Despite the lame duck aspect built into the Texas governorship, there are perks. Rick Perry’s son just got hired by UBS, which is a potential buyer of the Texas Lottery. Perry, towing a long-standing and sometimes useful Repub line of privatization, is all about selling the Lottery for anywhere between 80 million and 14 billion dollars, depending on how optimistic the expert is who you ask.
For those unfamiliar with such large figures, which is most of us, it’s like saying you might have just bought a Shetland pony or you might have just bought the next Secretariat. No one will know until the critter lines up at the Kentucky Derby. In any event, it’s a dumb move that will become a scandal if UBS ends up buying.
Bonus points: Long-gone US Senator Phil Gramm appears on the UBS board as the fatherly figure Perry Jr may have never had. Let’s hope he explains “conflict of interest” to Junior, as well as “white collar prison” to the Perry family.
