As Republicans and Democrats try to woo the American voters
to vote for their team, the American people are suffering from the devastating
results of their past legislation.
Special interest written legislation enacted by their lackeys in
congress has left ordinary Americans bankrupt, unemployed, ignorant and
hopeless.
It’s hard to fathom why they even woo the people when they
don’t count their votes anyway. As
American taxpayers fund their lavish lifestyles, trips, health insurance,
pension, vacations, retirement as well as that of their extended families,
American citizens get austerity. We’re
called takers, lazy slackers looking for a handout by our congressional overlords.
Through legislation they have cut Social Security payments
to people with government pensions, such as teachers who work part-time in the
private sector when they cannot afford to live on their salary. Even though they pay into Social Security for
years, lawmakers called them “double dippers”. Union pensions have been cannibalized and
they have been taxed for having “Cadillac” healthcare plans. Food Stamps have been slashed, Medicare premiums
have risen and cuts have been made to the Medicaid program. There are work requirements for food stamps
even though most people on food stamps already work but can’t afford to
eat. But what of congress, are they
governed by the same standards? From
Fiscal Times:
Excerpt:
Here’s the true story of what we provide our elected representatives and
how that compares to the real world.
Pay: Members of Congress set their own, not
unlike some state assemblies… the rank and file members now receive a tidy
$174,000 salary, which is automatically adjusted each year based on changes in
the employment cost index. The automatic pay increase was nixed in 2010, partly as a response to the uproar when
Social Security payments were held stagnant.
If you’re a House or Senate leader,
you get more. The Speaker of the House
gets $223,500, while both minority and
majority leaders in the House and Senate take home $193,400.
To put that in perspective, the
U.S. Census Bureau reports that just 5.1 million Americans earn more than
$150,000 annually out of the nation’s 240.1 million workers. That means members of Congress earn more than 97 percent of the
country.
Pensions: Back in
1984—the end of another great recession—furor over legislative pensions ushered
in reform. Legislative exemptions from contributing to the Social Security
system were eliminated and over-the-top pensions that would pay 50 percent of your highest salary after
20 years of service were replaced with a less-generous pension, plus Social
Security.
Now, if you retire at age 55 with
30 years in Congress, you’ll get just 44 percent of your pay—roughly
$76,560—versus 71.3 percent ($124,062) of pay under the old formula. Of course, now legislators also get Social Security
payments, which can add another $20,000 or $30,000 annually to their
retirement income, so they still come out ahead of the game.|
Congressional pensions also are
adjusted for inflation. In private
industry, where just one in every five workers has access to a traditional
pension, payments are about half as generous as legislator’s pensions and
retirees rarely get annual boosts to account for the rising cost of living…
More pensions: In
addition to the traditional pension, members of Congress participate in the
government’s Thrift Savings Plan. If legislators don’t want to save any of
their own money, the government will still set aside 1 percent of their
pay—that’s $1,740 annually—into the Thrift plan. If members do decide to contribute, Uncle Sam will match another 5
percent of pay for a total contribution from taxpayers amounting to 6 percent
of total income, or $10,440. The closest thing that private industry has to
the Thrift Savings Plan is your 401(k).
Health care: While
about 15 percent of the population is without health insurance, members of
Congress are all covered. Their plan is
similar to the subsidized plans offered by big companies. In this case, the
government pays about 70 percent of the cost of coverage, while legislators
pick up the remaining 30 percent. In addition, they have access to dental insurance, vision care, health savings
accounts, life and long-term care insurance—that’s similar to the cacophony
of lucrative benefits offered by the best American companies.
Perks: There’s
free parking, both at the office and at Washington, D.C.-area airports. You get
a cheap membership to the house gym, subsidized
daycare and access to legislative dining rooms that were once subsidized to the
tune of $2 million annually, but are now supposed to be operating at cost,
says Sepp… And like most other executive fringe
benefits, the bulk of the perks provided to members of Congress are tax free.
Travel: But the
legislative perk to trump all others is travel, says Singer. Not only do you
get to fly between D.C. and your home district on taxpayers through the
“members representational allowance,”
there are lots of ways you can globe-trot on somebody else’s dime. Join a
committee, for example, and you can participate in fact-finding trips all over
the globe.
