Pandemic Profiteers
By 
At this point, it’s becoming apparent that for much of the Republican conference the relationship with Trump isn’t so much “we will tolerate any level of corruption and incompetence as long as we get our upper-class tax cuts and neoconfederate judges” as “game recognize game”:
The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus.
“Appreciate today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,” she tweeted about the briefing at the time.
That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies worth between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.
It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
And now, the punchline:
When Loeffler assumed office she immediately became the wealthiest member of Congress. The Atlanta businesswoman, whose husband is the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, is worth an estimated $500 million.
In the context of her wealth Loeffler’s proceeds from her “my president will get people killed” inside trading scam is like you or me finding a quarter on the sidewalk. But, hey, what would be really immoral would be to let a sucker keep his money!
Speaking of people trying to fleece suckers, a warning to people taking Tucker’s attempts to attack Burr in order to burnish his fake “economic populist” cred at face value:
I’ll take Tucker Carlson’s anti-corruption credentials seriously when he starts calling out Trump for his extraordinary conflicts of interest and for lining his pockets with taxpayer dollars. Burr is small fry. https://t.co/Z5DJa3roFO— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 20, 2020