Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of us to Prison

How does a politician enter office with modest assets and exit a wealthy person, having regularly beaten the stock market along the way? How did certain members of Congress know to dump their holdings just before the 2008 financial collapse? And how do billionaires and hedge fund managers make investment decisions that seem to anticipate regulatory outcomes in Washington with uncanny precision? Peter Schweizer has the answers, and they are not complicated once you understand how the system actually operates. In Throw Them All Out, he exposes what he calls Washington's epidemic of "honest graft": the legal but deeply corrupt practices through which members of both parties quietly enrich themselves at public expense. Earmarks inserted into legislation to increase the value of a congressman's own real estate. Campaign contributors receiving billions in federal grants. Insider access to IPOs unavailable to ordinary investors. Trading on information that would constitute securities fraud if anyone outside the Capitol did it. Nobody goes to jail. The system is designed to make sure of that. Schweizer is unsparingly bipartisan, the graft he documents crosses every party line, and his investigation does not stop at exposure. He offers concrete proposals for how the house might actually be cleaned, if anyone in it ever decides to try.