This article details the breakup of the marriage of the Tony and Heather Podesta - a big-time Democratic power couple.
http://freebeacon.com/columns/divorce-beltway-style/
It was a marriage made in lobbyist heaven.
The only way to describe these people is "loathsome". Their whole life has been spent extracting money from people seeking favorable treatment in Washington DC. And they have been fabulously successful at it. They are the top 1% and won't be doing anything to undermine that status.
They talk about their "brand" in the divorce papers. And yet these two leeches don't make anything or provide any real service. So what, exactly, are they branding?
Read the whole article and then ask yourself if you really think we need more government control.
And yes, I know that the GOP has lobbyists on their side. Two wrongs don't make a right. And their is an extra layer of hypocrisy on the Democratic side to having rent-seeking moochers like this on their side while simultaneously decrying the top 1%.
The art works, the wine cellars, the houses in Australia, Venice, DC and elsewhere. The whining about going to Venice only 6 times a year instead of 12 times a year. And you know that they only fly 1st Class, even if the article doesn't mention it.
Key quotes:
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"If Heather Podesta has a flaw in the eyes of Washington it is that she is entirely too honest about the mechanics of lobbying. When she launched her independent company in 2007 it was with the slogan, “We know people.” Dianne Feinstein once canceled a fundraiser organized by the Podestas, the Post reported years ago, after she got wind that the invitation read as follows: “The prix fixe includes the Select Committee on Intelligence for the first course followed by your choice of Appropriations, Judiciary, or Rules Committees.”
Heather Podesta’s court filing is just as direct. “As a married couple who both lobbied,” it reads, “they strategically cultivated their public image, and worked to build the ‘Heather and Tony Podesta’ brand for the success of their shared enterprise.” Now that shared enterprise is no more, the Heather and Tony Podesta brand is damaged, and all the years of strategic cultivation is in danger of coming undone. This “married couple who both lobbied” is sundered, revealing a political culture of pettiness and greed, and reminding us that there are few things as revolting, intellectually, morally, and ethically, as the “Washington power scene.”
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"The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May-December romance gone sour, but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce, but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulates, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.
That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade—the phone-call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign—against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse."
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But perhaps the most disgusting aspects of Washington DC are described here:
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"As government expands, extending its reach to every aspect of business, every sector of the economy, private citizens and corporations require sherpas to lead them through the mountains of regulations and tax provisions, to discover exemptions and special favors and other forms of relief or favoritism to improve the bottom line. And who better to act as sherpas than the relatives of the Democrats who impose the regulations and tax provisions in the first place, who better than the lively proprietors of a family business operating in the luxurious and morally uncomplicated world of the caste of limousine liberals who dominate politics, culture, news, and finance.
Corporations give to Democratic politicians, avoiding the scrutiny of liberal attack dogs in the media and nonprofit sectors, and enjoying the ego boost that comes with being on the “right side of history.” Then those corporations hire the Podestas to get them out of the Rube Goldberg traps the Democrats have enacted into law. John’s innovation was to establish a corporate-funded think tank where the burdensome policies would be concocted, and whose staff would go on to man the regulatory agencies that put their wool-headed ideas into practice. And to whom do the corporations turn when they find themselves on the receiving end of all this uplift, all this do-goodery, all this progress, hope, and change? Why, to the man in the red Prada loafers, and to his flamboyantly patterned wife."
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Go that? This describes one of the more pernicious aspects of big government: There is money to be made - and power to be accrued - by first erecting complicated barriers to conducting business and then providing guidance in maneuvering around those barriers.
Fuck them. Off with their heads.