Last year’s Congressional junket to
talk about climate change in Copenhagen cost taxpayers $550,000, which included so-called “per diem”
allowances for hotels and meals that worked out to $2,200 per person, per day.
Technically, legislators are supposed
to return any per diem payments that they don’t need to spend, but a recent
Wall Street Journal investigation found that rarely happens. One
legislator quoted by the WSJ said he’d hesitate to travel so much if he thought
he couldn’t just pocket the taxpayer money.
Members say their trips are all
about business and fact finding, but they usually take their spouses, Singer
says. And it’s tough to figure out just how much members are spending and
whether American taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. That’s because international travel comes
out of what Singer calls a “bottomless mystery account” operated by the
Treasury…
The above is just a fraction of what congress get. Now a Republican representative has been
indicted for insider trading, I’m shocked.
I’m shocked that he was so overt about the insider trading, members of
congress are involved in insider trading all the time with no ramifications. Insider trading was enabled by a quietly
passed law that exempted members of congress, their staff and family from laws against
insider trading. From NPR:
Excerpt:
How Congress Quietly Overhauled Its Insider-Trading Law
The legislative process on Capitol
Hill is often slow and grinding. There are committee hearings, filibuster
threats and hours of floor debate. But sometimes, when Congress really wants to get something done, it can move
blindingly fast. That's what
happened when Congress moved to undo large parts of a popular law known as the
STOCK Act last week.
A year ago, President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act
into law at a celebratory ceremony attended by a bipartisan cast of lawmakers. "I want to thank all the members of
Congress who came together and worked to get this done," he said.
The law wouldn't just outlaw trading on nonpublic information by
members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs. It would
greatly expand financial disclosures and make all of the data searchable so
insider trading and conflicts of interest would be easier to detect.
But on Monday, when the president signed a bill reversing big pieces of the
law, the emailed announcement was one sentence long. There was no fanfare
last week either, when the Senate and
then the House passed the bill in largely empty chambers using a fast-track
procedure known as unanimous consent.
In the House, Majority Leader Eric
Cantor, R-Va., shepherded the bill through. It was Friday afternoon at 12:52.
Many members had already left for the weekend or were on their way out. The whole process took only 30 seconds. There
was no debate.
Isn’t that the way it is, pass a bill reigning in unlawful
behavior by politicians with lots of hoopla, backslapping, and self-congratulating
only to revoke it in the dark like cockroaches.
So when we saw the recent indictment of GOP congressman Chris Collins
for insider trading it merits looking at what he actually did that was so
over-the-top, to get him in trouble. From Business Insider:
Excerpt:
Indicted Rep. Chris Collins shows why members of Congress should not
trade stocks
Rep. Chris Collins, a prominent
backer of President Donald Trump in Congress, has been indicted on allegations
of insider trading, along with his son and his son's fiancée's father.
Collins is on the board of an Australian pharmaceutical company.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that he tipped his son about
a failed clinical trial and that the son and associates saved $750,000 by
trading on the tip. This is a really
stupid thing to allegedly have done…
Anyway: Rep. Chris Collins, a New
York Republican who gave President Donald Trump his first congressional
endorsement, has been indicted on
allegations of insider trading in a case with an extremely obvious,
how-were-you-dumb-enough-to-try-this fact pattern.
Get a load of this
Here's what's laid out in
complaints from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Attorney's
Office for the Southern District of New York (Collins has pleaded not guilty):
Collins sits on the board of Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian
biopharmaceutical company in which he
is also the largest shareholder.
On June 22, 2017, Collins learned
that Innate's main drug had failed clinical trials, a grave outcome for
Innate's financial condition. Literally seconds after learning this news,
Collins contacted his son, Cameron, who at the time owned 2% of Innate.
Over the following four days, Cameron Collins and several other
associates of the Collinses proceeded to liquidate their positions in Innate
before the public announcement of the drug failure on June 26, after
which the stock fell 92%...
Innate is not an especially large
company. As a result, per the SEC: "The
sales by Cameron Collins, his girlfriend, and her parents, including Stephen
Zarsky, made up more than 53% of the
stock's trading volume [on June 23] and exceeded Innate's 15-day
average trading volume by more than 1,454%..."
This leads me to a question. Is Chris Collins an idiot?... Was it because the trading wasn't on his own
account and he thought the SEC wouldn't be able to draw a link between him and
[checks notes] his son — even though
Collins was already the focus of a congressional ethics investigation related
to Innate?
