Queasy about Quasi

You’d think we’d learn.

Politicians (and unfortunately, voters) frequently set up quasi-governmental organizations to remove them from the corruption of political patronage and malfeasance. Massachusetts set up the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA) in 1952 for these very reasons and Congress created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1968 for many identical rationales. Big mistakes! The MTA sired the “Big Dig” that has cost the taxpayers upwards of $17 billion dollars (about ten times the original estimate) for a series of leaky tunnels and contractor corruption that rival a third-world country.

And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created to buy mortgage securities with the “implicit” backing of the U.S. government. And these two have been, as described by Mort Zuckerman, “the honey pot of the Democratic Party for a number of years.” Now the Federal Reserve Bank has had to step in to save these venerable mortgage-backing institutions from themselves by changing “implicit” to “explicit”. This all done at an ultimate taxpayer cost of probably hundreds of billions of dollars!

What happens with these quasi-governmental organizations is that they are effectively removed from voter oversight but not from the greedy designs of politicians. Interested readers can, within a few minutes of Googling, find enough political patronage abuses in these “companies” to nauseate even the most iron-stomached. Now, the ovine taxpayer has again been fleeced by trusting the public-relations lie of “quasi” being akin to “safe”.

Bull-hockey! Let us, the public, never again believe that fronting the description of a governmental entity with “quasi” is a recipe for keeping our solons’ greasy paws out of the cookie jar.