiss bank at the same time that he was serving as an advisor to McCain on economic policy.
"Senator McCain's dream of putting his lobbyist problem behind him [is] quite possibly turning into his own nightmare," Olbermann noted.
Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has been advising McCain on economic issues since 2006. The two men have been friends for many years, and Gramm is considered a likely treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm is a major proponent of deregulation and was deeply involved as a senator in passing bills -- from which his family benefited financially -- which led to both the California energy crisis and the current banking crisis.
Gramm currently serves as a vice chairman at the Swiss bank UBS, which he joined in 2002, shortly before he left the Senate. He was their registered lobbyist from 2004 until April 18 of this year, a period of time during which UBS was lobbying to kill the Predatory Lending Act, the Emergency Home Ownership and Mortgage Equity Protection Act, and the Helping Families Save their Homes in Bankruptcy Act.
Gramm was still actively lobbying for UBS on March 26, when he contributed to a speech in which McCain recommended further deregulation as a response to the mortgage crisis. Talking Points Memo notes that "UBS is among the banks worst hit by the global credit crisis," with about $37 billion in assets tied to bad US mortgages.
UBS has now told members of a private banking team which advised wealthy American clients to avoid travel to the US, following the indictment of a former senior executive for helping a billionaire evade taxes.
Olbermann concluded by noting "the drip, drip, drip we've talked about previously as he's thrown out one lobbyist at a time from the campaign, with a zero tolerance lobbyist disclosure form ... At the rate this is going, might the only solution for him to be -- to have zero people working on his campaign?"
This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast May 27, 2008.
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