Was it because he thought he and
his son could just talk the FBI into the idea that the sales were unrelated to
the clinical-trial news? Oops, now
Collins and his associates have also been indicted on allegations they lied to
the FBI…
Collins' public defense against
these charges has focused on a fact prosecutors do not dispute: Even as his
associates were selling, he did not liquidate his own, much larger stake in Innate.
That might seem like a tiny bit of prudence in a sea of recklessness — among
other matters, Collins would have had to
publicly disclose the dates and amounts of his sales under rules pertaining
specifically to members of Congress.
But as the SEC complaint says, it's
possible Collins didn't sell because he
literally couldn't. Unlike his son, he had not completed paperwork to
transfer his stock to the US, where one could trade it on the over-the-counter
market. His stock was stuck in
Australia, where trading of Innate on the Australian Securities Exchange had been halted — because of the impending
announcement of the clinical-trial failure.
Open Secrets estimated, based on
disclosure forms, that Collins' net
worth was nearly $70 million as of 2015.
Is Chris Collins an anomaly?
Are other members of congress humble public servants there to ensure the
overall well-being of the “people” they serve?
That question brings me to an article written by one of my fav’s Matt
Taibbi at Rolling Stone about the
dubious, lucrative trading of Senator Bob Corker, who ahem, is retiring this
year.
Excerpt:
So Tennessee Senator Bob Corker is
in trouble now, because he flip-flopped to vote for Donald Trump’s tax bill after a provision was included that reportedly helps
him personally. Color me not
shocked. I spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal
finances have been the subject of inquiry for years…
How do you increase your net worth
so significantly while you’re working full-time as a Senator? That is not an
easy story to explain. According to his
own disclosure forms, Corker in 2006
carried a series of huge loans.
Corker took office in January,
2007, during the last gasp of the Bush/Rove political juggernaut. The Iraq war
had gone south and the Republicans had just been routed in midterms. The
financial crisis was just around the corner. And nobody paid attention to the
smooth-talking freshman Senator from Tennessee, who turned out to have some financial issues…
It wasn’t until Corker took office
and filled out disclosure forms that his finances became public – sort of. Few
in the media seem ever to have read the “liabilities” section of Corker’s first
disclosure, where the former mayor and construction
magnate listed a series of massive outstanding loans. At the low end, Corker appeared to owe a hair-raising $24.2 million. At the
high end, $120.5 million.
He had been in debt to some of the
nation’s biggest lenders – including
somewhere between $12 million and $60 million in debt to GE Capital alone. Corker had been a construction magnate
in Tennessee before taking office, a sort of mini-Trump. Before he ran for
office, he sold off his business to a local developer named Henry Luken…
Ten years before reporters would
swarm over Trump for (among other things) raising fees at his Mar-a-Lago
resorts before making a series of taxpayer-funded visits, Corker tested the limits of the moonlighting possibilities in the
legislative branch, essentially
becoming a full-time day-trader who did a little Senator-ing in his
spare time.
In the first nine months of 2007, Corker made an incredible 1,200 trades,
over four per day, including 332 over a two-day period…
By 2014, when Corker sat on the Senate Banking Committee, a position that
gave him regular access to prime information about the future direction of the
markets, the Tennessee Senator still had his foot on the gas. He made 930 stock trades that year.
Of his colleagues on the committee,
Rhode Island’s Jack Reed made 39 trades, Pennsylvania’s Patrick Toomey 26, and
nobody else made any – meaning Corker
made 93.5% of all trades made by the legislators most plugged-in to the
country’s finances…
Corker’s activities didn’t go
completely unnoticed. A few ethics
groups and reporters cried foul over the years. He had to amend his Senate
disclosures after the Wall Street Journal in 2015 found unreported income from
“quick” trades in a Chattanooga company called CBL enterprises. As Fortune
noted at the time, Corker went back and made “dozens” of amendments to earlier
disclosures, to reveal about $3.8
million in previously unreported income.
Meanwhile, Bethany McLean of Yahoo!
News later reported that Corker had
invested in a Tennessee hedge fund that made profitable short bets against the housing market with Goldman Sachs…
Until this week, Corker’s history
has been scrutinized only occasionally, and most often because of the role he’s played in an unrelated
controversy known colloquially as #Fanniegate.
