Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine” Readers may recall that we discussed a Financial Times op ed by University of Massachusetts professor of political sciences and favorite Naked Capitalism curmudgeon Tom Ferguson which described a particularly sordid aspect of American politics: an explicit pay to play system in Congress. Congresscritters who want to sit on influential committees, and even more important, exercise leadership roles, are required to kick in specified amounts of money into their party’s coffers.
That in turn increases the influence of party leadership, since funds provided by the party machinery itself are significant in election campaigning. And make no doubt about it, they are used as a potent means of rewarding good soldiers and punishing rabble-rousers A new article by Ferguson in the Washington Spectator sheds more light on this corrupt and defective system. Let’s first look at how crassly explicit the pricing is. Ferguson teases out the implications: Top Favorite Stock Holdings of Congress. Why aren’t congressional members required to put all of their stock holdings into a blind trust? Why can’t insider trading by Congressional members be banned? How can elected officials do “the people’s business” when they are too busy running around trading on the votes they are about to cast?
How one earth can we ever get fair outcomes of issues involving finance, healthcare, or energy when the members so personally have a monetary stake in an outcome they may or may not be in the public interest? Why aren’t these people in jail? 1. General Electric (GE) Members invested: 75 Total value of holdings (max.): $11.41 million Total value of holdings (min.): $3.58 million Top Congressional Investors Darrell Issa (R. 2. Members invested: 62 Total value of holdings (max.): $39.42 million Total value of holdings (min.): $8.72 million Top Congressional Investors Rodney Frelinghuysen (R. 3. Members invested: 57 Total value of holdings (max.): $5.41 million Total value of holdings (min.): $2.83 million 4. 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.
Former Rep. . © 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. Lieberman, Cantor defend Capitol Hill’s inside traders. “Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress,” President Obama told the assembled members of the House and Senate in his State of the Union address last week, “and I will sign it tomorrow.” If only it were that simple. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a bill that prohibits legislators and federal officials from knowingly profiting off of nonpublic information related to impending legislation and regulatory decisions, looks certain to pass the Senate this week. On Monday, senators overwhelmingly approved a motion to cloture on S.2038 preventing the bill from being filibustered. But on Wednesday in the House of Representatives Reps. And therein lies a tale of Washington. The Senate version of the STOCK Act differs from the House version in crucial ways. Information about what’s happening in Washington is at a premium on Wall Street these days.
The move to limit the scope of the STOCK Act seems to have been led by the U.S. The U.S. Rep. Congress Considers New Limits on Insider Trading - NYTimes.com. Ethically Challenged Congress Needs Law or Code Banning Insider Trading. Comparing the promises made in the Geneva agreement on April 17 to the actions on the ground in the ten days since gives a good idea which side is the bigger liar. DONETSK, Ukraine -- In the war of words between Washington and Moscow—a rhetorical clash that is descending to personal insults – both sides are determined to prove they are in the right in an information war waged at a Twitter-driven speed that would have made the heads of their Cold War predecessors spin. But who is telling the truth? Below is The Daily Beast’s checklist on the Geneva agreement that is the closest thing we have as a touchstone for gauging reality. Diplomats drawn from Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union hammered out the accord on April 17. They agreed to “initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions” in Ukraine with all sides saying they would “refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions.”
Refrain from any indimidation Refrain from violence or provocative actions. Rep. Bachus faces insider-trading investigation. The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative agency, opened its probe late last year after focusing on numerous suspicious trades on Bachus’s annual financial disclosure forms, the individuals said. OCE investigators have notified Bachus that he is under investigation and that they have found probable cause to believe insider-trading violations have occurred. (Washington Post investigation: Capitol Assets) The case is the first of its kind involving a member of Congress. It comes at a time of intense public scrutiny of congressional ethics, with the House passing legislation Thursday to tighten rules against insider trading by lawmakers.
“The Office of Congressional Ethics has requested information and I welcome this opportunity to present the facts and set the record straight,” Bachus said in a statement issued Thursday by his spokesman, Tim Johnson. Omar S. Most of his investments are for less than $10,000, and almost all involve options rather than stock purchases. Infographic: What's the Cost of Getting Into Congress? (Scaling) Follow the ... Lawrence Lessig and Mark McKinnon: How to sober up Washington. The following op-ed, co-written by HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig and Daily Beast contributor Mark McKinnon, appeared in the Apr. 6 edition of the online publication. by Mark McKinnon and Lawrence Lessig Washington is hopelessly addicted to money and thus to the status quo; drunk with power and incapable of getting sober and fixing itself.
It’s time for an intervention—by the states. Politically, we two disagree on just about everything. But the one thing we do agree on is that the institutions of government in Washington have become corrupt, held hostage by well-funded special interests. And so too many throw up their hands and say, “We give up.
But there is something we can do. The framers left open a path to amendment that doesn’t require the approval of Congress: a convention. Easy to do? Even if 34 states don’t call for a convention, history teaches that a real threat is often enough to get Congress to act. Indeed, the movement has already begun. The Best Congress the Banks’ Money Can Buy. Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the President signs it into law.
But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law. They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. It’s happening right now with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act -- passed two years ago in the wake of our disastrous financial meltdown.
It will come as no surprise that the financial sector hates the Volcker Rule and is fighting back hard. They’re turning up the heat. Former Gov. Buddy Roemer: Washington is not broken, it's bought. Money in politics..