Throw Them All Out Hot

With the big expose on 60 Minutes and interviews all over, this book promises to provide one of the great muckraking stories of our generation, and perhaps of American history. The premise is straightforward and scary: Congressmen and women are exempt from a lot of the laws that restrict the rest of us from financial misdealings such as insider trading. The result, as one could imagine, is that many, perhaps most of the privileged class of senators and congressmen have invested in and then benefited from deals that would have landed the rest of us in jail. Everyone remembers Martha Stewart and how she had to go to prison for her insider trading. What the congressmen and women are doing is pretty much the same thing, and worse since they are actually sometimes involved in the actual deals that send federal grants and loans to the companies they invest in.

To take some examples, the book examines many of the most recent deals that congressmen and women have gotten away with. For instance, About $16 billion of the $20 billion that the Obama administration has doled out has gone to financial backers of the Obama administration. Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi received 5,000 shares of an almost impossible-to-get credit card stock. And 10 members of the national finance committee received Solyndra-type loans.

Perhaps the scariest is when the bureaucrats are also involved in the actual company's success, what is called "pump-and-dump." The book goes into such trades that Al Gore made in which he and a Silicon Valley investor put in $16 million into a company before a $25 million grant was issued by the federal government, after which Gore's initial investment turned into $89 million.

The real unfortunate thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg and the kinds of deals that these public officials get away with are so pervasive that it affects almost all that regular citizens do. Everyone knows that the government plays a huge role in the economy and that if a group of government officials wants to make a company succeed, it will do so. And the people who know where that money is going will benefit from it. The problem is that public officials can get away with it, and the rest of us would go to jail for the same action.

In the immortal words of George Orwell, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

This whole process is explained in the similarly excellent Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only People Who Can Save It by Eric Robert Morse, which also outlines a fantastic history and solution for this problem, which seems to only be getting worse.
--Ryan Freed, Amazon reviewer