SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In the wake of reports last month that four US senators sold stocks shortly after a classified briefing on January 24 about the risk posed by the novel coronavirus, Timothy Carambat, a mechanical and software engineer, created a website to make stock sales by every senator more visible.
In an email to The Register, Carambat, who runs a design firm based in Covington, Louisiana, called Industrial Object, explained he was motivated to create Senate Stock Watcher after news broke that Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) had dumped stocks before most people in America understood the implications of the outbreak. It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.
Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sued for alleged securities fraud, a charge he has denied. It is said he unloaded up to $1.7m in stocks in mid-February, particularly in hotel groups that would be later hit hard by the virus pandemic, all while receiving daily confidential briefings about the impact of the bio-nasty – and reassuring the public everything would be fine.
"As public servants, there are some senators making alarmingly large money movements at what would seem to be very fortunate timing in the market," Carambat said.
"I understand some senators were previously very accomplished businesspeople, but in my opinion, the level of access they have to information currently is highly privileged and it would only make sense to keep their own financial best interests at heart."
Details about the stock sales in news reports prompted Carambat to look into the source of the data, which turned out to be the US Senate Financial Disclosures website.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:26AM (8 children)
"They wrote the law. They exempted themselves. They can do insider trading as much as they like."
Which is why I think all elected federal officials should be required to put all their investments into a blind trust while they are in office; even cabinet level and elected officials at the state level should be required to do this. It's outrageous that this hasn't been put in place yet. Of course, even this wouldn't stop all abuses. For example, much of Trump's business dealing is not much more than name branding. How do you stop him from using the power of his office when he can't be truly divested of those investments?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:44AM
Kick him out of office?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:53AM (3 children)
Politics started to change in a lot of ways after JFK was murdered. In particular, Gerald Ford became the first [thoughtco.com] president to charge speaking fees. Up until then it was an unspoken rule that presidents didn't do this since it was seen as compromising the integrity of the office. It's easy to see why. Obama, for instance, chose to not only chose to not pursue charges against the bankers who destroyed the world economy, but then gave them hundreds of billions of dollars in a massive bailout. Then, after office, he went and collected near half a million dollar speaking fees from these same organizations, repeatedly, to give brief little chats with them. That's really really screwed up.
But the real point here is not about Obama, Ford, or anybody in between. It's that after JFK our politics started to becoming more and more for absolutely shameless personal enrichment. And somehow people stopped giving a shit. And so no solutions of the sort you're proposing would ever be implemented, because the status quo in DC is defacto personal enrichment, so why would anybody support such rules?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @04:39PM
You sound like a commie.
Why do you hate America?
That's a nasty question.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 15 2020, @05:08PM (1 child)
People always say the bankers should have been thrown in jail. But, what laws did they actually break?
When the republicans deregulate all those institutions you can't just turn around and say throw them in jail for not following the repealed regulations...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @09:38PM
Sorry bud, Clinton repealed glass stegal act, not a repub
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2020, @11:51AM (2 children)
A better solution would be to audit elected officials' holdings when they take office and require them to pay as tax any profits from their investments from the period that they are in office and a few years afterwards that are more than one or two percent above some index tracker. If they make the entire market do well and their portfolio keeps up (or very slightly outperforms the average), great, they make money. If the market does okay but their portfolio does spectacularly, they pay that difference as tax.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @02:48PM (1 child)
And what do you suppose the tax rate on presidential earnings would be set at?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:48PM
sudo mod me up