Imagine you work at a bank. Or a hospital, retail company, or a mid-sized logistics company. First week on the job, and the lady from the Human Resources department hands you the staff handbook. These are basically the company rules for staff members, and everyone understands this.
The usual stuff: show respect to each other, don’t steal stuff, dress properly and don’t be weird; also, you can’t accept a gift from a supplier without declaring it, and even then you still can not accept it…
Oh, while we are at it…
You can’t trade company shares unless during a certain period, and you can not trade shares in companies you have inside knowledge of. In fact, that’s also illegal in the eyes of the law.
You definitely can’t take a free holiday to a Caribbean island from a guy whose business your employer happens to regulate…
Break any of that, and you’re not “under review.” You’re gone. Badge deactivated, office box packed with your sad belongings, and maybe a follow-up call from the SEC.
Now picture a different workplace.
This one is in the good old USA.
Much higher pay grade. A slightly different job…
Very high profile and right smack bang inside the very regulators you give guidance to.
And somehow, only God knows how, none of those rules I mentioned earlier apply to the people in this role.
On July 22nd, the House passed something called the Stop Insider Trading Act. 232 to 198. Great name. Sounds decisive.
Here’s what it actually does: bans members of Congress and their families from buying new individual stocks going forward, but lets them keep, and continue selling, everything they already own.
The funny thing is that it carves out an exemption for the President.
No surprise.
The good thing, though, is that somebody bolted an unrelated voter ID provision onto it, which means it’s probably already dead in the Senate.
After fourteen years of “reform,” the headline achievement is: you can keep the stocks you have.
The original STOCK Act passed back in 2012, specifically to stop lawmakers trading on non-public information. Since then, roughly one in three members of Congress have kept trading anyway, with a suspicious number of those trades landing right around committee briefings and votes that happened to move the exact stock they’d just bought.
Try explaining that timing to a compliance officer at literally any other job in America or the UK
Yeah. No chance of a fair audience. Because it isn’t fair.
It is illegal.
Here’s the thing: every other American company solved this problem decades ago.
Blackout periods before earnings. Mandatory pre-clearance before you trade your own company’s stock. Pre-scheduled trading plans set up months in advance, specifically so nobody can claim they timed anything.
And gifts? Forget it.
Most corporate ethics policies cap what you can accept from anyone doing business with the company at somewhere between twenty and a hundred dollars a year.
A steak dinner from a supplier can get you fired. A round of golf can end a career.
The idea, and it’s the right one, is that a gift is just a bribe with better manners.
However, Congress operates on a different theory entirely: NONE.
Meanwhile, the President keeps his business interests running while foreign governments book entire floors in his buildings, and no one with real enforcement power seems eager to ask why.
Is it because we are in uncharted territory where the fraud that was historically hidden happens in front of our very eyes?
The President’s actions, some could say, fraud, gets treated the way a management team treats an awkward message in the group chat. Visible to everyone, acted on by no one.
Whispers.
And then there’s the Supreme Court.
Nine people with the literal final word on what’s legal in America, who for years operated under no binding, enforceable code of ethics whatsoever.
We now know one justice accepted decades of undisclosed luxury trips, private jet flights, and yacht cruises from a billionaire with business before the courts the very justice oversees, and reported almost none of it until journalists uncovered the details.
Cue the ‘huge’ investigation.
The Court’s response, in 2023, was to adopt a voluntary code of conduct.
Voluntary.
Written by the judges. Policed by the judges.
Enforced by absolutely nobody.
This is where all the themes come together, because the entire system depends on one convenient phrase: campaign contributions.
Hand a politician cash directly in exchange for a vote; that’s bribery, and you go to prison.
Route the exact same money through a Super PAC, timed suspiciously close to the exact same vote, and that’s “free speech.”
Citizens United decided a corporation writing a seven-figure check is basically the same act as a citizen holding a protest sign.
One of those things moves legislation. The other one gets pissed on by the law.
So let’s just call it what it is.
Not a donation.
It’s not “civic engagement.” It’s a bribe in a suit, complete with a receipt for tax purposes.
Any employee, anywhere, who tried running that exact scheme with a supplier would be fired by lunchtime and indicted by dinner. Do it with a flag pin on, call it a campaign contribution, and somehow that’s just… how the system works.
I would love to say this is only in America.
But we all know it is not.
It’s everywhere in political circles, and once you notice it, it’s hard to ignore.
China had, technically has, the same problem…
But at least they are dealing with it, and when politicians, businesspeople, or anyone else are caught stealing, they face serious consequences.
And so much more depending on the crime.
With the most recent high-profile case involving an official from Nanjing in China who stole $325 million of the people’s money. He was stripped of all his assets, his property and wealth and given the big sentence beginning with that capital D… and ending in …eath.
I don’t get that level of greed. The need. Why?
They say power and wealth corrupts, and we see it all the time. Blatantly when we look at our politicans. But it’s much more subtle when we look at the wealthy and how they sneakily use their money to influence others.
I don’t know how to solve this problem that is spreading through Western societies.
Greed, corruption and downright theft from the people…
Theft… in more ways than just money…
Theft of the lives of our people as our children are hooked away to go to SOME WAR that has been bought and paid for. By invested parties…
AND THIS IS WHY I AM ALL OVER MY NEWS FEED THESE DAYS.
Because that corruption is going to end in a huge conflict. Likely to be boots on the ground in the MIDDLE EAST, with all countries going to get dragged into it.
And that means our sons and daughters..
So if, like me, you have a SON, A DAUGHTER.
Then you should be all over the news, reading and absorbing from many different sources. Because if you are complacent, you might find your children drawn into a war they have no interest in or understanding of.
I know it sounds far-fetched in this Modern Day, and you might scoff at my comments.
But remember, that was the reaction when DONALD TRUMP said he was running to become the president of the UNITED STATES and floated down a golden staircase.
And we all know how that is unfolding as we speak…
It is not good.
THE PEACE PRESIDENT MY ASS..
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