This monstrous dispute over the future of the “government sponsored
entities” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in which Corker played a loud and
conspicuous part, made him enemies among investors
who are embittered over the unilateral seizure of the two companies’ profits
six years ago, on August 17th, 2012. Corker supported that controversial
and unprecedented move, known as the “revenue sweep…”
When Corker took on Trump this fall – saying
the White House was “an adult day care center” and that Trump’s behavior
threatened “World War III” – he suddenly became a darling of sorts in the
liberal media. Now, to his critics, he’s
a bad guy again, for reportedly doing
what he’s always done, acting in his own financial interest while earning a
paycheck as a U.S. Senator.
Corker is the norm in congress, they’re like pigs at the
trough. Corker is retiring after
engorging himself on America’s largess.
And, he’s not alone. So when
congress critters announce their exit do they lay low and pull their snouts
from the taxpayer trough? No hardly. From USA Today:
Excerpt:
These lame ducks still fly – on the taxpayer’s dime – often to faraway
countries
WASHINGTON – Last September, Rep.
Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania became the latest in a large cohort of members of
Congress to announce his retirement. About
a month later, Dent, a seven-term
Republican and former chairman of the House ethics committee, arrived in Italy
on the first leg of a six-day, three-nation trip at taxpayer expense that
included stops in Belgium and Luxembourg.
The cost to taxpayers for Dent’s
trip: nearly $7,000.
His post-retirement announcement
travel habits are hardly unique. At
least 17 retiring members of Congress have gone on overseas trips after
announcing they were not going to seek re-election, according to travel
information included in the Congressional Record. All were on the taxpayer’s
dime with a total cost of nearly $190,000.
There is nothing illegal about
these trips, and all were signed off on by the chairman of the committee under
whose authority the trip was taken. But they do raise the issue of how much benefit the constituents in these cases
get when their representatives travel shortly before they leave office.
"The problem is many
of these trips are really much more like paid vacations than fact-finding
trips,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the
good-government group Public Citizen. “Then
when you take a look at retiring members of Congress suddenly jetting around
the globe, it really does have every appearance that they’re just in the last minute getting the most of what they can out
of the perks of being a member of Congress,” Holman said….
Dent ended up resigning on May 8 of this year and in June began as a senior policy adviser at the international law
firm DLA Piper. He also serves as a political commentator for CNN... Dent
declined to comment for this story because, he said, he has an exclusivity
agreement with CNN that prevents him from talking to other media.
Five retiring members traveled as
members of congressional foreign affairs committees, including House committee
chairman Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. and Sen.
Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as
well as Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. and Ted Poe,
R-Texas…
In many cases, details of these taxpayer-financed trips by members of Congress are
not generally available. And what is available in the Congressional Record
can be hard to find.
So congressman Charlie Dent resigned on May 8th
as he segued into his new job as a policy adviser at the international law firm
of DLA Piper as well as a political commentator for CNN. How prevalent is this practice? From The Atlantic:
Excerpt:
An Exodus From Congress Tests the Lure of Lobbying
There’s a wave of lawmakers fleeing
Capitol Hill this year, but if recent history is a guide, many of them will put down roots in the D.C. swamp. There’s a particular moment
Representative Tom Rooney can see in his mind, when his fifth and final term in
the House comes to an end and he leaves Washington, D.C., for the last time as
a member of Congress.
He’ll drive south toward Georgia,
crossing over into Florida north of Jacksonville. He’ll pass that familiar sign, the blue one
that says “Welcome to the Sunshine State,” when he reaches the border. “I made it,” he’ll think to himself.
Every two years, retiring lawmakers
like Rooney face a choice: Do they return home to their states and districts, or stay where the political action—and
the money—is in Washington? The last several months have seen a rush to
the Capitol exits like none other in more than a quarter century: Rooney, a
Republican, is one of three dozen members of the House and Senate who aren’t
running for reelection or another office this fall...
Some in this year’s class of retirees are more junior members who’ve
grown disenchanted with national politics. Rooney, 47, is one of them: “The
D.C. rat race has run its course for me,” he told me in a recent interview.
