The Big Rake

Guest Post by The Zman

One of the things normal people don’t get about Hillary Clinton is how seamlessly she fits into the moral universe of the ruling class. For instance, to normal people, lying is a bad thing. It lowers your status among the other Dirt People. In the Cloud, lying is a conditional concept. Lying to the Dirt People is fine. It’s what Cloud People must do to maintain order and assert their superiority. Lying to rivals while wrangling for power can be acceptable, as long as it does not reflect too poorly on the managerial class.

Another way to see how Hillary Clinton is emblematic of the managerial class is to examine her motivations. Normal people assume she is running for the White House as a power grab. It is assumed that politicians have big egos and winning office is driven by those big egos. That used to be true, but not in the modern managerial state. The real motivation is money. Most of the people in the managerial class are always aware of the fact they are not rich, at least not as rich as they deserve, and they hate it.

Hillary Clinton has always been obsessed with money. In Arkansas, she would complain constantly about not having enough money. Some will recall how she used to moan about how they were not rich enough when they left the White House. Presumably, that’s why they stole the furniture. All of her capers have been about turning her position or her husband’s position into cash for the family business. In the managerial class, credentials and connections are to be monetized. That’s their purpose.

Hillary Clinton did not weasel her way into the State Department gig because she wanted to burnish her foreign policy credentials. It was not about staying in the game. There was always a money angle. At State, she could travel the world, shaking down the rich and powerful for cash to her money laundering operation. Her husband could charge outlandish fees to give speeches on behalf of the foundation and maybe put in a good word, for the foreign potentate, with his old lady at the State Department.

Clinton’s run for the White House has a similar angle. This story about Clinton’s scheme for American retirement plans is a classic managerial class rake. Getting picked as one of the firms with a license to “manage’ these new accounts is a license to print money. The government will have to “supervise” this process, which means the bankers will now have a billion reasons to be on good terms with the government. Put another way, Team Clinton is planning to build a giant graft machine .

Now, Team Clinton will not benefit in the long run, but they are getting tens of millions in contributions now, because they are promising to push through this new plan. If Wall Street wanted to bring back slavery, Hillary would be talking like Colonel Sanders and singing Dixie during her speeches. Her political motivations are a manifestation of her financial ambitions. All over the managerial class, the game is to monetize access, power and prestige. It’s why Hillary fits in so well with these people.

For about twenty years, the managerial class has been trying to figure out how to get their mitts on American retirement funds stashed away in 401K’s. Talk to any Progressive and they will tell you how terrible these plans are, while they drone on about the terribleness of Wall Street. They floated a scheme in the 90’s called the Guaranteed Retirement Account that was like a 401K, except all funds were invested in US treasuries. This never got far as it was just a complicated tax and the math could never work.

This new scheme is simpler, but potentially much more lucrative to the managerial elite. If every American is required to have a retirement account, administered by a fund manager, that’s billions of new money siphoned off the real economy into the pockets of the financial sector. Better still, those funds will be controlled by Wall Street. They will put those funds into investments good for Wall Street. What’s good for the bankers is to be on good terms with the government. You see where this leads.

This is the way the managerial class works the rake. In less sophisticated countries, like say France, the politicians just raid the pension funds. It’s legal plunder. In the managerial state, the plunder is more nuanced, tarted up with soft feminine language like “inclusion” and “coming together for a common cause.” You can be sure that this plan will be sold as a way to bring the country together to solve our retirement problems for those who “play by the rules and just want a fair deal.”

What will happen, of course, is the same thing we saw with health care and pretty much every other part of the economy these days. It will be a bust out. The billions that pour into these new funds will be “invested” in things that benefit the rulers. Politicians will get advance notice on some new move so they can cash in their privileged status. The fund managers will kick back a piece of their rake to the politicians for the right to manage these funds. It will be systematic robbery of the middle class.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like organized crime. That’s because it is organized crime, except the criminals write the laws, thus legalizing their plunder. This is a feature of the managerial state. It is the big rake. Instead of the criminals eluding the state in order to plunder the people, the criminals acquire credentials, which are a license to skim off a portion of middle class wealth. The whole point of winning office or gaining access is so you can get a taste of the skim.