Give me the standard response to this accusation of corruption?

Politics & Elections
61

The Clintons had both legit and shady income. Hillary was a partner in the prestigious Rose law firm. But there was a lot of smoke around some of their other ventures. E.g., they turned $1,000 into $100,000 in cattle futures using what was almost certainly insider information.

‘Softer’ corruption can often take the form of influence: although Hillary Clinton was considered an accomplished lawyer, it’s impossible to say that her husband being governor didn’t enable some of their legit income.

More recently, Joe Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch was made CEO of pharma giant Mylan (despite receiving an MBA without completing almost half the requirements from the state university WVU), at a time when her father was governor of WV. She retired with a $30 million package. Stealing from shareholders (and employees) is generally penalized less than stealing from taxpayers.

62

That’s what, a consistent 25% ROI per year? Is Berkshire Hathaway that good?

~Max

63

According to my memory it was. The internet is saying 20%. That still sufficiently awesome to get you to $30,000,000.

64

I would agree with what Sam wrote, by the way. As I’ve noted, most people can become relatively wealthy through honest means. But that doesn’t mean that most can become wealthy that way nor that the wealthy all became so in that way.

You really need to investigate the individuals and what they were doing. There’s no shortcut.

65

Since this seems to have changed from “response to accusation” to “ways of corruption”…

From the book “Thirty Tons a Day” by Bill Veeck: Fly under the radar.

Be an insurance agent with the right connections. Any project that needs political approval and must be insured (stadiums, etc.) comes with the understanding that the insurance will be thrown to the right insurance agent. Insurance is one of those mundane details that the press rarely investigates.

Become a property tax consultant with the right connections. Friends in the tax department raise the assessments on business property every year. (Rotate among businesses so it isn’t TOO obvious.) Businesses find out that they will get the assessment lowered every year - if they hire you to do it for them.

66

I would agree with this, but add: since electoral positions lend themselves so easily to this sort of corruption, the holders of such positions should be investigated often and routinely. Instead, they seem to scarcely be investigated at all.

67

Every election, their opponents hire investigators to look into them; while in office, the newspapers are continuously investigating them and all their public disclosures.

I suspect that the arrest rate for Congress is higher than it is for the general public of people of similar age, income, and race. Though, I’ll admit, I don’t know that to be true.

68

Another mechanism for graft: The ‘offsetting trades’ scam, in which you open a trading account, and so does the person who wants to pay you for a favor. Then a crooked broker places two offsetting trades, and assigns the winning tade to your account and the losing trade to the other. You get really lucky, and the briber gets really unlucky, but no one can connect you definitively. If you want to really hide tuis, you don’t domit at once, hut the broker iust makes sure that more winning trades wind up in the politician’s account. Do it over time, with miltiple accounts, and it would be really hard to spot.

This is how it’s suspected that Hilllary Clinton managed her magical cattle futures wins. I suspect this stuff goes on all the time.

You could pass legislation that says that any politician who beats the market average in investment income must be audited by a neutral panel of auditors. Also while we’re at it, rather than letting such people off the hook we should assign treble damages for cheating, to reflect both how lucrative it can be and how damaging revelatiins of political cheating are to the country.

Good luck getting that signed off in Congress, though.

69

Nah, futures trading gives (can give) very outsized returns. She definitely didn’t come up with it herself, and I guarantee she had some hand-holding from a knowledgeable trader, but it wasn’t about someone secretly shifting money to her. If you saw the movie “The Big Short”, it is similar to what the Brad Pitt character did for the young guys wanting to get started.

Instead, it was more likely, “how can I pull together a a chunk with a risky investment”?

70

I currently know a successful attorney who is being recruited to run for an open seat in Congress. He’s mulling it over, but I think he’s going to do it.

At this point in his life, he’s a partner at a firm. I don’t know how much he makes per year, but it’s got to be solidly in the six figures. I also knows that he owns lots of real estate (about 12 homes, which he rents) and is a part owner in a restaurant.

