Members of the House Financial Services Committee, who are supposed to oversee the banking industry, each seem to havemade  a bundle as the market tanked, by snapping up, or dumping, bank stocks.

One of them, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, is a raving Christianist whose "re-election" in 2006 was evidently stolen (from John Russell), like that year's "wins" by other Florida Republicans, including Tom Feeney (who "beat" Clint Curtis) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (who "beat" Frank
Gonzalez).

Those outcomes were contested by the "losers," who canvassed their respective districts, and thereby found that the official vote-counts were completely off, by margins large enough to have "elected" their Republican opponents.

(Curtis led that effort, knowing, as he did, that the Republicans in Florida were routinely rigging vote-counts electronically--as he knew all too well, since Feeney had, two years before, asked him to help develop a computer program for that very purpose. For more, see
http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=4454 ; and for a terrifying documentary about it all, see Patty Sharaf's Murder, Spies and Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story.)

So what did those three "losers" do with their statistical proof of Bushevik election fraud? They took it to the House Administration Committee, now in Democratic hands--and that committee unanimously voted not to look at the evidence. And that was that.

Why do I (re)tell this story here? Because both parties are corrupt--as the article below makes clear. For it wasn't only the extremist Brown-Waite who made a bundle off of bank stocks while the market crashed. As the blog below informs us, that surreptitious rip-off was a perfectly bipartisan affair.

So how can we expect the Democrats (or most of them) to give a s**t about the dire state of our voting system, when it served to put them in their very lucrative positions?
 
MCM

Members of U.S. House Financial Services Committee snapped up or dumped bank stocks as bottom fell out of market
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/06/members_of_us_house_financial.html

A representative for Rep. Charlie Wilson said the congressman leaves day-to-day investment decisions to a money manager.

* Members of Congress were chasing profits while making policy
WASHINGTON -- As financial markets tumbled and the government worked to stave off panic by pumping billions of dollars into banks last fall, several members of Congress who oversee the banking industry were grabbing up or dumping bank stocks.

Anticipating bargains or profits or just trying to unload before the bottom fell out, these members of the House Financial Services Committee or brokers on their behalf were buying and selling stocks including Bank of America and Citigroup -- some of the very corporations their committee would later rap for greed, a Plain Dealer examination of congressional stock market transactions shows.

Financial disclosure records show that some of these Financial Services Committee members, including Ohio Rep. Charlie Wilson, made bank stock trades on the same day the banks were getting a government bailout from a program Congress approved. The transactions may not have been illegal or against congressional rules, but securities attorneys and congressional watchdog groups say they raise flags about the appearance of conflicts of interest.

"I don't think that any of these people should be owning these types of financial instruments," said Brian Biggins, a Cleveland securities lawyer and former stock brokerage manager. "I'm not saying they shouldn't be in the stock market. But if they're on the banking committee and trading in these kinds of stocks, I don't think that's right."
<snip> http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/06/members_of_us_house_financial.html for rest of article


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