Monday, December 07, 2020

Do we believe greed is good?

It's entirely too easy to underestimate what rapacious swindlers these two are. Here's Matt Ford:

The Georgia Runoff Elections Are a Referendum on Political Corruption

Some people collect stamps in their free time. Others play chess or go bird-watching. David Perdue, the senior senator from Georgia, trades stocks. An analysis by The New York Times earlier this month found that Perdue reportedly accounts for one-third of all stock trades made by senators in recent years, and that taken together, his trades exceed those made by the next five senators put together.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Perdue wasn’t a senator. Everyone needs a hobby, after all. But he is a senator, and his seat gives him access to nonpublic information that could affect stock prices, as well as influence over the fates and fortunes of businesses that could be affected by the Senate’s actions. To make matters worse, he appears to have bought and sold stocks in companies that deal with the committees and subcommittees on which he serves.

... Loeffler, who was appointed to the Senate in December 2019, has also been dogged by ethics concerns since taking office. Some of them stem from her own business dealings as well as her marriage to Jeffrey Sprecher, a wealthy financier and the founder of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution presciently noted, when Loeffler took office, that she faced a potential “minefield” of ethical concerns if her financial holdings intersected with Senate business. Those predictions came true after news outlets discovered that she and her husband, along with a handful of other senators, sold off stocks in January as the Senate began to receive briefings about the emerging pandemic. ...

Do Georgians care about corruption? Or have years of dirty governance convinced them that all politicians steal, so who cares? 

We had a meeting today planning for the UniteHERE phonebank to Georgia voters for the January 5 run off. We were asked to think about what we hoped to learn from it. I want to learn more about what Georgians think about corruption and about what they might hope for. Join the phonebank from the link and you can too.

1 comment:

Joared said...

What’s a little graft here or there, and ethics is just a word, not a practice. Of course greed is good — why else would these two want to become Senators than to get the inside scoop for investing purposes like any seriously dedicated investors would do.