If he did win office, he’d have to give up the attorney position, but he’d still be pulling in the income from the other investments.

And, of course, if he left congress and returned to the law firm, his name recognition might dramatically increase his income once out of office.

My guess is that he’s likely typical of the people who end up in Congress - they are quite successful in their field, and have lots of passive income, with the further ability to earn even more once they leave office. This helps make them wealthier than a congressional salary would seem to offer, but it’s not corrupt.

Meanwhile, politics can beget wealth in other ways. As noted, speeches and book deals can be lucrative. And since we don’t expect politicians to be permanent, they may return to the private sector and be rewarded for their efforts to pass laws favorable to the industry. Is it corrupt to hire a former congressman as a senior executive after he helped deregulate oversight of your company? What if he merely helped the company secure government contracts?

I’m reminded of the example of Dick Cheney. He was Sec Def during the first Gulf War. As part of that effort, the defense department paid millions of dollars to Halliburton to determine if privatizing certain military operations was feasible. They said it was, and then got the exclusive military contract to do so. Cheney then leaves office and becomes their CEO - making tens of millions of dollars - before eventually returning to politics as a VP (where he again facilitated Halliburton contracts).

Now, I think that’s shady as hell. But it’s not corruption in the sense that you can outlaw it.

71

Since LBJ has been mentioned, it’s worth clearing up the issue of his wife’s investments. She used her inheritance to buy a radio station, which eventually led to buying up TV stations. So it’s wasn’t so much “investments” as a particular kind of investment into a specific business.

The corrupt part came through Johnson’s influence on, and manipulation of, the FCC’s broadcast licenses. Basically, he was able to turn a small radio signal into the most prominent one in Texas, and similarly was able to compel CBS to use his TV stations.

So it wasn’t so much as LBJ was telling his wife to put money in places where it was going to offer a big return as she bought into an industry and he used the regulation of that industry to insure that she got preferential treatment.

https://www.slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/07/how-lady-bird-and-lyndon-baines-johnson-came-by-their-millions.amp

72

One of the biggest reasons people succumb to the pressures of corruption and commit financial crimes is financial hardship and debt.

Sometimes they have gambling debts or just consistently spend more than they make. Sometimes it’s a more sympathetic reason, like a special needs child or and aging parent with dementia.

That’s why companies check finances as part of their background check. That’s why criminals looking to recruit someone inside a company to help them steal look for individuals with financial hardships.

If you start limiting the ways in which an individuals in public office can earn an honest living, you make them more vulnerable to corruption, not less.

I have mixed feeling about ultra-wealthy people running for public office, but I don’t feel that they pose a greater risk of corruption than an ordinary Joe. In fact, it can be the opposite. I don’t think Mike Bloomberg was a good candidate but the one thing I did like about him was that as a billionaire with a self-financed campaign, he was the very rare candidate that was completely impervious to lobbyists and special interest groups.

In short, I don’t think it’s an excess of money that makes people vulnerable to corruption, it’s a lack of money that makes them vulnerable.

73

D.J.T.

74

This is also why security clearances look into your financials and your home situation – to screen out people who may be vulnerable to bribery or to blackmail.

But that’s the thing: those two figures show that moving big money by itself is not necessarily an indiator of “corruption” nor provides an immunity to it. It just goes to the character of the individual, and in the discussions in this thread, whether there should be an expectation that if you go into public office, it will be per se, right of the bat, your burden of proof that you are not being corrupt, and further never were and never will. (Then again, in the specific office of the Presidency, we have learned the hard way over the last few years that many of what we thought were existing provisions for ensuring transparency were nothing but gentlemen’s agreements based on tradition and “best practices”.)

75

NOBODY’s impervious to corruption–poor people want to be rich, and rich people want to be richer. The argument “I’m so rich I’m incorruptible” has now been proven so clearly and demonstrably false it should never be heeded again. Unless you want to be fooled, which describes quite a few American voters.