Politics as Usual
by JS
Change may have come, but the corporatism continues.
A review of hundreds of pages of financial disclosure forms on Friday evening offered an extensive portrait of the wealth of top officials in the Obama administration. The forms detail the salaries, bonuses and investments of the president’s circle of advisers, many of whom took deep pay cuts from the private sector and sold their companies to work at the White House.
There’s always going to be tension between the need for capable public sector staff and the private interests such staff will leave behind. Under the assumption of a perfectly meritocratic system, we’d hope that people working in the administration do command such high private sector salaries. But time and time again, it seems like meritocracy is a myth, and that competency no longer correlates with wealth, influence, or power.
For comparison, I’d like to see what disclosure forms looked like for the last administration.
