By: Arlen Williams
Gulag Bound
What presidential candidate can, with the help of Providence, save the United States of America, in no small part, by assisting to deliver it from congressional corruption?
Newt Gingrich is the Republican front runner of the hour and is being assailed, with some good reason, by a Marxstream media apparently committed to manipulating a Romney nomination. But, is Gingrich fully repentant of his political adultery throughout his career? Someone who is repentant makes it known by the renunciation of the behavior patterns he has left behind and by his new walk.
The former speaker must be feeling some pain, even as Governor Palin cuts open and diagnoses the body of the Congress of the present. It is not unlike the prior Congress, of the influence peddling of Gingrich advised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is not dissimilar to the problematic Congresses prior to that, in which Representative and Speaker Gingrich played such an integral role.
Integral and now, where is integrity to be found?
The reader may have already caught Palin’s reflections, location: Wall Street Journal; re-shown here in case it all slipped by.
How Congress Occupied Wall Street
Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?
By SARAH PALIN
Mark Twain famously wrote, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Peter Schweizer’s new book, “Throw Them All Out,” reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)
Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians’ stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers’? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.
AP photo on WSJ page
The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it’s sickening.
Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress.
And how would America’s presidential prospects look, if Sarah Palin had joined the hunt?
Those of us who seek to restore America to sanity still seek politicians worthy of that massive political challenge and personally daunting task.
Palin in New Hampshire, September 5th, 2011
Note: Read more about the GOP presidential candidates in Kelleigh Nelson’s “Phony Right Wing” series, in Gulag Bound.
