Throw Them All Out by Peter Schweizer Read Free Book Online Page A

The threat of a tax increase for hedge funds was withdrawn.
    Politicians are so good at throwing their weight around that the banking industry had to lobby for legislation that would prohibit banks from lending to congressional candidates during election time. Why would they do that? Presumably out of fear that politicians would pressure them for special deals.
    In our system of government, the legislative branch polices itself and the President is allowed to skirt conflict of interest laws because, well, he's the president. It is time for that to change.

9. WHY THIS MATTERS
Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees, and the both, the trust and the trustees, are created for the benefit of the people.
—HENRY CLAY
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    T HERE'S A STORY about a politician who returns from Washington to his home district to run for reelection. When his constituents learn that he is not yet a millionaire, they promptly vote him out of office. He
must
be stupid.
    There seems to be only one sure-fire way to prevent the Permanent Political Class from getting drummed out of power: maintain extremely low standards. We have come to accept minor indiscretions, financial malfeasance, and profiteering on the taxpayer dime as regular occurrences. And as those indiscretions and crimes (for the rest of us) mount up and become more common, we become even more tolerant of them. The standards become lower still. To steal a phrase from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (on a different subject), we have defined deviancy down in Washington. The quality of our leadership is so low because we expect so little.
    The political class is able to exploit honest graft because they have been given a position of privilege and power, and they work very hard to persuade us that their well-being is necessary for our well-being. They work very hard to persuade us that they, and only they, are capable of "running" the country, or "managing" the economy. This, of course, is the classic appeal of the con: I may be a rogue, but I'm indispensable. George Washington Plunkitt made a similar appeal for Tammany Hall. Without the political machine in place, he warned, "it would mean chaos. It would be just like takin' a lot of dry-goods clerks and settin' them to run express trains." 1
    At the root of the Permanent Political Class is a profound sense of arrogance. A good military commander should never consider himself to be irreplaceable, but many politicians in Washington believe precisely that of themselves. It is an ugly form of elitism, less overt than what we would see from the royalty of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Sun King could proclaim, "I am the state." The modern, subtler version of this arrogance is the politician's belief that if we restrict his ability to engage in legal graft, the nation will suffer, because we won't be able to attract bright people (like them!) to run the country.
    Over the past forty years we have been governed by the best-educated political class in our history. Today, debts mount, the financial markets are in turmoil, the economy is in terrible shape—and the Washington games continue. The problem is not a lack of smart people in Washington. There is no "smart gap." There is, however, a "character gap." Like the financial crisis on Wall Street, the root of the problem is not ignorance but arrogance.
    The Permanent Political Class tells us: We need them. Only they can dissect the entrails of the latest bill or understand the complexities of financial reform. They are making so many sacrifices on our behalf, they say. They are smart and well educated and could be making a lot more money somewhere else, they claim. We should tolerate a little honest graft on the side, or the occasional financial indiscretion, like failing to report income on their tax returns.
    Yet, of course, the political class is hardly the only group of people in the country making a sacrifice for public