Pedro Espada is not the poster boy for political corruption

But maybe Hassan Nemazee is. Nemazee, according to this PolitickerNY story  by Jason Horowitz, is at the highest level of national Democratic Party fund-raising, and has been particularly active in support of New York Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (there's also a Republican connection in the last graf). He has been charged by federal prosecutors with an attempted $74 million fraud against Citigroup. That would be the same Citigroup which got $45 billion in U.S. taxpayer funding in last year's TARP bailout, which (you will recall) was a Republican presidential initiative approved on a bipartisan basis by a Democratic-majority Congress, with the support of the current Democratic president. (Maybe it helped stave off a depression. Who knows?)

Is political economy now mainly about determining which rich people get the spoils -- including political spoils like the mayoralty of New York City? Is there nothing really to debate but a few culture war issues where liberal Democrats tend to be aligned with higher-income voters? Is this a reversal of the American Revolution's key victory, with the world turned upside down? 

Comments

[Brian]

What exactly was, in your eyes, "American Revolution's key victory"?

In contrast to nearly other major revolution, the American Revolution was an uprising led by and on behalf of the merchants and the business- and upper-classes.

[Bob Conner]

It was an obscure reference to the final link of post, to when the British military band supposedly played a tune known as "The World Turned Upside Down" during the surrender ceremony at Yorktown in 1781.