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| Home Front: Politix |
| Nobody But Us |
| 2013-10-22 |
| It may not be news in principle, but its still disheartening to learn the details of political corruption, rather like walking in on someone you knew was having in affair in theory before seeing them in flagrante delicto. Peter Schweizer lays out gory excerpts from his book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes and Line Their Own Pockets in the New York Times. It makes depressing reading, but it is also very illuminating. Schweizer describes “John Boehner’s ‘Tollbooth’, by which the Speaker of the House extracts money by soliciting political donations before he holds crucial votes on the House floor. He details the Obama “Protection Money” racket, where the Administration targets industries for criminal investigation but passes over the lintels of those who are key political donors. Doubtless Schweizer regales us with many other forms of this activity, but they boil down to the same thing. Schweizer’s expose makes it easy to understand why the “showdown” over Obamacare and the debt ceiling was in many respects an act. It wasn’t about “yes” or “no” but always about ‘how much’. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the root of all evil. And often the public, fatted on the narrative, is the last to know. We now learn that Federal Workers are going to get backpay for the days they missed and collect unemployment insurance for those same days to boot. That the Senate budget deal which ended the shutdown actually provided backpay as part of the bipartisan settlement. It turns out that nobody lost a dime in the crisis that was billed as the End of the World, unless of course you count the taxpayers. And they don’t count. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 We now learn that Federal Workers are going to get backpay for the days they missed and collect unemployment insurance for those same days to boot. We knew that. We just didn't know how long it would be until they went back to work and collecting regular paychecks again... and neither did anyone else. Hence the anxiety. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2013-10-22 17:33 |