Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp, it should be remembered, cheated his way into office by continuing to act as Secretary of State while running in the very election his office was in charge of supervising. As Secretary of State, it should be remembered, Republican candidate Brian Kemp nullified the registrations of thousands of voters, mostly black and Latinx, while he was running against a woman of color (the formidable candidate Stacey Abrams) for governor. Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp, it should be remembered, ran a campaign ad where he pointed a shotgun at a teenage boy. Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp, it should be remembered, ran a campaign ad where he said he may have to use his pickup truck to round up "illegals" on his own. Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp, it should be remembered, campaigned as the "trumpiest" candidate in the race, as Georgia's home-grown version of the Donald.
So many of us were surprised when, after Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson's abrupt resignation due to health reasons, Republican Governor Brian Kemp didn't appoint Trump's preferred replacement, Rep. Doug Collins, and instead appointed a relative unknown, Kelly Loeffler. Few Republicans, governors or otherwise, go against Trump's wishes, and Kemp, the "trumpiest" of candidates in the gubernatorial election, is one of the last persons you'd expect to go against our so-called president's directives. What I'm saying is he's no Mitt Romney. He was taking a huge political risk, so getting Loeffler into the Senate must have been very, very important to him.
And now Kelly Loeffler is being accused of insider trading. After a closed-door meeting when Senators were first advised of the potential health and economic impacts of the Trump flu pandemic, she sold millions of dollars of stocks, and invested in on-line telecommunications. She claims that the two events are unrelated and she sold the stocks merely at the advise of her financial planners.
Riiiight. Give us a break, Loeffler. She is a sitting U.S. Senator (for now) and her husband is the CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange and a chairman at the New York Stock Exchange. People like that don't just blindly allow "third-party" investors to handle their financial portfolio. The advisers and brokers may execute trades on their behalf and they might provide some advice, but it's always a negotiation. If you think the way the world works is chairmen of the Stock Exchange and U.S. Senators let financial advisers dictate what to buy and what to sell and not the other way around, well, bless your heart but I'm sorry to tell you, you're probably poor.
Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) did the same thing and is also in hot water, but I'll let the good people of the Tarheel State deal with their own. I'm here to kick some Georgia butt.
I'm retired and am reliant on my stock-based IRA to keep me solvent through my golden years. I don't have the privilege of closed-door briefings on upcoming events to tell me what to divest and what to acquire, and in just the past two weeks, I've lost a lot of money which may or may not come back. I may or may not be able to live in my own home years from now; I may or may not be able to afford groceries and other essentials if my IRA doesn't recover. It's a very real, existential issue to me. A system that allows the rich and powerful to profit from insider information while others lose their life savings is the very definition of corruption.
I've often wondered if the many crises of the Trump presidency, mostly self-created, are just a redistribution of wealth from the remains of the middle class to the very rich. Every time there's a crisis - Trump leads us to the brink of war with Iran, Trump starts a needless trade war with China, etc. - stocks tumble and my portfolio loses value, but the already wealthy and the inside traders get richer. It's a reverse Robin Hood - robbing the poor to benefit the rich.
Fuck Donald Trump, and fuck Bill Burr, and mostly, because I get to vote her white ass out of office, fuck Kelly Loeffler.
As Karl Marx once said, "We'll hang the last capitalists with the rope they just sold us."
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