Birmingham’s Rep. Spencer Bachus Exposed for Insider Trading on ’60 Minutes’
November 14th, 2011Alabama Democratic Party Calls for Bachus’s Resignation
The next national election is now less than a year away and congressmen and senators are expending much of their time and their energy raising the millions of dollars in campaign funds they’ll need just to hold onto a job that pays $174,000 a year, according to CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
Few of them are doing it for the salary and all of them will say they are doing it to serve the public. But there are other benefits: Power, prestige, and the opportunity to become a Washington insider with access to information and connections that no one else has, in an environment of privilege where rules that govern the rest of the country, don’t always apply to them.
According to a recent 60 Minutes report, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Birmingham would attend closed meetings with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the fragile state of the market, only to turn around — sometimes the next day — and essentially short the market by buying stock options whose value would increase if the stock market collapsed.
According to the Alabama Democratic Party, Bachus should resign as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, even though what he did was not technically illegal.
“Congressman Bachus likes to tout his record on ‘protecting investors,’” Alabama Democratic Party executive director Bradley Davidson said in a press release. “But it’s easy to see the only investor he’s interested in protecting is himself. If Bachus wasn’t a Congressman, he’d be under investigation for insider trading right now. But then again, if Bachus wasn’t a Congressman, I doubt he would have been able to make these deals. If only we could all be as lucky as Congressman Bachus.”
Bachus claimed not to have used any private information when making the deals, though at least one profitable trade took place just days after one of the private meetings with Bernanke and Paulson. As a congressman, Bachus is exempt from the laws that would typically govern this kind of insider trading.
“Bachus made tens of thousands of dollars off the information he took from these critical meetings,” Davidson said. “While the rest of us were wondering what would happen to our retirements as the markets dropped, he was making sure he’d make a quick buck when they did. This is absolutely not the kind of leadership we need in Washington, especially not on something as powerful as the finance committee.”
For more information, watch the video above or read the transcript here.
Tags: 60 Minutes, Spencer Bachus
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