One of the interesting things about 18th century America is the way government sold favors to private interests. Ben Franklin got government printing contracts through bribery. It was not considered bribery at the time, but it would be today. Buttering up local officials to grease the skids was just the way things were done. In a land with a tiny amount of government and a tiny number of laws, you’re getting a tiny amount of public corruption. Corruption, like government, does not scale up well.
Today we have vast and complex state apparatus. So vast and complex no one knows the limits. In fact, you break the law every day. It is this vast and complex web of laws that provides cover for the colonizing pod people to rob us blind. The old expression about the devil being in the details means that the more details, the more opportunity for the devil to do his work. Big government is, if nothing else, a vast thicket of details and minutiae. This post at ZeroHedge is a good example.
It was back in April 2013, when the WSJ reported of a peculiar surge in various health insurance stocks that came moments after a report from Height Securities, a Washington-based investment-research firm that ferrets out policy news and analysis for investors, correctly predicted the Obama administration would reverse course on big spending cuts that would have hit health insurers. The note was released about 15 minutes before markets closed on Monday, April 1, leading to the following surge in the biggest Obamacare beneficiaries.
Needless to say, it is quite clear that non-public info was leaked by US legislators to a “expert network” consulting company, which in turn further propagated the information to its own clients, making them profits of up to 8.6% in milliseconds. As the WSJ summarized at the time, “The resulting stock surge is one of the most dramatic examples in recent years of how tips and insights from Washington’s burgeoning political-intelligence business can drive trading on Wall Street, potentially leading to big profits for those in the know.”
It took the SEC 14 months to finally figure out there may have been something illegal with this setup and as the WSJ followed up three weeks ago, “prosecutors are gathering evidence for a grand-jury probe into whether congressional staff helped tip Wall Street traders to a change in health-care policy, an indication the long-running investigation has entered a more serious phase.”
Trading on inside information has become so common in Washington, no one bothers to hide it. It was not always this way. In the olden thymes, officials relied on foreign junkets to cash in on their position. A Congressman would decorate their homes with goods “gifted to him” by foreign potentates. His big fancy house was probably paid for by donors or a special deal made possible by his donors. It was all legal and mostly small potatoes. Compensation in lieu of salary.
Today, public criminals like Harry Reid become millionaires making shady land deals with organized crime. John Kerry went to DC penniless. He is now worth north of $100 million. A lot of it came from marrying two rich widows, but that was levered into a fortune using inside information. With the parasitic financial system, politicians can now grab millions for themselves trading their knowledge of new rules, new investigations and new taxes.
As we see with this story, they think it is their right and privilege. Where have we heard that before?
What is unknown – and perhaps unknowable – is how much of the legislative tsunami is strictly for privateering purposes. Those million word bills are not only packed full of favors; they are packed full of gimmicks the pols can use to grow their portfolios. Since no one reads these things in their entirety, no one knows where to look for the deals tied to specific pols. In fact, the laws are now written by law firms lobbyists working on behalf of wealthy interests like corporations.
The outrageous part of this is not the corruption. Men are not angels. Washington controls trillions of dollars and that will attract the worst sort, determined to skim some for themselves. The outrage is the lack of outrage. In the 18th century you could shrug at Franklin buying off a local official for a printing contract. It was small money and the printing needed to be done. Today’s pols are like highway bandits, robbing for the sake of robbing. Yet, no one seems to care.
I agree we’re corporately stupid and overwhelmed with a sense of impotence at the loss of our heritage and the destruction of our nation. I don’t think the vultures of the political class are wise either. They are penny wise and pound foolish in pulling down the nation. It’s like the crooked bookkeeper with a drug problem. He could steal 20 here and 30 there for a bag of dope and get away with it, but instead he embezzles 50000 and goes down. I think Donald Fagan summed up the fate of the elite robbers in “Razor Boy”: “Will you… Read more »
Indeed Bones, I find myself staring glassy-eyed at the world and have had the requisite number of years to watch our civilisation become odious. You are correct that outrage is difficult to sustain, and I suspect the perps knew this all along.
The reason there is no outrage is very simple. The sense of outrage in most people has burned out from the constant barrage of outrages over the last forty or fifty years.
The opportunities for large-scale graft are one reason why the political parties will fight to the death to keep their people in positions of power, including corrupting the voting process and flooding the country with people who have no business moving here. All means to an end, and the end is not some version of political and social philosophy, but rather what can be quietly extracted from the system for private personal benefit.