The New Road

Making money in government

I used to wonder exactly how politicians went into government being wealthy and come out being super wealthy. Obviously it's illegal to loot the government. But it seemed that Republicans were getting away with it. But how?

So here is my thought, and it's really pretty simple. Companys give the candidate a lot of money. The candidate uses the money to mercilously attack his opponent, as well as rig the election, and wins. Then when he is in government he uses his control to give no bid contracts to the same companies that put him into office. And those companies then give kickbacks on a personal level to the government official through things like fraudulent house sales.

To really make money at this the company has to do is little as possible with these contracts to ensure that they have insane profit margins.

This is what happened to FEMA. The Republicans gutted the agency and turned it into a contract outlet house. And they gave contracts back to the incompetent cronies that got them into office. Then, when it came to actually deliver, the "emaciated" agency (as Mike Brown said yesterday) just defaults.

Which, unfortunately, leads Republican supports to say, "look I told you so, you can't depend on the government". Which shouldn't be true. There is a structural need for this type of agency. Either that, or the agency should be disbanded so that everybody knows that in the case of a disaster they are completely on their own.

It's a great scam and these Republican politicians are making serious bank doing it. It's also a virtuous cycle, so it will keep repeating until the government comes back into control. And of course, it's the American citizen that gets screwed in the end, but, really, nobody in the Republican party cares about that.

What's even better is that when these agencies act incompetently the only ones that really get hurt are the poor and middle class, which the Republicans don't care about anyway. The poor don't vote Republican. And voting doesn't really matter anyway since the cronies in the electronic voting industry rig the elections anyway.

Iraq is another example of this. The President starts an "optional war" on a "tactical mistake" (Bill O'Reilly's words) which creates a vaccumn of contract work that has enriched the companies that control the Presidency to no end.