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Talk is cheap, which is why I almost skipped this non-story, but social media was buzzing about it all day yesterday. NBC’s article was headlined, “Biden says he supports a congressional stock trading ban.” You have got to be kidding me. You could cut the irony with a knife.
In an interview with the obsequious, far-left progressive blog More Perfect Union, Biden answered a softball question about how he, Joe “Ten Percent for the Big Guy” Biden, never traded stocks while he was in Congress, and let him explain how he, Burisma Biden, thinks there should be a law against Congressional stock trading. People should make their money the honest way, like forcing Ukrainian gas companies to hire your son as a “Board Member,” or shaking down Chinese oligarchs for kickbacks.
Anyway, Joe said, “I think we should be changing the law that we have to abide by at the federal level—that nobody, nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re in the Congress. Not a joke.”
Nancy Pelosi, one of the House’s biggest traders, who helped overthrow Joe for Kamala, was unavailable for comment. Something about her hip.
In fairness, Joe never needed to play the market. He had lots of other ways to grift his and his crime family’s way through his political career. Hunter’s hand-painted (mostly) portraits, which are not stocks, have been very lucrative, for example.
NBC covered a non-story. It’s going nowhere. It was just something snarky Joe said. And it helpfully came up right as Congress is debating a last-minute budget to fund a bunch of progressive priorities. This issue usually surfaces somewhere in corporate media whenever the deep state wants something. (For a much better story, research how after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013, Adam Schiff —yes, that one— concluded the intelligence agencies needed reform and started proposing various possible laws reining them in. After Democrats put him on the Intelligence Committee, CBS ran a “breaking” story about “insider trading” in Congress, and just like that, the story went away —poof!— and Adam got on the reservation.)
In 2011, Congress passed the STOCK Act, designed to prevent insider trading in Congress, and requires “timely” disclosures of trades. So we already have a law, as Biden well knows, since he was Vice-President when Obama signed the Stock Act into law. The problem is that nobody enforces the Act, except through insignificant fines ($200).
In truth, the Act is a little murky on enforcement.
No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the STOCK Act, despite what you might call a “target-rich environment.” There is not even any public record of payments of the $200 fines for late reporting trades. Some watchdogs think public officials are ignoring even these insignificant fines. To be fair, the STOCK Act’s main focus was to require disclosure of trades, to disinfect things with sunlight, and to let an informed public do the rest.
Obviously, that failed. This summer some good people tried again, filing a tougher, bipartisan bill titled ‘Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks,’ or the ETHICS Act. The ETHICS Act would ban stock trading altogether by lawmakers and some family members. But the bill remains stalled, locked in a committee dog cage, where it is slowly starving to death.
Yesterday, when making his anti-trading comments, Joe never mentioned the ETHICS Act.
The problem is that there is zero incentive in Washington, DC, to change the current system, apart from humility and morality, which are both in short supply. Congressmen are clearly conflicted; voting for ETHICS means voting against their own self-interest and against the most financially lucrative perk that federal public service can offer.
The President also has a conflict; Congressional trades and the prospect of DOJ enforcement is very useful, as blackmail, as the cyclical every-few-years “insider trading” “breaking” media event shows. If the President ever signed an ETHICS law with teeth, he (and the executive-branch deep state) would lose a lot of leverage over Congress.
It will take a miracle to end this incredibly destructive practice. Fortunately, God has been delivering miracles lately. So who knows?
Whose idea was it, anyway, back in the spring of 2020, to retrieve this broken hack from the dumpster of discarded Democratic Party primary candidates and jam him into the role of nominee for president? You’d suspect Barack Obama, of course, since the former president had set-up a war-room across town from the White House during the Trump interregnum, and had openly bragged that he’d love nothing better than to someday kick back in a warm-up suit and phone-in governing orders to a stand-in dummy occupying the oval office.
Except Mr. Obama famously disdained his former veep. The few duties “Joe Biden” had in that role (under poor supervision apparently), he converted into a money-laundering and grift operation — most notoriously his adventures in pre-war Ukraine, where First Son Hunter played bag-man from his seat on the Burisma gas company board. That racket evolved quickly and neatly so that at just about every airport around the world that Air Force Two landed, Hunter and “Joe” were clocking-in fat bribes, supposedly for “influence.” That was the joke, of course, because “Joe Biden” had no influence with his President Obama, who regarded him as an idiot, a bumbling Inspector Clouseau, of whom he famously said, “Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up." ...
Despite the blob’s best efforts, the content of Hunter’s laptop was already leaking onto the Interwebs, photos of Hunter naked with whores, guns, and drugs, deal memos between shadowy foreigners and Hunter’s Rosemont-Seneca money laundromat. But, of course, the news media buried all that and social media censored it. ...
The slime trail of crimes he leaves behind would be easy to follow by law enforcement officials actually interested in crime. He’s likely to pardon himself at the last moment, and pardon a long roster of federal officials who have committed crimes with and behind him. One way or another, they are going to be found out, even if many manage to evade prosecution.
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