Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison

Schweizer, Peter

ISBN 10: 0547573146 / ISBN 13: 9780547573144

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 0547573146-3-18848657

Inhaltsangabe:

Politicians often come into office with relatively modest assets. As investors, they regularly beat the market and sometimes beat the most rapacious hedge funds. Even without making stock trades, they often retire rich. How do they do it?

Billionaires and hedge fund managers often make well-timed investment decisions that anticipate events in Washington. How do they do it?

When such former politicians and federal appointees as Al Gore, Dan Quayle, and Madeleine Albright decide to launch investment funds, wealthy clients sign up. Why?

Welcome to the insidious world of crony capitalism.

Cronyism exists not so much as outright bribery, using suitcases full of cash, but rather in accepted insider routes to wealth: Members of Congress trade stocks based on privileged information. They insert earmarks into bills to improve their own real estate holdings. Campaign contributors receive billions in federal grants. Nobody goes to jail.

Crony capitalism transcends party lines and has become a big business hidden in plain sight. Using personal financial information, government databases, and a team of indefatigable researchers, Peter Schweizer shines a light into the darkest corners of the system — and offers ways to overcome it. It is time to clean house.

Von der hinteren Coverseite:

THE BOOK WASHINGTON DOES NOT WANT YOU TO READ

As Ben Franklin knew, ambition and avarice, the love of power and the love of money, when united in view of the same object . . . have in many minds the most violent effects.

In Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer rips back the curtain to show how Washington has become Franklin s worst nightmare, thanks to:

Insider trading in Congress
* Senator John Kerry regularly and aggressively traded health care stocks while helping write health care legislation
* Congressman Spencer Bachus shorted the market in 2008 after receiving private briefings from Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson

Legal legislative graft
* Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi received insider IPO shares and bought millions more in Visa stock, and shortly thereafter she blocked four bills that would have harmed the company
* Former Speaker Dennis Hastert used an earmark to pull off a multimillion-dollar land deal that helped make him rich.

Favors to crony capitalists
* Over $10 billion worth of stimulus grants and loans were directed to companies run or owned by members of Barack Obama s 2008 campaign National Finance Committee and his campaign-donor bundlers.

For the rest of us, this is called insider trading, conflict of interest, and kickbacks. But for them, it s completely legal. It s time to end crony capitalism once and for all.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and ...
Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Good