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Normalized Corruption: ‘Looked from…Pig to Man Again; But Already It Was Impossible to Say Which Was Which’
While I do realize that some (i.e., far too many) will not get too excited by this, I remain convinced that not-at-all hidden-anymore corruption like this is not only unseemly in the extreme but fundamental to the further corruption of the entire modern American governmental process. The tools and processes of our elected representatives to the first branch of government are really just commodities for personal enrichment and the resulting legislative ends — whether good or bad for us — are a completely incidental byproduct. “Follow the money” used to be the path to discovering political corruption, now the fully corrupt freely take delivery of wheelbarrows of ill-gotten cash right under the noses of the reliably incurious watchdog press — and We the People — to great and perfect silence. But, before going on, I should restate my now-standard disclaimer:
I often throw around the “completely corrupt” theme somewhat flippantly when talking about our beltway betters and the charade they perform for us while enriching themselves. Unfortunately, as definitive as that simple phrase may be, it really does understate just how much the operations of this Potemkin constitutional republic have been distorted and bastardized into one hell of a joke on us, We the People.
Many of you probably rightly guessed that I was going to focus on this headline (H/T):
Just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed back on the idea that lawmakers should not be able to make individual stock trades while in office, her husband Paul bought shares in Google’s parent company Alphabet, Disney and Salesforce worth millions.
‘We’re a free market economy,’ Pelosi told reporters during a news conference on Dec. 15. ‘They [lawmakers] should be able to participate in that.’
Two days later, her husband went on a tech stock-buying spree. And he is apparently really good at such things:
Paul Pelosi has proven himself a prolific stock trader, so much so that social investing app Iris allows users to track their trades and be notified every time he makes a purchase so that they can do the same.
‘Every single stock she [Pelosi, through her husband] has bought in the last two years has gone up significantly,’ Christopher Josephs, cofounder of Iris, told Yahoo.
[Emphasis added]
Unless I missed it, there is one little bit of information not covered in that article that is touched on here:
Some are raising questions about whether Pelosi is slow-walking bipartisan legislation that could adversely impact tech firms. So that puts an even sharper question on her buying tech shares.
[Emphasis added]
A bit beyond mere insider trading but… (Hey, let’s join that idiot Liz and chase after that Jan. 6 squirrel yet again. But I digress.) And, once again, the fully corrupt Speaker is allowed to slip by with nothing more than this ridiculous brush-off:
Asked about the recent trades, Pelosi’s chief of staff and spokesperson Drew Hammill said that they had all been made by the speaker’s husband and she did not own any stocks herself. ‘
The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,’ Hammill told DailyMail.com.
[Emphasis added]
To this insulting piece of condescending crap, I can only repeat: Where I erroneously see unseemly behavior (or worse) our reliably incurious press (and every other controlling legal authority) seems to have keenly identified that, while it is a fact that the important flow of insider information is important in one direction only, a denial that there was a flow of information in the other direction is satisfactory and no real follow-up questioning is required of the obviously corrupt Speaker of the US House of Representatives. What a country!
But that was not even going to be the main focus this week. I intended to dive into an enlightening 20-page section of Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets titled “It’s a Family Affair” from 2013 that details two of the most semi-elaborate and relatively sophisticated family corrupto-political syndicates at that time not operated by someone named Clinton. Namely, the Harry Reid (D) family from Nevada and the Roy Blunt (R) family from Missouri. But — as the saying goes — at this point, what difference does it make? Less than a decade later the Speaker of the House is literally stealing millions right before our eyes in neither elaborate nor sophisticated ways and offering nothing but laughably shallow non-explanations to a reliably incurious press while the masses totally ignore or prefer to be condescendingly dismissive of the whole thing.
What a country, indeed!
Published in General
Yeah, we’ve always had corrupt politicians but now it’s become a lifestyle. The problem is, most voters don’t care as long as the politician is taking care of their pet causes.
I recommend the Schweizer book to anyone who cares about the corruption that is so common in Washington. In Appendix 1 & 2 the author shows the amount of money some of these hucksters are carting off.
