By Scott Winchell and Denise Simon
As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators continue the tired “we are the 99%” mantra and accuse Wall Street of being greedy; the “one percenters” (1%), many commentators have said the OWS people are demonstrating in the wrong place. They should be marching to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. However, SUA suggests they expand that to the halls of Congress, the Judiciary, and the other agencies in the Executive Branch as well. The ‘pay-to-play’ world includes a large portion of all these people; elected and appointed.
The web site Open Secrets and many others have been shouting from the mountain tops to get people to notice the very lucrative world that openly enriches the real greedy people: the politicians, and belt-way insiders. Regardless of political stripe, it is amazing to see these numbers. Now we see that some have noticed, and 60 Minutes is about to air a program on one facet; ‘Congressional insider trading’.
We applaud Steve Kroft for his work, and we will be watching, but its more than just Congressmen using their positions to feather their nests and those of their family and friends, its also about people in very powerful positions making decisions for industry members they were once a big part of.
The left was very adamant about the fact that former VP Cheney ran Haliburton, but they turn a blind eye to their own ilk doing far worse, and in greater number. To really get a feel for what we are talking about, look at Open Secrets “Networth 2009” category to look up your favorite hero or most despised office holder. Here are a few people you may want to look at closer, especially in light of emerging scandals that seem to pop up daily.
From Open Secrets:
By law, members of Congress are only required to report their wealth and liabilities in broad ranges. It’s therefore impossible to precisely determine how much value their assets are worth, or have gained or lost. from year to year. The Center for Responsive Politics determines the minimum and maximum possible asset values for each member of Congress to calculate a member’s average estimated wealth.
Here are a few examples to examine as you watch news reports:
- Steven Chu – Dept. of Energy Secretary; 2009 estimated net worth – $11.2 million. Think about Solyndra and Beacon Power, among others, also look at the “Positions Held” section that shows he served on the Copenhagen Climate Council.
- Jon Corzine – Former NJ Governor and Senator, worth $225 million in 2004, now the CEO of the failed MF Global Holdings group where over 1,000 people are about to or have lost their jobs, and all of the swindled investors.
- Steven Plouffe, advisor to President Obama worth an estimated $6 million who worked as a consultant for Boeing and GE. Yes, the GE run by Jeffrey Immelt, the man Obama named to head the Economic Advisory Panel.
- How many of these insiders, or one-percenters are associated with Goldman-Sachs, or Boeing, beside Plouffe, and William Daley, who was Boeing’s Director. Wonder why the Obama administration’s Labor Relations Board (NLRB) does not want Boeing in South Carolina? The recently released email trail, mocking Boeing is appalling at the NLRB.
- Then there are blind trusts, family foundations, and enriched family members. Think of Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law who happens to be the number two man at PCG – or, Rahm Emmanuel and his Charitable Family Trust worth over $15 million.
- Can someone also tell us how Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg is worth over $45 million, and Associate Justice Stephen Breyer at $16 million, and Justice John Paul Stevens at $6 million – all left leaning judges, are not part of the 1%?
- To be fair, Darrel Issa (R) is worth over $451 million and John Kerry (D) is worth over $294 million. Yes, John married into his money, twice, but please John, save the limousine liberal pomposity for the mirror.
- Even Jack Abramoff, the convicted jail bird tells us that the practice of using special information available only to Congressmen and their staffers is common.
Then there is the whole reporting process where politicians only need to fill out forms by indicating a category of the level of asset or liability; they don’t need to be exact. To understand this reporting, Open Secrets describes how each figure is arrived upon.
More to read:
- MF Global – Unwinding the trades;
- Open Secrets – Lawmakers and Insider Trading;
- Michelle Malkin – K Street’s Super Committee Splurge
The country is broke, our system is broken, and the greedy are who again? Which party is what?
Here is the article on Congressional Insiders:
Congress insiders: Above the law?
Martha Stewart went to jail for it. Hedge fund honcho Raj Rajaratnam was fined $92 million and will go to jail for years for it. But members of Congress can do the same thing -use non-public information to make stock trades — and there’s no law against it. Steve Kroft reports on how America’s lawmakers can legally make tidy profits on information only they know, simply because they won’t pass a law against themselves. The report will be broadcast on Sunday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Among the revelations in Kroft’s report:
Members of Congress have bought stock in companies while laws that could affect those companies were being debated in the House or Senate.
At least one representative made significant stock purchases the day after he and other members of Congress attended a secret meeting in September 2008, where the Fed chair and the treasury secretary informed them of the imminent global economic meltdown. The meeting was so confidential that cell phones and other digital devices were confiscated before it began.
If senators and representatives are using non-public information to win in the market, it’s all legal says Peter Schweizer, who works for the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. He has been examining these issues for some time and has written about them in a book, “Throw them All Out.” “[Insider trading laws] apply to corporate executives, to Americans…If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply,” he tells Kroft. “It’s really the way the rules have been defined…[lawmakers]have conveniently written them in such a way as they don’t apply to themselves,” says Schweizer.
Efforts to make such insider trading off limits to Washington’s lawmakers have never been able to get traction.
Former Rep. Brian Baird says he spent half of his 12 years in Congress trying to get co-sponsors for a bill that would ban insider trading in Congress and also set some rules up to govern conflicts of interest. In 2004, he and Rep. Louise Slaughter introduced the “Stock Act” to stop the insider trading. How far did they get? “We didn’t get anywhere. Just flat died,” he tells Kroft. He managed to get just six co-sponsors from a membership of over 400 representatives. “It doesn’t sound like a lot,” says Kroft. “It’s not Steve. You could have Cherry Pie Week and get 100 co-sponsors,” says Baird.
