Why Is "Insider Trading" OK For Congress ?

Although the Republicans have eliminated a lot of regulations in the financial industry and on Wall Street since 1980, there is one thing that hasn't changed -- insider trading is still illegal. This is where a person with knowledge not available to the general public uses that knowledge to trade on the stock exchange and make a lot of money.

An example of this would be an executive of a company who knows his company is going to reveal information soon that they are either doing better or worse than expected. That executive could use that information to either buy or sell a lot of stock at prices favorable to him/her before the information becomes public and the prices change. This is considered to be unfair and has been outlawed. If that executive (or anyone else) uses inside information to enrich themselves, they will probably go to jail, or at the very least get a huge fine.

But there is a group of people for whom trading on inside information is legal. This group, because of their job, have access to a lot of economic and legislative information that will affect the prices of stocks when it is revealed. But they are somehow immune to the laws that say they cannot take advantage of having this information (which the general public does not have) to enrich themselves. They are the members of both houses of the United States Congress.

It has been recently revealed by Jack Abramoff recently that this insider trading is commonly used by members of Congress to make large amounts of money on Wall Street. It was verified by CBS News. Some members have even used bad economic news, which hasn't yet been released to the public, to bet against the U.S. economy on Wall Street and actually make large sums of money over the country's economy sliding downhill.

Frankly, I can't believe this is right, or ethical. It means a Congressperson can actually make money by voting to keep the economy in the dumper rather than do something to help hurting Americans. And this is not something that is particular to any one party. Politicians of both parties are using this insider information to make themselves rich, or richer.

This needs to be fixed. Any law that applies to the public in general should also apply to every member of Congress (and even the president). It should be illegal for Congress to use their inside information to make money for themselves. In fact, I would go even further. Since it can be very hard to determine whether insider information was used or the person was just very "lucky", I think Congress should be barred from all stock trading while in office. And I think they should sell all their stocks the moment they are elected (so they won't be tempted to pass laws that would favorably affect their own stock holdings).

It won't happen, of course. Congress is not honest enough to kill their own golden goose. But this is just another example of what is wrong with this country. Equality demands that everyone is subjected to the same laws and penalties. When our leaders are not subject to the same laws, then equality and fairness have been tossed out the window.