Politicians, Money, and the Ruling Class

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." - Earnest Benn

The media likes to portray the Republicans as the Party of the Rich but there are many wealthy democrats also, some obscenely wealthy. Perhaps this is a reflection that it takes money to be elected? We like to think of politicians as representatives of the people but today they appear to only represent themselves and rule over the people.

First two recent examples of extreme wealth:

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry "voluntarily" pays $500,000 in Massachusetts on his $7 Million yacht which he may have tried to avoid by docking it at Rhode Island.

Hillary Clinton still begging supporters to retire Presidential campaign debt as Clintons spend $3-$5 million on daughter’s wedding.  Why spend your own money to run for office when others will pay it for you?  At times Hillary's campaign has "borrowed" money from the Clinton's personal funds. Should a politician be allowed to borrow from themselves and have the public contribute towards the interest?

According to an FEC report filed Wednesday, Clinton’s debt as of the end of July [2008] stood at just under $24 million .... More than $13 million of that total is owed to the New York senator herself, while close to $11 million is owed to individual vendors. Clinton has suggested she is not seeking to pay back the money she owes herself.  http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/22/one-reason-its-not-hillary-debt-load/

Under campaign finance law, a candidate must make a good faith effort to pay back all campaign loans. If a business just "writes off" the money then the loan could be reclassified by the FEC as a campaign contribution which is subject to different laws and limits.

Then there are stories of politicians being petty and cheap:

NY Representative Charles Rangel was charged by the House Ethics Committee with 13 violations. One charge was for owning multiple rent-control apartments, one of which was used as his campaign headquarters. (NY law allows one apartment and only for residential use.)  It takes a special hubris to flaunt the law in such a noticable way to save a few thousand bucks a month.

Even more petty - drama and anger over $1:

70-year-old Representative Barney Frank, (D-MA) was heading out to New York’s Fire Island. The New York Post reported that the Massachusetts congressman failed to contain his exasperation when a ticket clerk at the local dock rejected his request for a $1 discount ferry fare to the island. Frank did not possess the necessary Suffolk County Senior Citizens ID to take part. ... a witness claimed that, ”Frank made such a drama over the senior rate that I contemplated offering him the dollar to cool down the situation.” http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/28/barney-franks-one-dollar-fare-conundrum-and-the-ruling-class/

Bottom Line
From the dailycaller opinion article quoted above,

As Angelo M. Codevilla described in his stunning essay, America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, Barney Frank’s actions are emblematic of the ruling class mentality. Frank would not have objected more if the Sayville, New York dock clerk had shorted him $5 or even five cents. Either would have signaled a failure to recognize the congressman’s ruling class authority and the power that thus brings over the public at large. It is through this prism of elitist thought that the ruling class and thus those like Frank, gaze upon the masses.

Here's more from Angelo's Ruling Class essay...

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. ... Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. ...

What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. ...

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the [ruling] class any more than mere money. ... Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. [ ... And having the right attitude: ]  that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. 

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. [In France] people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. ...[but] getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. ... Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges.

It's a long essay but well worth reading.

Another worthwhile article is Brooding on ChicagoBoyz.net. The author wonders,
"Why does the Ruling Class ... have such strong cultural confidence?  And what can we do to undermine it?"
In other words, why do the ruling Democrats think so highly of themselves (and so lowly of Republicans, e.g "Bush is stupid")?

 "Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?"

Here's two related stories from Instapundit:

INSIDER TRADING inside the Beltway. “A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that Senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period. A reasonable inference is that some Senators had access to – and were using – material nonpublic information about the companies in whose stock they trade.”


MARK TAPSCOTT: Gulf widening between ‘Political Class’ and most Americans. “That the gulf between these two Americas is growing wider is seen most disturbingly in Rasmussen’s finding that less than a quarter of Mainstream America now believe the government has the consent of the governed. Washington has a profound credibility crisis.”