Monday, February 8, 2016

Tomaaato, Tomahto

Insider Trading
In today's news, we read where SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts sold upwards of $500,000 of Microsoft stock shortly before the SCOTUS agreed to hear a case involving Microsoft.  The champion of the Constitution (unless he's ruling on obamacare or abortion) made a magnanimous gesture by divesting his interest in Microsoft before sitting for the case.  Or did he?

See, what gets my attention is that he made a clean profit on his stock.  Did he know something before selling?  Was he privy to insider information prior to the sale?  It would have been an easy thing to simply recuse himself from the Microsoft case.  Of course, he didn't bother to do that when he voted on a case involving Texas Instruments.  While, the court spokesperson chalked it up to human error (i.e. forgetting you have a couple hundred thousand dollars in a company you are ruling on) but you gotta wonder what's going on?

If he were not the Chief Justice, would Roberts have been charged with insider trading for the sale of the Microsoft stock?  Of course, who can forget Secretary of the Treaury Timothy Geithner's tax fiasco or the fact that he didn't spend a single night in jail for cheating on his taxes?  The point to this is that it seems if you are in a political office, that you can cheat, steal, lie, maim, and murder and still not get investigated; whereas the rest of we the people are easy pickings.  

So much for the clarity our POTUS promised.

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