President Barack Obama may be unpopular, but members of his inner circle of advisers are finding themselves in high demand for big money consulting gigs with crony capitalist companies like Uber and Apple, reports The Hill.
This week, top Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe took a job with the $17 billion taxi app giant Uber.
It’s all part of the DC “Boomtown” cash dash to trade insider access from public service into cold hard cash. What’s more, as Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer chronicled in his New York Times best seller, Extortion, the Obama administration is engaged in a form of legal regulatory extortion wherein it makes complex, onerous, and costly regulations and then whirls through Washington’s revolving door to go to work for corporations who will pay a premium to help navigate big businesses through the very regulatory minefields those former staffers and advisers helped cement in place.
“There’s just a lot more regulation going on,” Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer told The Hill. “There’s a lot of intersection between the economy and Washington.”
Indeed, the increasing crony capitalist intersection between big government and big business is what has many free market conservatives, Tea Party members, and libertarians so alarmed. One need look no further than Obamacare to see how White House and congressional staffers are flooding across Capitol Hill to become high paid K Street lobbyists–a move that further fuels government’s growth and spending.
The Hill says former Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney is also eyeing a corporate windfall in the form of a possible job as Apple’s top communications guru.