government. in texas that chronee government helped bring in campaign money but that s peanuts compared to the $700 million perry tried to grab in 2003 by setting up an elaborate insurance scheme that targeted retired schoolteachers in the state. the huffington post reports that the plan would have allowed swiss banking giant ubs to buy life insurance policies on elderly teachers and create a speculation business with wall street investors, gambling on when these teachers would die. the state would get paid for being the middle man in this gambling ring. if this sounds familiar to you, it s because the setup is similar to the same market scam that allowed wall street to bet on the value of people s homes leading to the financial collapse of 2008. i know it s unbelievable, isn t it? one of the architects of the mortgage-backed securities scandal was former republican senator from texas phil gramm.
well, that s remarkable. just about nobody involved with this scheme ends up taking a serious political hit. rick perry and phil gramm remain very close to this day. phil gramm s just endorsed perry for president. rick perry s son goes to work for ubs, shortly after this happens, and then ubs makes a big pitch led by phil gramm to privatize the texas state lottery just a few years later so it didn t seem to have much of a long-term impact on his political career at all but still a remarkably morbid scheme for taxpayers to be sort of playing bookie here for wall street gamblers going after you know dead teachers. zach, address the cronyism. if you given direct perry s campaign, are you going to get a deal in the end somewhere? well, it depends. but generally in politics, you re much more likely to get the ear of lawmakers and elected officials if you spend a lot of money on campaign contributions. now phil gramm certainly spent a lot of money on campaign contribution contributions
since this was all happening and since it went public. how did he handle this in the campaign, and why didn t it affect his campaign? because he won. well, that s remarkable. just about nobody involved with this scheme ends up taking a serious political hit. rick perry and phil gramm remain very close to this day. phil gramm s just endorsed perry for president. rick perry s son goes to work for ubs, shortly after this happens, and then ubs makes a big pitch led by phil gramm to privatize the texas state lottery just a few years later so it didn t seem to have much of a long-term impact on his political career at all but still a remarkably morbid scheme for taxpayers to be sort of playing bookie here for wall street gamblers going after you know dead teachers. zach, address the cronyism. if you given direct perry s campaign, are you going to get a deal in the end somewhere? well, it depends. but generally in politics, you re much more likely to get the ear of lawmakers and elected
one of the biggest lessons of the bush administration is that crony government leads to bad government. in texas that chronee government helped bring in campaign money but that s peanuts compared to the $700 million perry tried to grab in 2003 by setting up an elaborate insurance scheme that targeted retired schoolteachers in the state. the huffington post reports that the plan would have allowed swiss banking giant ubs to buy life insurance policies on elderly teachers and create a speculation business with wall street investors, gambling on when these teachers would die. the state would get paid for being the middle man in this gambling ring. if this sounds familiar to you, it s because the setup is similar to the same market scam that allowed wall street to bet on the value of people s homes leading to the financial collapse of 2008. i know it s unbelievable, isn t
perry, do you trust him to run the government? text a for yes, text b for no to 622639, and go to our blog at ed.com msnbc.com. zach carter reporter for the huffington post who broke the details of perry s insurance scheme. zach, good to have you with us tonight. excellent reporting. how did perry get retired teachers to sign on to this? or did they even know that this was going on? well, of course, the scheme ultimately collapses, so nobody does actually sign up for it. but the basic pitch that the perry administration was making was to pay people $50 to $100 to sign over their consent to have ubs, this swiss banking company, take out life insurance policies on them. and if these life insurance policies paid off when these people died, ubs and a bunch of wall street speculators would make money, but the families of the retired teachers would make nothing. and one of the biggest problems,