With the appalling Senate scandal over coronavirus insider trading, it is no longer possible to deny it: we are governed by a caste of the unimaginably rich who don’t care if we live or die.
"On January 24, Sen Loeffler sat in on a private, senators-only briefing about the virus, which included Dr Anthony Fauci. Over the next three weeks, until February 14, Loeffler and her husband sold off between $1.275 to $3.1 million of stocks, while buying stocks in Citrix, a company that makes software for remote work."
Bear in mind that by February 12, a booming Dow Jones Industrial Average had hit a record high, with no signs of slowing down.
But even this is nothing compared to North Carolina’s Richard Burr, who has justifiably been thrust into the eye of the hurricane over congressional stock sell-offs. As ProPublica
reported, Burr not only attended the same January 24 briefing as Loeffler, but, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was getting daily briefings about the virus’s spread. A day after the Dow Jones Average hit its all-time high, Burr made his largest stock sell-off in fourteen months, selling up to $1.72 million in shares, including as much as $150,000 invested in several hotel chains whose value tanked not long after. Burr didn’t buy any shares, either. As icing on the cake, Burr was one of only three senators to vote against the 2012 STOCK Act, which banned insider trading by members of Congress.
What makes Burr’s case particularly outrageous is that, unlike with Loeffler, we have
evidence he was lying to the public about the threat of the virus. Despite authoring a
February 7 op-ed assuring people the government was well-prepared to prevent a pandemic, twenty days later, in a meeting with his real constituents — a group of wealthy local industrialists who had donated more than $100,000 to his last campaign — Burr gave a
very different message: that the virus was “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history”; that “you may have to alter your travel” and that of their employees; that there would be school closures; that the military would be tasked with grappling with the health crisis.
