Theres something deeply disturbing about seeing someone profit from a disaster, and weve already seen a few examples in the present crisis. First it was the guys who bought up over 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer in the hopes of selling them at a high markup. (After Amazon put a stop to their sales, the pair of hoarders donated the sanitizer.) Now we have reports that multiple US senators may have acted on inside information about the coronavirus pandemic, selling stocks in anticipation of a crash, even as they failed to warn the public about the danger posed by the virus. These allegations, if they are indeed true, show that even in a time of crisis, our elected officials are looking out for themselves rather than the public.
ProPublica reports that North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, who was receiving daily coronavirus briefings as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72m of his holdings, a week before the stock market tanked. And while in public he was insisting that the government was capable of handling the virus, to well-connected constituents at the Capitol Hill Club he was warning that the virus was much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history. Then there was Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler, who according to the Daily Beast also sold a substantial amount of stock in the leadup to the crash, as well as buying shares in the teleworking company Citrix. Other senators also sold stock around the same time, though the evidence of insider trading is less clear in the other cases.
Burr, Loeffler, and the others have denied wrongdoing, though have not offered especially convincing alternate explanations for the sales. If they did trade on insider information, what they did was probably illegalunder the Stock Act, which Burr voted against, lawmakers are prohibited from trading on nonpublic information, though the definition of nonpublic is not always clear and Burr says he relied solely on public news reports.
But even if that was true, the fact that Burr had reason to suspect that the disaster would be worse than he was publicly letting on is a deep betrayal of his constituents. He should entirely lose the confidence of the public, because its clear that he chose to make money at a time when he should have been offering Americans the truth. Thats why even figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro have been outraged by the alleged behavior, with Carlson saying there is no greater moral crime than choosing yourself over your country at a time of crisis.
Elected officials whose first response to a pandemic is to cash in are indeed monstrous. But its not especially surprising in the Trump Era, when the pathological pursuit of financial self-interest is widely seen as unobjectionable. Burr and Loeffler were just doing what they learned in Economics 101: rationally maximize your returns, regardless of the consequences for other people. Its a little surprising to see Shapiro condemning this behavior instead of defending it as an example of the glorious free market at work. After all, you frequently see defenses of price-gouging among free market types, which is no less sociopathic of a behavior during a time of need. Its strange to see those who are generally fine with those who profit off human misery like, for example, health insurance companies get so worked up about insider trading.
The alleged behavior of Burr and Loeffler is indeed despicable, and there is a reasonable discussion to be had about whether senators ought to own stock in the first place. Can we trust people to make laws neutrally if they are significantly financially invested in the outcome of those laws? But we should also make sure not to over-focus on insider trading and corruption as being whats wrong with our politics. They are one part of what is wrong, to be sure, but more important than self-enrichment is the fact that US senators are allowing people to suffer and die needlessly by failing to push through the measures needed to deal with the coronavirus crisis.
Unethical and selfish behavior becomes especially disgusting in a time of a deadly pandemic, but we must keep our focus on giving people the healthcare and economic relief they will need to get through this. The inadequacy of current measures is a crime in which many elected officials in both parties are complicit, and we should be just as angry at the legislators who kill people through inaction as the few who jumped at the opportunity to make a buck.
The rest is here:
US senators accused of coronavirus insider trading are a symbol of moral bankruptcy - The Guardian