ETHICALLY CHALLENGED CAPITALI$M

A dozen Congressional members traded stock in companies owned by Elon Musk in 2022: report

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 11, 2022

Elon Musk AFP

As Elon Musk turns his attention to his recent Twitter acquisition, a new report is shedding light on Congressional lawmakers' stock investments in the billionaire's companies this year.

According to Business Insider, "at least 12 members of Congress or their family members personally traded stocks in Twitter or Tesla in 2022."

The news outlet's report includes the following lawmakers: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Reps. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), John Garamendi (D-Calif.), Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.), Kathy Manning (D-N.C.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and David McKinley (R-W.V.).

McKinley, Gonzalez, Garcia, Whitehouse, and Fallon personally purchased stock, and family members of the remaining lawmakers made the other purchases with values ranging from $1,000 to approximately $5,000,000.

The latest development comes as Congress deliberates over whether or not lawmakers, their spouses, and their dependent children should even have the opportunity to own or sell individual stocks. So far, lawmakers have failed to deliver on efforts to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

"The delay is a momentous setback for the stock trading reform effort, which drew a rare confluence of support from an overwhelming majority of Republican and Democratic voters," the Hill reported.

“Passing a stock trading bill before the midterms would have been a good faith sign to the voters that Congress takes its responsibility to the public interest seriously,” said Danielle Caputo, an ethics lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center. “And so obviously, that’s disappointing.”

Other critics also expressed concern about a loophole in the bill that would still give lawmakers the ability to purchase stock. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, an advocate working with the watchdog organization, The Project on Government Oversight (POGO), explained how the bill appears to be an example of "fake blind trust."

“The problem is that the bill allows people to create a trust that they can claim is blind and diversified, and yet it doesn’t actually have to meet the criteria that are currently in the law for it to officially be a blind trust,” said Hedtler-Gaudette.

“It’s basically a fake blind trust,” he said. “We don’t have that much trust in what the ethics committee is going to do because they’re notoriously weak in doing anything that’s particularly restrictive or robust around what happens internally.”