I’ve thought about writing a series of blog posts about how it feels to be self-quarantining. On Friday, March 13, we had our last dinner in a restaurant and, thankfully, it was with family. Over the course of the day, I went from considering whether to take (what seemed to me at the time) drastic measures to deciding that it was imperative to take such measures.
On Saturday, I cancelled Lost Pines Republican Women events, did our weekly grocery shopping online, filled up our cars with gas, ordered some puzzles and thought about what we’d do to fill our time.
Today, I get up to this news: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8132245/GOP-senator-gave-dire-coronavirus-warning-heeled-constituents-Capitol-Hill-social-club.html
To quote from the Daily Mail article:
- Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee which was directly briefed on coronavirus, sold up to $1.7m in stock between January and February
- Dianne Feinstein, on the same committee, sold up to $6m in stock in same period
- Kelly Loeffler, on the Senate Health Committee, sold up to $3.1m in stock starting on the day her committee was briefed by the CDC
- James Inhofe sold up to $400k in stocks including real estate all on January 27
Outraged is an understatement. Every day Americans are watching their IRAs and 401Ks, life savings, plummet. With the economy shutting down, it’s clearly going to get worse before it gets better.
Let me be perfectly clear: I believe in the strength of the American economy. It will come back. It always has. I believe there will be a shift in how we conduct business. There will be new winners, definitely losers. And, as I was taught by my dad, you don’t lose unless you actually sell.
But all that being said, profiteering with insider knowledge has been going on for a long time and we turned a blind eye. So some of this is our fault. But this is a war against an invisible virus. And, elected officials who do this are war profiteers.
I’d really like to see a year-long timeline of trades in these people’s “blind trusts”. If their investment managers were trading all the time at the multi-million dollar level, I’ll give them a pass. If they’ve traded hospitality and drug stocks multiple times over that year, I’ll give them a pass. If they immediately re-invested all those proceeds into a variety of industry sectors in the stock market, I’ll give them a pass.
But, if they’re long term investors and rarely trade, then all of a sudden are dumping airline or hospitality stocks and buying up online delivery stocks, health stocks, or tech stocks, then the Attorney General and the SEC should immediately open investigations. If they violated insider trading laws, they should resign and be charged (think Martha Stewart). If they violated no laws, then we need some to stop elected officials from being able to profit from insider knowledge.
It’s an outrage that elected officials profit on this pandemic while the rest of us (peons) watch our net worth collapse. That’s nothing short of war profiteering.