BTW, that chapter referred to (in Extortion) has an enlightening illustration of Reid’s political “skills”:
“It was like a scene out of Godfather, one lobbyist told Roll Call, He (Reid) was in the back room and people were lined up to greet him and pay homage.”
It used to be that the FBI went after people like Reid (does anyone remember Abscam?). However, these days, the Feds are more interested in irate parents.
You’re beginning to make me think that the COVID vaccine debacle is only a diversion from the real game that is is afoot.
While also extracting more wealth from the tax paying middle.
This is why the DNGOPe despised Trump. He knew how they operated and was unafraid to call them out. He pointed to his own history contributing to politicians to underscore his knowledge. He was less familiar with the Intelligence Community which was his undoing in his ability to defang the Beast. It would be great to have a righteous man or woman lead the battle, but we need cunning to defeat evil.
As bad as we think Washington corruption is — and personally, I think it’s pretty bad — I am also quite sure that it’s far worse than I could possibly imagine.
And that corruption isn’t just measured in dollars. It’s deep, soul-sick corruption of the type that uses the powerless for sexual satisfaction as well. And don’t think for a moment that only Democrats are guilty.
Yes, no doubt about it. Congress has always had lots of corruption and ineptitude but were limited in power and were mostly accountable to voters. Now they depend on the bureaucracy to do their jobs and tolerate their corruption. The bureaucracy, in contrast is mostly honest, i.e. most don’t take bribes but they make very generous salaries, engage in things that serve their interests that do not serve the people’s interest except as they have to spend to buy support which is itself corrupting and culturally destructive. Congressional corruption is used to justify the bureaucracy’s totalitarian drift. They are the threat. Let’s not lose sight of that.
Bread and Crises.
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Or tactical nukes.
They used to be subtler about this. For example, Harry Reid pushed through a bill to swap federal Nevada land to benefit a development in which his sons have an interest. They cut him in later, after the vote. You kids, what a surprise!
A lot of members used to have a very high affinity for lucking into IPOs, almost as if they got inside info as a favor. Tom Foley comes to mind.
But this is a new level. Google et al makes them rich, manipulates information to keep them in power and the whole bunch now think they are untouchable. That is scary. Give me old-fashioned small scale graft anytime. I miss it already.
If you’re a reporter, isn’t Pelosi’s response about private transactions just a hugely ripe piece of fruit to be plucked? You can report on that 57 ways to Sunday, just completely tear it apart – Pelosi writes and influences laws that directly impact publicly-traded companies, just as, I don’t know, a place to start. She can directly affect stock prices based on legislation she supports or doesn’t, and talks about potentially writing, or not writing.
A few years back when I was doing a weekly blog, I dug up information on Bernie Sanders, his wife Jane, and step-daughter, all tied into the Burlington College bankruptcy, which was created as a direct result of Jane’s failings of stewardship (in short, this small city college bought property it could in no way afford to make payments on unless enrollments doubled or tripled, it was not even close, so something else was up when the bank gave them a loan). The fact that a Senator’s wife was named to the head of a college was an enormous joke in and of itself; that she then drove the institution into the ground within the space of years was the real story.
Note that her daughter created a woodworking school, a school that had direct tied to Burlington College, meaning “woodworking” was offered as a course at her daughter’s school out in the hinterlands of Vermont (I drove past it randomly when I was back in VT for Christmas).
So – I found a lot of the above based on public documents, and tax filings of Burlington College (which are public because it’s a 501c3). Those filings show the financials, annual revenue, salaries of the “leadership” (Jane did quite well for a socialist), etc. Pretty easy to calculate the payments on a loan for land that the school was in no financial position to develop. Meaning it’s quite clear that the Burlington political network was involved, there would be favors given, as the property was (mostly) on the shores of Lake Champlain, and quite valuable from a real estate POV.
Why do I throw all this out there? It’s normalized corruption, which philo has ably named. Bernie came close to being president and was there any coverage or questions on this stuff, this localized corruption? Anyone? Anywhere?
Nope. It’s just normal and ok, because the right people are doing it – according to the MSM.
Or checking their pension payout schedule and counting the days until they can retire.
