The Senate and House voted themselves to be The Lords of America during the Reagan years, brah.
Take kickbacks from companies to vote their way?
All legal because they're the ones that make the laws.
Our forefathers never foresaw naked greed in elected officials.
Unfortunately.
Close, but not quite. The real explosion in congressional insider-trading riches kicked off around 2004-2005, nothing to do with the Reagan years at all.
Trading on non-public info had always been legal for them because Congress quietly exempted itself decades ago and the laws from the thirties never address public servants only wall street. What changed was the scale: after 9/11 and the housing/finance bubble, net worth for House members roughly doubled and Senate members tripled in just a few years, returns no hedge fund on earth could match.
The mask slipped hard during the financial crisis. Members who sat in on closed-door TARP and bailout meetings made perfectly timed trades that would’ve landed any normal citizen in federal prison. Paul Pelosi’s uncanny streak became the poster child, but dozens were doing it. Only what I called the minority press was sounding the alarm and I dug in to find the dirty little details I couldn't find anywhere in the press.
Then comes the 2012 STOCK Act, Congress pretending to fix the problem with a big public show of ‘no more insider trading, promise!’ The rubes bought it. Then, in 2013, in the dead of night, they gutted the transparency part (the public database requirement) by slipping a one-page amendment into a completely unrelated bill. Obama signed it. Mainstream media (95% libtard at the time) ran zero stories. Crickets.
Pelosi and the rest went right back to work. Since then, Democrats (and a healthy handful of crooked Republicans) have built layer after layer of protection: blind trusts that aren’t blind, spouses who magically pick winners, and slush-fund cutouts like USAID when the stock game gets too hot just like a hedge fund.
Same game, better armor. And the press still pretends it isn’t happening. I damn near choked laughing when Biden, on his way out the door, casually tossed Pelosi under the bus and suggested Congress finally ‘look into’ this insider-trading thing, like he just discovered it last week, lol. Perfect timing, Joe. A few years from now some moron here will believe and argue to the death that Biden tried to end it.
