David C. Farmer, Trustee vs. Harmon

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

—

DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

WENDY GRAMM

Wendy Gramm, wife of former Texas senator, Phil Gramm, is from Hawaii and is a graduate of Punahou School.

From wikipedia:

Wendy Lee Gramm (born 1945) is an American economist, currently the chairman of the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based in Washington D.C. She is also the wife of former United States Senator Phil Gramm.

Wendy Lee Gramm was born in Hawaii and is of Korean and Hawaiian ancestry. She received a B.A. degree in economics from Wellesley College in 1966 and a Ph. D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1971. In her role at the Mercatus Center, Gramm generally calls for deregulation of the energy industry. Previously, Gramm held several positions in the Reagan Administration, including heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1988 to 1993. After a lobbying campaign from Enron, the CFTC exempted it from regulation in trading of energy derivatives. Subsequently, Gramm resigned from the CFTC and took a seat on the Enron Board of Directors and served on its Audit Committee. While on the board of directors she received donations from Enron to support the Mercatus Center.

After the Enron scandal, Gramm and the other directors of the energy company were named in several investor lawsuits, many of which have been settled. In particular, Gramm and other Enron directors agreed to an $168 million dollar settlement in a suit led by the University of California. As part of that settlement, the directors agreed to collectively pay $13 million to settle claims of insider trading. The remainder of the settlement was to be paid by insurance.

From 1985 to 1988, Gramm was head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). In 2002, OIRA solicited public recommendations for regulatory reform. Mercatus made 44 recommendations.

Gramm also serves as chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a director of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's group. She has sat on the boards of Enron Corporation, Iowa Beef Processors, Invesco Funds, Longitude, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and State Farm Insurance Companies.

She has two sons: Jeff, who heads the indie-rock outfit Aden, and Marshall, a professor of economics at Rhodes College.

Ronald Reagan once said Gramm was "my favorite economist."

References

Wendy Gramm, Mercatus Center

Critical report on Wendy Gramm from the Clean Air Trust, January 2002

UC press release on Enron settlement

This article uses content from the SourceWatch article on Wendy Lee Gramm under the terms of the GFDL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm

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Reference:

The Catbird Seat - Part II: The Nests: Commodities Futures Trading Commission

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Letters - Topix

Regarding racial requirements for admission to Kamehameha, in Pauahi's will: The 3-judge panel of ..... You can thank Phil Gramm for that. You remember him? ...
www.topix.com/forum/city/ewa-beach-hi/TLQC9NLVI58J59RII - 113k - Cached - Similar pages

1. [CTRL] [2b] THE CATBIRD SEAT - THE NESTS

The name of one company in particular might have caught Wendy Gramm's attention: .... Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate was set up 115 years ago to educate ...
www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg38027.html - 64k - Cached - Similar pages

2. [CTRL] [1b] THE CATBIRD SEAT - Birds of a Feather

At the time, Xerox was a Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate vendor. ..... Leach of the U.S. House Banking Committee and Chairman Phil Gramm of the U.S. Senate ...
www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg38023.html - 62k - Cached - Similar pages

3. Letter | starbulletin.com | Editorial | /2008/08/25/

The second case is the admissions lawsuit against Kamehameha Schools. Under American law, Princess Bernice ... Phil Gramm to guide him in these matters. ...
archives.starbulletin.com/2008/08/25/editorial/letters.html - 39k - Cached - Similar pages

4. The coming Republican fall | starbulletin.com | Editorial | /2008 ...

His economic adviser, Phil Gramm (husband of Waialua's Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm), recently said ... Kamehameha Schools should decide how to end lawsuits for good ...
archives.starbulletin.com/2008/08/10/editorial/commentary2.html - 44k - Cached - Similar pages
More results from archives.starbulletin.com »

5. The Story of ENRON

Finally, Wendy Gramm (wife of Senator Phil Gramm) joined Enron's Board of ...... have followed the scandals of Hawaii's Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate, ...
www.apfn.org/APFN/enron.htm - 230k - Cached - Similar pages

6. NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Punahou School

One of the nine new Case Middle School buildings on the Punahou Campus. ..... William Philip Phil Gramm (born July 8, 1942, in Fort Benning, Georgia) served ...
www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Punahou-School - 146k - Cached - Similar pages

