Wait, so government officials have to liquidate all their investments, or just redirect them to avoid conflicts of interest? Because the latter is basically the status quo.
The latter is what the status quo used to be, in theory.
In practice we see it means fuck all and these guys are in on the grift. It’s just more out in the open than ever. So in no way is ‘redirecting to avoid conflicts of interest’ the actual status quo.
Yeah, i think they should have to liquidate them. Potentially if you can have a truly blind trust where you have no idea where your money is, that would be fine too, i guess.
But right now, people in government have actual direct investments in various corporations, and benefit from their actions in government, and it’s bull.
Ridiculous. They should be frozen, so that nothing can be added or deleted.
Requiring complete liquidation would probably prevent a lot of decent people from holding office.
I think I recall an example or two in local government.
The federal government is different. Failure to avoid financial conflicts of interest can result in federal prison time.
Well I think we discovered a lot of our checks and balances were just guidelines instead of actual rules. They should be rules, laws, and you put it in a trust where you don’t touch it or deal with, not your family or anyone else connected to you while you’re in office.
We shouldn’t exclude people in office from preparing for the future, but we can certainly do better at ensuring they are not making decisions based on what they’re invested in. In most cases liquidation should not be necessary and is an extreme solution.
Oh agree it is an extreme solution.
But, honestly, if this keeps up? It might be required. Maybe as a second tier thing. Like a law stating all investments must be in either a blind trust, or mutual funds. If they are not when you take office, then your assets must be liquidated within 30 days. Any assets not liquidated by that are forfeited to the government.
Like make it a three tier thing.
Put in trust
If not, must liquidate
If not liquidate, assets seized.
What Trump and his family are doing should be illegal. We just don’t want the pendulum to swing too far the other way because of these extremes. It would not be hugely difficult to nullify most the conflicts of interests without liquidations.
If what keeps up? Can you find three examples at the federal level of government officials profiting from a conflicted investment?
And before you start, Trump doesn’t count because the POTUS is exempt from COI rules.
If they did it right you wouldn’t. That doesn’t make it right.
I’m pretty sure there were three in just the last few months. Are you really arguing that this sort of corruption isn’t, well, commonplace?
Other than the guy who started this discussion, here are 40 other guys in the house who held investments in medical corporations while they voted on laws affecting them.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636666323/new-york-congressman-indicted-on-insider-trading-charges
This has several instances
Oh, also apparently insider trading wasn’t illegal until 2012!
Which, I should note, is a bipartisan list.
And we wonder why real medical reform is so hard and doesn’t really tackle the root financial causes.
They get pensions and benefits.
You know, unlike everyone else anymore. Also they tend to leave Congress as multi-millionaires with easy consulting/lobbying jobs that pay 6-7 figures on top of that.
Now If you’re talking about Mayors or the like… sure maybe there should be more leeway. But government pensions have always been a thing and they didn’t gut those along the way, unlike they did to everyone else.
Really needs to be read in whole.
The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 …
During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape. One feature—detailed in Before the Storm , Rick Perlstein’s account of the origins of the New Right—was liberals’ inability to see, let alone take seriously enough to understand, what was happening around the country. For their part, conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas. Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too “backward” for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Is lying and deception some kind of STD that’s infected all Republicans?
Hatch issues a statement regretting the things he said on CNN earlier this week. He also uses it as an opportunity to tout his proposals to ‘reduce overcriminalization’, with four links that basically all point to the same proposal, a mens rea requirement for every crime in the criminal code.
Of course, the point of a strict mens rea requirement is to make it much harder to prosecute white-collar crime. No one ever argues that a bank robber or a drug dealer or a burglar didn’t really intend to commit those crimes, and proving mens rea beyond a reasonable doubt in the case of those crimes is easy to do. But many do argue that e.g. Paul Manafort didn’t mean to launder money, or Michael Cohen didn’t mean to evade taxes, or Donald Trump didn’t mean to order Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws; and proving mens rea in that kind of case can be quite hard to do.
In one of the links, Hatch acknowledges the criticisms of his proposal but dismisses them on the grounds that his proposal is fair because it applies to all crimes, and that everyone would therefore benefit. But this strikes me as a bad-faith argument, because Hatch surely knows differently.
And that Hatch points to this now makes me think that will be his take when Mueller points the finger at Trump: That no one can prove Trump knew he was committing a crime. Who can know what’s in another (rich white) man’s head?
https://www.hatch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=releases&id=5D5C96B3-0B4D-4988-97B6-D9EA99A8D640
God, I hate that craven little shit.
Those are all very valid points you bring up. Thankfully in this particular case, we would know what was in Trump’s head because he’s a dumbass and already admitted it.