Congress Stock Market Fraud (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: ultra-wealthy members of Congress are illegally manipulating the stock market while trading hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stocks to make obscene profits off of national crises that they are supposed to be fixing.

It's blatantly illegal, but not one single member of congress has ever been prosecuted for doing it. Instead, they make millions on top of millions while we beg them for basic human rights like healthcare and a living wage.

In January of 2020 Congress was informed that we were facing an unprecedented plague in which the economy would collapse, and life as we knew it would change forever. Instead of using that information, and the power of their office to which we elected them, to inform, prepare, and save us - they sold stocks in hotels and entertainment, bought stocks in PPE and video conference software companies, while giving public interviews saying that things would be fine.

Martha f*cking Stewart was sent to jail for lying about insider trading $50,000 of stock. Last year, Senator Kelly Loeffler sold $18.7 million dollars worth of stocks 4 days before the biggest point drop in stock market history, and she got to stay in office and keep the money. She knew. And she wasn’t alone.

I'm not sure there's a single business or industry where such blatant financial corruption is as dangerous, or as easily brushed off, as the US Congress.

In the time period between their classified COVID briefing in January and the market crash in March, more than half a dozen senators: notably Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein, David Perdue, John Hoeven and Kelly Loeffler bought stocks in companies that would come to profit from the pandemic and sold stocks it in those that would fail, starting just three days after the first case of COVID was discovered in the US, well before the real risk was made public to the American people.

And in February, while the Trump administration was saying the virus would disappear like a miracle, Senator Richard Burr was quietly selling  $1.5 million worth of personal stocks and privately telling his campaign mega-donors to prepare for COVID to wreak havoc on the economy.

Wanna get really angry?: when Burr's office was asked to comment on allegations that he'd engaged during illegal insider trading during a pandemic, his office responded with three letters: lol. That’s not an exaggeration or an excerpt - his official spokesperson told reporters “lol”.

And when we found out that they used this information to illegally benefit themselves, their families, friends, and donors - not a single one of them suffered the consequences. Trump’s Department of Justice begrudgingly opened an investigation and 8 weeks later closed it with no charges.

As wild as this all is -- it's not an anomaly in America's political system. This has been a widespread problem in Congress for a VERY long time, on both sides of the aisle. It may surprise you to learn that until 2012, insider trading for Members of Congress was completely legal, although it had long been illegal for everyone else. It took passage of the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act, to explicitly outlaw the practice.

The problem is: the year after it was passed, the STOCK act was changed to make it absurdly difficult to access Congress members’ financial disclosures and find out if they were violating the law. And as we’ve seen, it doesn’t matter anyway - even when insider trading is obvious, the law still isn't enforced.

One analysis found that before the Stock Act, between 2004 and 2010, Congressional stock trades outperformed the market by 20% with Republicans in particular outperforming it by 35%. To give a sense of how outrageously high that is: beating the market by 35% in the 80s is what made Warren Buffet one of the wealthiest investors ever, and in the last 20 years even HE hasn’t cracked 20%.

The real question is: why the fuck are members of Congress even allowed to own stocks in the first place? Did you know that companies that professionally evaluate comic books prohibit their employees from personally trading comic books? Meanwhile, members of Congress regularly trade on companies whose stock price they directly affect through legislation that they create and vote on.

And just a reminder, the same politicians who are cheating to make millions of dollars off of people's pain, suffering, and 401k are the same ones who refuse to cancel student loans or raise the minimum wage. Rules for thee, not for me.