7. Shining the Light on Education Spending in Hawaii: Where Do Our ...

Aug 20, 2008 ... Phil Gramm touched off a firestorm when he accused Americans of being in a .... The recent Kamehameha Schools admissions controversy and ...
www.grassrootinstitute.org/GrassInReview/GrassInReview08-20-08email.shtml - 40k - Cached - Similar pages

8. Punahou School Alumni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oct 24, 2007 ... Punahou School Alumni is a list of notable graduates, students who attended, ..... spouse of Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm; '62 Terrence O'Donnell (Air Force ..... Chairman of Board of Trustees, Kamehameha Schools ...
www.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/wiki/Punahou_School_Alumni - 137k - Cached - Similar pages

9. Punahou School alumni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... spouse of Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm; '62 Terrence O'Donnell (Air ..... Polynesian diaspora, Chairman of Board of Trustees, Kamehameha Schools ..... The main reference for this page is the Punahou School Alumni Directory ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punahou_School_alumni - 246k - Cached - Similar pages

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The Legacies of Phil and Wendy Gramm

by Karen Hedwig Backman

Mon Sep 15, 2008

The costly collapse of Enron. Not to mention WorldCom, Global Crossing, etc.

The costly collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The costly collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, possibly Washington Mutual, etc.

The 300 point plunge on this morning's Wall Street stocks.

Plummeting bank stocks in Europe.

All, it would seem, the bastard children of Professors Phil and Wendy Gramm who have been so wonderfully kind to the U.S. economy. And to working-class Americans who are going to pay the bills to clean up the Phil and Wendy messes.

Karen Hedwig Backman's diary

Did it all begin with a little tryst between the corporation Enron and the professorial wife of then Senator Phil Gramm of Texas?

In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's campaign.

A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.

Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor—and according to Public Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed Gramm just under $100,000.

http://www.villagevoice.com/...

The frosting on the cake for corporate fraud and nonsense was the crowning glory of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, (November 12, 1999), courtesy of Republican Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa and Republican Congressman Tom Bliley of Virginia, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

Phil Gramm, McCain's top economic adviser, sponsored a bill that made the Glass-Steagall act much less than it was, by making it possible for large brokerage firms to act like banks, without the Glass-Stiegel regulations, leading to the chaos we have today.

http://www.mydd.com/...

A brief history of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

In 1933, a few years following the stock market crash, Congress passes the Glass-Steagall Act, in hopes that regulating banks will help prevent market instability, particularly amongst Wall Street banks. The purpose of the act is to separate commercial banks that focus on consumers from investment banks, which deal with speculative trading and mergers.

The Glass-Steagall Act provided the proper oversight and entity separation that would prohibit banks and other financial companies from merging into giant trusts (conflict of interests) -- giant trusts or corporations being more powerful, naturally, and having the seemingly limitless capital to lobby their corporate interests, however, with a very myopic scope (particularly when it comes to factoring in potential losses -- most banks, as seen in contemporary times, chose not to anticipate losses in the mortgage market; they presumed home prices would continue to appreciate).

In 1999, former Senator Phil Gramm ... set out to completely gut the Glass-Steagall Act, and did so successfully, replacing most of its components with the new Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: allowing commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers to merge (which would have violated antitrust laws under Glass-Steagall). Sen. Gramm ... had received over $4.6 million from the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate donations) over the previous decade, and once the Act passed, an influx of "megamergers" took place among banks and insurance and securities companies, as if they had been eagerly awaiting the passage of Gramm's Act. Everything in between Glass-Steagall and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (i.e. Savings and Loan crisis/bust) was, in large part, the incubation period for what would take place over the nine years that would follow the passage of Gramm's Act: an experiment in deregulation.

Shortly after George W. Bush was elected president, Congress and President Clinton were trying to pass a $384 billion omnibus spending bill, and while the debates swirled around the passage of this bill, Senator Phil Gramm clandestinely slipped a 262-page amendment into the omnibus appropriations bill titled: Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It is likely that few senators read this bill, if any. The essence of the act was the deregulation of derivatives trading (financial instruments whose value changes in response to the changes in underlying variables; the main use of derivatives is to reduce risk for one party).

The legislation contained a provision -- lobbied for by Enron, a major campaign contributor to Gramm -- that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight. Basically, it gave way to the Enron debacle and ushered in the new era of unregulated securities. Interestingly enough, Gramm's wife, Wendy, had been part of the Enron board, and her salary and stock income brought in between $900,000 and $1.8 million to the Gramm household, prior to the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.