Royal nonesuch

It isn’t hard to believe that the real reason Mr. Smith goes to Washington is to get rich. Senators, it seems are far more likely to make it big in the market and of late and by coincidence, are very supportive of rich man’s rights. A few years ago, the Christian Science Monitor published a study about the portfolios of US Senators relative to market insiders and the public at large. According to the article,

“a majority of US Senators were trading stocks - and beating the market by 12 percentage points a year on average. By comparison, corporate insiders beat the market by 5 percent, and typical households underperformed by 1.4 percent.”

You don’t have to be a statistician to see which way the profit flows. There seem to be surprisingly few regulations, de jure or de facto, controlling the way politicians benefit from their connections, but more surprising to me is the degree to which the public tolerates the political gravy train. We know about the “blind’ trusts that wealthy politicians like Dick Cheney and Bill Frist use to make it appear that they are not getting rich or benefiting personally from the actions of the government they are part of and we observe how Congressional Fat ( in more ways than one) Cats like Dennis Hastert have traveled from rags to riches while they are on the public payroll by using secret land trusts to buy and sell property that, although Hastert denies it, fluctuates in value because of nearby government projects.

Of course I’m pointing out the obvious, but it’s obvious only to those not on the winning team that everything the Federal Government does promotes the establishment and perpetuation of feudalism and concentration of wealth. Redistribution of wealth has long been anathema to the Right and at the top of the list of things Socialists and Communists and Liberals are guilty of, but of course it never has been about redistribution, it’s been about the direction. Duke Cheney and Baron Hastert along with Emperor by Divine Right George are doing an excellent job of providing us with the nobility we’ve secretly wanted since 1776.