Maybe you're not into Guy Ritchie movies. In particular, maybe you never saw "Snatch." I love this movie, even though it has all of the criteria that would lead me not to like a movie. In any event, Dennis Farina's character tells another character, who has gotten injured in London, that he's going to have him treated by a "nice Jewish doctor." The caricature here, of course, is the trope about Jewish doctors' somehow being better than doctors who are not Jewish. So the joke was that it mattered if the doctor was Jewish or not Jewish. Judaism, and real or fake Orthodox Judaism, is one of the side whacky dynamics in this movie.
But here's my point. And it has nothing to do with doctors or religion. There are people who tell themselves that there's something somehow better about Jewish doctors, or Jewish lawyers. And they seek them out, like in "Snatch," on the theory that they'll get a better result from these practitioners. Politics, and specifically influence-peddling, is not like that at all. People who want an outcome just want the outcome. They don't care from whom they get it. They pay, with campaign contributions, for the outcome they want. It doesn't matter to them if the candidate or elected person is Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Caucasian, African-American, Republican, Democrat, or anything. And they'll contribute to more than one candidate running, against each other, for the same office. They just want the winner, whoever it is, to remember the contribution, and give the donor what the donor wants. It's very impersonal, and it's all about self-interest and money.
There's been a lot of complaint lately about Clarence Thomas. Fair enough. There's a lot to complain about. But Thomas is not the only Supreme Court Justice who is for sale. So is Roberts, so is Gorsuch, and there's been talk about trips taken by the late Ginsburg and by Sotomayor, and funded by someone or other else.
I'm listening to a podcast right now, and the person being interviewed was in the DoJ. The podcast is about the venture capitalist industry, and part of the discussion is about how the tax code gets manipulated and corrupted to allow venture capitalists to buy industries, destroy them, sell the remains back to themselves in bankruptcy so the old owners, who are now the new buyers, become freed of the retirement obligations the previously intact companies had, and can declare the income from this wildly destructive, and lucrative, scheme at the lowest taxation level. The person being interviewed mentioned, withholding the name, a Senator who a few years ago introduced legislation to interfere with this manipulation/corruption of the tax code, then quickly withdrew the introduced legislation, and was rewarded with a large campaign contribution. The interviewee doesn't mention who the Senator was, or his or her party (or his or her religion). It didn't matter. The donors needed a corruptible tax code, and they paid whoever was in their way in order to get one.
The specific example at hand in this interview was nursing homes, but veterinary practices were also mentioned, as were some other industries. These industries are acquired by venture capitalist organizations, trashed, flipped, or converted to low tax value, and you can take a guess who pays the price for this.
There's a bigger picture, or problem, here, and it is American politics. Specifically, it is the connection between lengthy campaign seasons, and private money in politics. We tried to get at least a bit of a handle on the latter, but Citizens United blew that out of the water. Now, it's unlimited and "dark" money, and essentially unrestrained greed and self-interest.
I don't know much about the differences among states, but Florida is particularly bad. The legislature is a "supermajority" (Rep, in this case), so it's not afraid of anything (DeSantis got much more unhinged after he trounced Crist last year), and it feels very untethered in taking whatever it can get, and treating with abandon the donors like the only constituents worth worrying about, and ignoring the voters and citizens.
We -- you and I -- pay for this.
My error. I said the podcast was about venture capitalism, but it was about private equity.
ReplyDelete