If someone happens to ask you what the #ows crowd has been talking about, you can point them to this chart.
http://ldsgeek.tumblr.com/post/14479671292/this-is-crony-capitalism
If someone happens to ask you what the #ows crowd has been talking about, you can point them to this chart.
Published
A Pun Involving Travel 
I disagree, pretty strongly.
When someone without qualifications is appointed to a government post as a favor, sure enough, crony. When they appear to still be working for their former employers, or working on getting a job at a future employer instead of carrying out their position duties, yes, fair enough. That’s why we have oversight committees, etc. It’s the disabling of the oversight that has time and again allowed the corruption to be pretty terrible.
However, anyone who is knowledgeable in their field is almost assuredly going to end up working for a private company in that field if they leave government. This chart doesn’t convey much in they way of useable information.
Corzine, for instance, was elected by the people AFTER he CEO of Gold Sachs. He might be a douchebag, but his position wasn’t a result of cronyism.
I think a chart of people who were actually at least accused of ethical violations would be a little handier.
I will agree that elected officials switching over to Lobbyist is something that needs to be stopped, though.
I think the chart at the top of this page is a little more meaningful to me and why I support #ows http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/what-we-know-about-wealth
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I think it’s fair to say that it’s at least partly because Corzine WAS the CEO of GS that he was elected. Election comes as often as not because of monetary and organizational support, which (again as often or not) is provided by the companies that a candidate has a good chance of being in a position to regulate.
We agree, I think, that oversight needs to be improved. The other major issue is that the prevailing counter-argument to the revolving door is generally that in our modern world the only people qualified to regulate a complicated industry are people who have worked at high levels in that industry. I don’t think that’s true, but it’s become the accepted answer to “Why do CEOs become regulators for the companies they used to run, then go run companies they just spent their term regulating?”
If you take away the idea that the talent pool for a regulatory seat is limited to the top two or three executive tiers in the industry it’s supposed to be overseeing, it looks a LOT more like cronyism.
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We do agree on oversight needing to be improved.
However, I’m not saying there isn’t such a thing as “crony capitalism”, I just tend to start seeing red from anything from Lew Rockwell’s website. I just don’t like that chart. Corzine spent over something like $62 millions, so certainly without have been at GS, he wouldn’t have had that much money. I would just argue that isn’t specifically crony capitalism (no other elected official appointed Corzine to regulate, he was a congressman). I just picked out Corzine from the chart because I knew something about his history. In my estimation, it’s actually probably the lesser known staff who get appointed and then get to help enact or write regulations where the most problems appear. Of course, those at the top run such a system that allows the problems to pervade.
As for the ‘revolving door’ regulators, I didn’t mean you need to be from an industry to be a regulator, I was just saying that some number of people skilled in any area in government are going to end up with a job in the industry they are knowledgeable in. In the instance when a lifetime bureaucrat is actually replaced by a crony, and is forced to find work possibly with the industry he/she regulated, you get a double whammy. I would not advocate myself that someone must be ‘from’ an industry to regulate it, Geithner is after all the top financial regulator who’s path was very bureaucratic (however good a job he is, or isn’t doing, he hasn’t gone through the revolving door…at least yet).
Anyways, I’m pretty sure we agree pretty much all the way, I just don’t like the original chart 😉
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