But if recent history is a guide,
many of Rooney’s fellow congressional retirees won’t be leaving the Beltway at
all…. But once their terms are up, a surprising number of these same
politicians don’t return home. They
stick around town, joining law firms, think tanks, and lobbying shops. On
any given day, ex-lawmakers stalk the corridors of the Capitol complex,
kibitzing with their old colleagues as they prod them for votes…
Ex-lawmakers can cash in on their policy expertise and
friendships in the Capitol, earning two or three times their $174,000 base
salary as a member of Congress…
Members point out that lobbying
allows them to use the experience and issue expertise they’ve built over many
years in Congress to continue to advocate for causes they believe in. But while
that might attract ex-lawmakers to lobbying, it’s not what draws high-paying companies to them: They want the
relationships.
The American people are not lazy slackers. As a matter of fact Baby Boomers largely did
everything that was expected of them.
They worked hard, saved, earned pensions, invested in 401K’s, raised
their children and took care of their elderly parents. Now that their well-earned twilight years
have arrived, what do they have? From
Zero Hedge:
Excerpt:
"Their Wealth Has Vanished": Baby Boomers File For Bankruptcy
In Droves
An alarming number of older Americans
are being forced into bankruptcy, as the rate of people 65 and older who have
filed has never been higher - at three times what it was in 1991, while the rate of bankruptcies among
Americans age 65 and older has more than doubled, according to a new study
by the The Bankruptcy Project…
The magnitude of growth in older
Americans in bankruptcy is so large that the broader trend of an aging U.S.
population can explain only a small portion of the effect. The median senior filing bankruptcy enters the
system $17,390 in debt, vs. an average net worth of $250,000 for their
non-bankrupt peers.
According to the study, a three-decade shift of financial risk
from government and employers to individuals is at fault, as aging
Americans are dealing with longer waits for full Social Security benefits,
401(k) plans replacing employer-provided pensions and more out-of-pocket spending on items such as health care.
“When the costs of aging are off-loaded onto a population that simply
does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give,” the
study says, “and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social
safety net — bankruptcy court.”
“You can manage O.K. until there is
a little stumble,” said Deborah Thorne, an associate professor of sociology at
the University of Idaho and an author of the study. “It doesn’t even take a big thing…”
The questionnaire asked filers what
led them to seek bankruptcy protection. Much like the broader population,
people 65 and older usually cited multiple factors. About three in five said unmanageable medical expenses played a role. A
little more than two-thirds cited a drop in income. Nearly three-quarters
put some blame on hounding by debt collectors…
Meanwhile, by 2013 the average Medicare beneficiary's out-of-pocket health
care expenses ate up around 41% of the average Social Security payment,
according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Moreover, more people are entering their senior years in debt. For many,
that means a mortgage - roughly 41% of senior debt in 2016, which is nearly
double the 21% rate from 1989, according to the Urban Institute…
What isn't helping is that
many older parents report that helping their children contributed to their
bankruptcies. Seattle bankruptcy attorney Marc Stern says he's seen
parents co-sign loans for $10,000 or $20,000 for their kids, only to find
themselves on the hook when their offspring couldn't service the debt.
“When you are living on $2,000 a month and that includes Social
Security — and you have rent and savings are minuscule — it is extremely
difficult to recover from something like that,” he said. Others parents had had co-signed their
children’s student loans. “I never saw
parents with student loans 20 or 30 years ago,” Mr. Stern said.
“It is not uncommon to see student
loans of $100,000,” he added. “Then, you
see parents who have guaranteed some of these loans. They are no longer
working, and they have these student loans that are difficult if not
impossible to pay or discharge in bankruptcy, and these are the kids’ loans.”
“They worked all of their
lives, and did what they were supposed to do,” he said, “and through
circumstances like a late-life divorce or a death of a spouse or having to
raise grandkids, have put them in a situation where they are not able to make
the bills.”
Every bit of the reasons Baby Boomers wealth has disappeared
is the result of legislation written by special interests and enacted by their
lackeys in congress. The Joe Biden
Bankruptcy protection for banks legislation made it impossible for student loans
to be forgiven in bankruptcy. Biden’s
bankruptcy bill was an onerous thing that protected predatory banks from any
losses regardless of their risky actions.
Just who do they serve?
Baby Boomers wealth hasn’t disappeared, it has been transferred to the
very top which includes members of congress.
Almost every member of congress is a millionaire. They have pensions and savings plans regular
people can’t even dream about. Just who
do they serve? Answer, they serve themselves.
By Patricia Baeten
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