I've never seen a down and out US Senator staggering around on La's skid row with a snoot full in my time as a cop, just as there are a real scarcity of news articles in the few remaining newspapers or on cable television - which vacuum cleans the country for moronic tid-bits of sheer idiocy and three headed lambs and such - about retired US Senators in a soup line, in detox, losing their yacht to the repo men or having too little dough to set up their third or fourth wives after a nasty divorce.
Nope, mostly you hear about Senators doing pretty well. and I never would've have given their way of life a second thought until a few things crossed my mind as a result of news story I heard the other day somewhere on TV or on XM satellite radio — I wish I could remember where. But the facts remain, even though the story seems to have disappeared about as fast as my first wife, the joint account and the Porsche 911 Targa.
a long time ago it became pretty apparent that the senators have a rather lucrative retirement plan. although the poor folks have been required to pay into Social Security since 1983, they have a plan which can pay them a substantial stipend at retirement, depending on their length of service, as well as the ability to toss some extra dough into the Thrift Savings Plan - a 401(k). after 22 years of service in Congress with a retirement at the end of the 108th Congress in 2004, a Senator would receive a quick $84,847 a year, to start, without any 401(k) earnings or Social Security, and not counting the COLa, according to the January 2005, Civil Service Report to Congress. a rate which runs about two or three times better than what the average american receives.
Okay, so the Senators are pretty well set up in retirement, with the pension, the 401(k), the speaking stipends, the books, the yukking it up with the fat cats and the pod people — if you're really lucky, that is.
Then, back in October of 2005, Joseph Farah, from his WorldNetDaily site, raised a prescient and rather troubling question in his article, The real inside traders, which explored the amazing return that Bill Frist generated with his sale of Hospital Corporation of america, which netted him a ton of bucks, just before the stock took a nose dive into the heavy flak.
Farah included a 5 year study of stock filings by alan Ziobrowski of Georgia State University, which were quite startling. Mr Ziobrowski stated that, "The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors. The results suggest senators knew when to buy their common stock and when to sell." Hmm, something's cooking on positive side of the ledgers in the old Senate, something we're not able to snare from Neil Cavuto or while we're ogling Leigh Gallagher.
and then the other day I heard that yes, US senators, and their staffers, can trade, freely, any time they want, using non-public information and that one staffer had made as many as 500 trades in a day. It has also been rumored that one of the ways the senators clean up is through the cashing out at the time of the issuance of IPO's by using the three day limit. Whoa, something is rotten, not only in Denmark but in the halls of Congress.
Now I think that anybody who can listen, for years on end, to the idiocy of feigned filibusters and the phony statistics pumped out by that craven blackguard Ted Kennedy, or put up with the mewling from that dim-witted blowhard Russ Feingold, or wade through the frumpery shoveled around by Barbara Boxer, nod through the tinder dry languorous droning of John Kerry, or listen to the recent inchoate lost in space free ramble book advertisement from the former criminal John Dean and his lofty views on impeachment and then deal with the bleak cowardice shown by a majority of the body politique in the shameful illegal alien business deserves something of a decent retirement fund.
But I think it's a real stretch to have the entire bank of senatorial offices set up as a day trader operation, with the staffers acting as floor men, the senators sending in the leads, while the administrative assistants type up the slips.
Do the staffers wear different colored blazers and carry pads? are the floors littered with old orders? Is there a room with flat screens and banks of phones where the latest quotations run by in real time? Should I start calling my senator's office for the latest quotes and give up on Fidelity and Morgan Stanley? Does the Civil Service Report to Congress cover the Senate's real earnings in the market? If I send in enough dough to my senator, can I get valuable tips? How do I know this isn't going on with the big money boys? Is this the reason there aren't any down and out senators on skid row? This explains why so few seats are full during a gab fest — everybody's off buying and selling.
as Mr Farah indicated, isn't this just a new way to take payoffs? Doesn't it all have the appearance of a way to grab some easy gravy? It looks and sounds suspicious to the old retired cop.
Who passed the legislation that gave the US Senate special status and a prolonged pass on the SEC regulations?
Come on guys and gals, give some of it up. Drop the day trading end of things and go back to just passing laws and protecting the Constitution.
To filch a phrase from Oliver Cromwell, this Senate has sat too long for any good you are doing lately, and this whole trading thing on top of the retirement package is a perk too far.
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