Bush cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created

From USA Today: "More than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." Michael "DHS" Chertoff is now charging for advice on how not to get screwed by the DHS (the former director of the CIA is working for him); Ashcroft is working for companies that his own DoJ brought anti-trust charges against. Nice work if you can get it.

Several Bush officials work in areas related to former jobs

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Takuan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amakudari
nosehat

Not surprising.

What more proof do you need that these guys were not at all “civil servants” in the honorable sense? This proves more than anything that they were motivated by something other than “doing the right thing” or a personal commitment to any ideology.

Only people gaming the system switch sides like this. People whose actions stem from a heartfelt conviction to their beliefs would never do this.

Contrast this with somebody like Jimmy Carter in retirement; once a peacemaker, always a peacemaker.
Antinous / Moderator

The first step in solving a problem is creating it in the first place.
mdh

The first step to profiting from adversity is the adversity itself.
marcusp

Oh noes! “Bush cronies” at it again!!! Seriously, does anyone here really believe this only happens with bushie republicans? Really?!
Takuan

even a tick is smart enough not to kill its host. Right, Chertoff?
Anonymous

Granta Nakayama, former AA under the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at EPA is now advising companies on how to avoid EPA enforcement.
jphilby

“People asking questions lost in confusion / Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions.”

A lot of people calling themselves Americans act as if the whole government thing was a setup to allow a minority to milk the people like a herd of cows.

Looking at history, I saw that is *a*, if not *the*, primary function of government. As we acquire our ID cards and RFIDs it becomes more obvious; as we submit repeatedly to losses of rights, privacy and lifelong retirement savings without resistance, it seems almost certain.
guernican

There is absolutely nothing odd about this. In fact, the linked article states that as many (if not more) figures from the Clinton administration do exactly the same.

Hasn’t this idiot got enough reasons for people to hate him without making some up?
Anonymous

Kind of makes sense….. like someone at a new job you work at, letting you know how things work…
Chris the Tiki guy

@ #6, I’d say that more what government has become than what it’s intention at the outset is, further proving that people who believe that government is the problem should on no account be elected to “prove” themselves right.
Ugly Canuck

My guess is that, like the Honorable Arlen Spector, many GOP/Bush guys have now (and in fact since it became clear that Bush had flushed the GOP’s electoral popularity down the toilet to get those wars & torture camps & Wall Street Treasury-looting going, say since mid 2007) “migrated” to the Dem party, and are now influencing its policies: not that that is a long journey (considering the Dems enthusiastic support of the foreign Wars/torture camps, it appears to be a simple change on the name-plate as to Party affiliation) and their (pre-emptive, eh?)”taking off the table” of single-payer universal gov health-care, impeachment, and any actions as to torture prosecutions.
From where I sit, the USA is becoming a new kind of military dictatorship: since milspending NEVER decreases, and I’ve been watching for 50 years, now.
But the difference IMO with old-style military dictatorships is the super-megaphone (with no dissenting views mandated since 1986!!) of the mass media, supporting ever more vicious policies, both home and abroad.
And if you do show signs of political effectiveness (meaning that, you threaten their positions of power), their domestic spies will take you out, using surveillance and leaks of same, combined with super-tight heavy-penalty trumped-up Draconian criminal laws for minor ‘offenses’ like adultery, or smoking reefer (never vigorously applied to those in Office or in uniform with the “correct” views as to War & Torture & surveillance, like Bush & Co, even after they are out of Office or the Service!)…: like Spitzer, like Blagovich, like Kwame.
But Rummy of course walks proud and free.

In light of the SecDef, Treasury and China Ambassador appointments, want to bet O names a right-wing conservative Justice to the USSC?
It’s pretty sure he won’t appoint someone as far to the left, as Alito or Roberts were to the Right. O seems to be pitching for the ol’ GOP vote, after all: but what of his base, the guys who got him elected?
Or will they go along, like the GOP did on Bush’s out-of-control military spending?

