This morning I decided to do a little research on Pelosi's finances, and it leads to some interesting possibilities.
On the surface, and probably even below, Pelosi is clean, in the sense of illegal conflict of interest. The money was made by Paul Pelosi, her husband,. The primary source of the family treasure may be inheritance, or Paul's career as an investment banker in New York. He continued investment banking once the family moved to San Francisco, and diversified into real estate, some commercial.
Feinstein and Giuliani also made fortunes in investment banking, in Feinstein's case her husband made the big bucks. The question comes to mind,Is making a fortune from the banking system an essential conflict of interest when presiding over the political system that protects and coddles the banking system?.
Pelosi made her fortune from access to bank credit. The fortune is the foundation of her political might. It would require a person of rare intellect and honesty to enact real reforms to a system that brought her to power.
On a related not I discovered that Clint Reilly was Pelosi's campaign advisor early on. Reilly made a fortune when he bought the Merchants Exchange Building at 465 California Street for a song in the mid nineties from the Shorenstein's. My office was in that building.
Now, I am just imagining this, and have no evidence, but did Shorenstein do Reilly a favor, and sell him the building on the cheap Probably the deal was on the up and up. Nevertheless,the nature of the deal, between political connected entities shows the ease at which political favors worth tens of millions of dollars may be paid back, or advanced , possibly even over decades. Only chumps transfer cash in brown envelopes..
This got me to thinking about campaign contribution laws. Even if they were obeyed one hundred percent, they could never prevent the creation of political fortunes through business connections, especially connections to the money creation system.
Witness Giuliani's rapid rise to extreme wealth. He buys an investment bank with borrowed money. Then he turns around and sells it for ten times more a few years later, and calls the transaction an immaculate cleansing of conflicted interests.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/giulianis-investment-bank-is-sold/
Romney also made his fortune in credit.
The unity of government and banking gets real personal. This marriage of interests is the formal definition of fascism.
Campaign "reform " laws do nothing to slow this down, they only stifle the chump competition that make a big deal out of 20 million bucks in individual contributions a quarter, when Giuliani scores 85 million in the stroke of a legal pen.
The take home lesson is that the Founders knew what they doing. Government is infinitely corruptible and thus must be held in a tight
constitutional straight jacket.
Phil