POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

How To Secure Your Future (If You’re a Politician)

Short version: by lavishing a bunch of your constituents' money on someone who will reward you for it, on the way out the door.

Iowa’s outgoing Democrat Governor Chet Culver gave his union buddies at AFSCME a true ’sweetheart deal’ on Friday—a two-year contract worth $200 million taken from Iowa’s taxpayers.

The funny thing is, Culver didn’t even bother to negotiate a better deal for the state’s taxpayers. In fact, Culver didn’t bother to negotiate at all. Instead, Culver took what was asked for by AFSCME and put it into effect leaving the next administration (and taxpayers) to deal with it.

Not that this is an unusual thing. You may recall what Chris Christie said about Corzine and what happened at his inauguration.

Way back when I was writing about how Fannie and Freddie used Enron-style accounting to reward their administrators, such as Franklin Raines and Rahm Emanuel, I noted that those were large sums they were getting for helping drive the economy into ruin by means of systematic fraud, but sadly paltry compared to the hardship and debt it has placed on the shoulders of taxpayers. It takes a special, special person to be able to justify such practices.

Naturally, Pelosi's net worth has risen dramatically over the past year, as the economy has languished. That's not true of Pelosi only: as the net worth of most Americans has actually dropped substantially, Congresscritters aren't exactly hurting.

It's going to be interesting to see who gets nabbed in the SEC's investigation of insider trading and hedge funds.

By the way, compare what you get from Bing! and Google for the search, FBI+eager beavers+Pershing+insider. Hmmmmmm.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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