People heading to Raleigh’s Sisters’ Garden at noon for the latest John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon will have a chance to hear Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner offer his insights into the 2012 presidential election, along with his take on the role Big Business and Big Government play against the free market in the United States.
Carney’s latest column focuses on that crony capitalism theme, as he examines the story of former New Jersey politician and Wall Street top dog Jon Corzine.
President Obama’s friend and fundraiser Jon Corzine, whose firm MF Global blew up in a spectacular bankruptcy this fall, was trying to make billions by betting on government bailouts. But more interestingly, Corzine — a former senator and a trusted adviser to the Obama administration — was aiming to profit off of big-government regulation.
What should upset both liberals concerned about special-interest influence and conservatives who value the free market is not that Corzine failed, but that he almost succeeded.
Corzine’s personal connections to regulators, his influence within the White House, and his pull inside the Senate’s Democratic majority cannot be questioned. His longtime personal and professional relationship with his main regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, was well depicted in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
Gensler and Corzine worked together at Goldman Sachs during the Clinton administration. When Corzine needed a guest lecturer at a course he taught at Princeton in fall 2010, Gensler stepped up. They have met and spoken repeatedly, and even attended a wedding together.
The Obama-Corzine ties are even tighter. Corzine, as Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman in 2004, he was the national Democrat most attentive to raising money for then-State Sen. Obama, and helping elect him. In 2008, the Obama campaign deployed Corzine as a spokesman on economic matters, while Corzine gave the maximum $28,500 to the Obama Victory Fund.