Drew always paints a picture of reality I can get behind.
Get behind and start weeping, but I can get behind it.
This type of base corruption has been with us throughout American history. Pelosi comes from a family who ran Baltimore in that manner, her father being either the head or the front man for Baltimore’s political machine (he was mayor for awhile)..
Starting with Woodrow Wilson, and maybe Theodore Roosevelt, we traded one form of corruption for another. Wilson, who was the first president to openly speak against the U.S. Constitution, started setting up a civil service of expertise. What he started was largely, but not completely, dismantled. And when Herbert Hoover, and later Franklin Roosevelt had a crisis they didn’t let go to waste, they built up a federal civil service of experts that has only been expanded since then.
Even during the 1920’s, federal law enforcement starting doing things reserved to the states. The idea of the incorruptible G-Man was born, where they started fighting organized crime which became prominent because of Prohibition. But what has the FBI become in the last few years?
We have a deep state at the federal level, whose members quietly control our government, but who ride coach instead of first class, yet who nevertheless get good salaries and good pensions. They live an otherwise comfortable life. They don’t flaunt their power, yet they nevertheless exercise it. Until only recently, Anthony Fauci was a good example of that having quietly exercised his power for close to forty years by controlling billions in government grants. If you are a PhD epidemiologist, you didn’t want to cross Fauci, because your research wouldn’t get funded.
We can only hope that we return to the days of the political machine where politicians like Pelosi are allowed to steal a little bit, but whose motivations are out there to be seen by everyone.
The corruption I’d like to go after is much more deeply hidden, and it means giving at least some power back to the grubby little politicians like Pelosi.
Because make no mistake, Pelosi’s power is within an institution that has become lame. Members of Congress are reduced to begging the executive for their baubles instead of outright taking them.
As contemptible as elected politicians have always been, we’re better off giving them more real power so we can hold them accountable.
Nailed it.
Shades of Charles Murray.
Exactly. The statement from her spokesperson is ridiculous on its face yet it shows up time and time again as a satisfactory and final explanation in published reports. Imagine Trump’s spokesman in 2018 saying “all of the wildly successful trades were done by the President’s wife and he did not own any stocks himself. The President has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions…” How many media outlets would just let that pass as an acceptable answer?
These words could have come right out of the recent book “Laptop from Hell” by Miranda Devine, in which she dissects Biden’s ludicrous statement that he had no knowledge of or connection with Hunter’s various and nefarious deals all over the world– she devotes an entire chapter to Tony Bobulinski, who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show for an entire hour and blew the lid right off of that lie. He was uniquely qualified to to do as he sat in a meeting in a lobby bar of a LA hotel, also attended by one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., himself (The Big Guy) in which there was an extensive discussion of the deal then under consideration involving Hunter, brother Jim, and Bobulinski, among others. I note I have not gotten through the entire book — I find that I have to put it down for a breather now and then as the stench tends to get to the reader if one stays with it for long periods of time — but what I have read paints a picture that ordinary deplorables like me looks like something out of another planet. Million dollar annual “salary” deals for no-show board memberships, the delivery of a 3.16 carat diamond to Hunter’s door, valued at $80,000.00, by a Chinese oligarch “for introductions alone” (see https://nypost.com/2021/11/28/chinese-titan-lavished-hunter-biden-with-3-carat-gem-offer-of-30-million/) , visits to an 80 Million Dollar penthouse overlooking Central Park, owned by said Chinese oligarch, who by the way seems to have “gone missing” after being charged by crimes on the orders of the Bidens’ “good friend”, Xi, etc. When asked by a typically hapless MSM interviewer what happened to the diamond, Hunter answered he was not sure, but he thought it wound up with one of his associates! This is a perfect illustration of your superb phrase “reliably incurious watchdog press”! If any of us plebs would give an answer like that– can you imagine stating on a widely broadcast interview that you “kind of lost track of” an $80,000.00 diamond? — several little men in white coats with butterfly nets would show up at our doorstep, tres vite!
Thanks for this thought provoking post. For what it’s worth, I share your curiosity expressed in #9.