Yeah IMO a new kind of hi-tech mil. dictatorship is/has been created: resulting from their monopoly on information about its Citizens and their lives: and designed only to help to keep your Rulers secure in their power & their friends fat from useless (or even worse than useless) Gov military pork .
Phikus

This is no great shocker, but what is somewhat unique to the Republicans in this regard is the fact that nearly all of them were appointed from the private sector in positions that made them the foxes guarding the hen house in the first place. Look across the board and you will see the head of the lumber lobby appointed to head the EPA, etc. Have the Dems done this? No. They are too busy trying to appear non-partisan by appointing, of all things, Republicans to fill vital positions in their administration. Those who would like to paint a false equivalency here had better look a little deeper.
Felix Mitchell

This is standard politico behaviour, alongside working for the company that you chose to supply that really expensive contract.

Civil servants should sign ‘non-competing’ contracts when they start the job, similar to other professions, which stop them from working in the same industry they just came from.
marcusp

I stand corrected. I guess there actually is someone who really does believe it is only republicans who do this. Good on ya.
ausuchinu

Perfect re-usable (non) news story:
“ cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created”

Can iterate for the current administration starting in about 18 months.
jamestraficant

yeah, because only Bush cronies would go back to work making money after the administration got ousted…I mean the Clinton’s went quietly into that good night, same with Gore…
seriously, who DOESN’T make money off their old BS policies.
Captain Squiffy

Republicans ate my eyes!!!!!!!!
Ugly Canuck

Perhaps the Government has set up something like this for US security agencies:

http://www.statebook.co.uk/index.html

Got to keep y’all safe.

As to this article, why do you expect these right-wing reptiles to care about you in any way whatsoever? What evidence have you besides their own statements?

Oh I like the predictions posters make above which assume the current leaders will be as bad as Bush & Co. – future claims which have no evidence for them, now do they?
If such proves accurate, then it shows how the entire US political leadership class needs to be dismissed from power: they keep voting for un-necessary (and thus clearly illegal immoral and unjust) Wars, seemingly only to justify endless and ever-increasing military budgets (initially brought into being to respond to Hitler & Stalin: funny how those tyrants’ even today exert a continuing influence on American military spending – a good result for America, from those tyrants’ actions? I doubt it, very much.
It seems to me that the US gets to be a worse place to live for the average Joe, the more authoritarian and info-rich the State becomes.
What’s that? The CIA budget alone is greater than all but a handful of other countries’ entire military budgets?

What a waste!!

Oh right: the hawls say that as a per cent of GDP, milspend’s not so much: but that number has been growing quickly as the rest of the economy shrinks, eh? Gonna start cutting the milspend now, since it as a per cent of GDP is increasing so quickly in this recession?
I doubt that too.

Remind me, how long has it been since the Dems won control of Congress, promising to end the War in Iraq? Years, eh?

Making War abroad is all that your Fed politicians care about, anymore…
Anonymous

the real problem is not that they’re “cashing in” on their experience and connections, but that we don’t know if they weren’t *already* working for these companies while they were in office, with promise of future $$$ for guiding policy while in their government jobs. *That* is the reason that we need to prevent this sort of crap.
Phikus

Marcusp: I appreciate your mea culpa, but to clarify, I don’t think the Repubs are the only ones doing this. They are just much better at it, doing so even before they held public office. Cheney was a lobbyist for one of the biggest defense contractors in the world prior to his term as VP. Is it any surprise we went to war on two fronts and they got all those no-bid contracts once he was in? We need to wake up to the fact that these people are not serving our interests. Quite the contrary, in fact.

/rant
urshrew

You know your system no longer works when it becomes a self defeating loop. Officials make laws then pimp themselves out to organizations to find the loop holes in those very same laws, therefore, negating the value (if there was any) to these same laws.

If this report was on another country, let’s say China or Russia, or France we would call this activity by its real name: corruption.