It is no surprise that Phil Gramm is John McCain's leading financial adviser.  

When McCain decided to go after the 2008 Republican presidential nomination with gusto he realized that tactically the road to success lay in rolling over and becoming the reliant and supplicant puppy dog to Bush-Cheney and the neoconservative corporate bag men.

As such he could not have picked a better bag man than the former senator from Texas Gramm, who along with his wife created a king size loophole for Enron to be exempt from energy trading.  

Phil's senatorial largesse to Ken Lay's corrupt company, which then had a "full speed ahead" signal to rape California's power supply, came after his wife Wendy, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had earlier pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight.

The topic below was originally posted on my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

An old cliché is that we can judge people by the company they keep. McCain's camp has vigorously tried to scare people about Obama's associations. Well, if you're a hard working wage earner consider John McCain's friend Phil Gramm. In 1996, John McCain endorsed former Texas Senator Phil Gramm's quest for the presidency. As a Senator, Gramm was the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and worked hard to promote the interests of banks and credit card companies at the expense of wage earners and small business entrepreneurs.

The information continues to abound that the McCain campaign represents a lobbyist bazaar in the worst tradition of corporate greed at the expense of gouging regular taxpayers.

Charlie Black, one of the pre-eminent figures of the presidential campaigns of George Bush the Elder, was reported as touching base with his lobbying interests while aboard the McCain campaign bus, which is ironically called "The Straight Talk Express."

In addition to working with a laundry list of major corporate forces, Black's efforts were also linked to the late Ferdinand Marcos, repressive dictator of the Philippines who was overthrown through mass demonstrations after trying to steal an election Republican style when international observers calculated he lost to Corazon Aquino, who rightfully succeeded to the office she won at the polls, by a 65 to 35 percent margin.

Lately, though, the major focus has been on McCain's leading economic adviser, Phil Gramm, as it should be considering the red flags that the former U.S. Senator from Texas has set off in the past while continuing to do so in the present.