SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
insider trading
AOC: Democrats Must Be 'Brawlers for the Working Class' to Counter Trumpism
"One of the things that we need to do is to talk to people directly," said the congresswoman. "There need to be Democrats who walk the walk and talk the talk."
Jan 24, 2025
As Democratic lawmakers grappled with the reality of President Donald Trump's second term this week, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday urged the party to see the president's devotion to billionaires and corporations—after he campaigned as a champion for the forgotten working class—as an opportunity to make clear that Democrats, not Republicans, will fight for the interests of "everyday people."
First, the New York Democratic congresswoman said in an interview with Jon Stewart on his podcast, "The Weekly Show," the party must abandon its own allegiances to the billionaire class.
Trump, his close ties with tech billionaires like Tesla founder Elon Musk, his plans to extend the 2017 tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy, and his promises of deregulation to oil executives ahead of the election all highlight "ways that we can fight back," said Ocasio-Cortez.
"One of the things that we need to do is to talk to people directly," said the congresswoman. "There need to be Democrats who walk the walk and talk the talk. There is an insane amount of hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is what gets exploited [by Republicans]."
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the example of "insider trading" by lawmakers, with members of Congress who receive briefings on the defense industry, pharmaceuticals, and other businesses able to use information not available to the public to predict future stock prices. As Common Dreamsreported in December, dozens of members of Congress bought or sold up to $113 million worth of shares in Pentagon contractors last year, with three Democrats—Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Suzan Delbene (D-Wash.)—trading the most.
Pelosi, the former House speaker, is among the lawmakers who have vehemently defended stock trading by lawmakers, while Ocasio-Cortez has frequently spoken out against the practice.
"People think that everyday people are stupid," Ocasio-Cortez told Stewart on Thursday. "Do you really think that people don't see this shit? ...And then we're supposed to act like money only corrupts Republicans? Give me a fucking break."
Trump won the support of working class people across the country, increasing his support among voters who earn less than $100,000 per year despite the fact, as Ocasio-Cortez said, "that he has a Supreme Court that guts labor rights, that [Republicans] are overwhelmingly opposed to raising a minimum wage, that they are really gutting the civil rights around working people and organizing."
Wealthier voters shifted toward the Democratic Party in the election, supporting Democratic candidate former Vice President Kamala Harris.
To respond to Trump's victory, Ocasio-Cortez said, "we need to be a party of brawlers for the working class."
"We've been chasing this affluent group and making all of these little concessions and hoping that working people don't notice," she added.
The congresswoman—who campaigned for a top House Oversight Committee seat in recent weeks but lost to a more senior Democrat—has been a leading proponent of the Green New Deal, which would fight the climate emergency while creating millions of green energy jobs over a decade; the push to expand Medicare coverage to every American; and a supporter of tuition-free public college, which was offered to students across the U.S. until at least the 1970s.
Her interview with Stewart came as Semaforreported that Democratic leaders are "wrestling with how much resistance to mount to Trump's Cabinet."
"We're obviously in a bit of disarray," one Democratic senator told the outlet. "I don't think people are really completely sure about what lesson is to be learned in this election."
Jesse Brenneman, an editor for the podcast "Know Your Enemy," commented that "the fact Democrats don't know what to do tells you everything about their priorities."
In an email to supporters the day after Trump was inaugurated this week, Ocasio-Cortez stuck to the same message she shared with Stewart.
Pointing to the tech billionaires who attended the inauguration, with many elected officials "kicked to the curb," the congresswoman told supporters: "You're getting ripped off. All of us are going to be getting ripped off for the next four years, but what do we do about it?"
"The Trump trifecta has taken hold, and so have their billionaire right-wing donors," she said. "Our movement for real progress will have to push harder than ever these next four years."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Rahm Emanuel Made Alarming Stock Trades as Ambassador to Japan
A report on the "suspiciously timed" trading comes as the longtime party insider mulls a run for Democratic National Committee chair.
Nov 19, 2024
"Siri, what is insider trading?"
That's how one reader responded to Tuesday reporting by The American Prospect's Daniel Boguslaw that Rahm Emanuel, who is supposedly mulling a bid for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, made some concerning financial moves while in his current government job.
Emanuel is the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He was previously the mayor of Chicago, a Democratic Illinois congressman, and a key adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. While in the House of Representatives, he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and then the party's caucus in the chamber. He's also been an investment banker.
As Boguslaw detailed Tuesday:
Periodic transaction reports filed with the Office of Governmental Ethics over the past two years suggest that Chicago's golden boy may be better served returning to his roots on Wall Street, given the six-figure trades he executed at highly opportune moments in U.S.-Japanese trade relations.
Among the millions of dollars of stock trades Emanuel conducted between 2021 and 2024 while serving as ambassador, one purchase jumps out. On September 29, 2023, Emanuel bought between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of stocks in CoreWeave, a leading AI cloud computing service.
Emanuel's purchase took place one day before the Japanese government announced a $320 million subsidy to Micron Technology to manufacture storage components that are essential to the Nvidia chips which CoreWeave relies on for its AI computation services.
Emanuel "purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Ocient stock on March 8, 2024, before the close of the firm's series B raise," after the Illinois "data analytics company's CEO Chris Gladwin traveled to Japan in October on a trade delegation mission," Boguslaw noted. "At the end of July, Rahm also purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in Monroe Capital, a Chicago-based middle-market lender that specializes in collateralized debt obligations, the Frankenstein financial product that crashed global markets in 2008."
While Emanuel did not respond to the Prospect's request for comment, Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, declared on social media that it was a "MASSIVE STORY!"
Hauser told Common Dreams that "being ambassador to Japan is a big job, but normally owing to its importance to America's relationship with a key ally in a critical area of the globe, and not because of the access it apparently provides to actionable stock tips."
"Ambassador Emanuel's brain ought to have been focused on improving America's lot in East Asia, not maximizing his retirement account," he said. "We at Revolving Door Project have long argued that senior government officials should be limited to investing in diversified mutual funds rather than stock by stock. That Emanuel was making exotic investments in businesses he may have learned about on the government's dime only underscores the need for such reforms."
"If Democrats are to ever put a full and final end to Trumpism, they are going to need to develop a clear and consistent critique of why corruption by public officials is a bad thing. That would make Rahm Emanuel among the worst possible choices for DNC chair, especially since Sen. Menendez seems likely to be unavailable for the position," Hauser added, referring to Bob Menendez, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who in July was convicted of taking bribes.
As Common Dreamsreported last week, progressive critics of Emanuel have called his potential leadership of the DNC—after various devastating losses for the party on Election Day earlier this month—a "sick joke" and "the worst idea in the world."
Noting Emanuel's consideration of the job in an email to supporters on Tuesday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that "there is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party's political crisis—that's it."
"The DNC needs an organizer who gets people," she asserted. "Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail."
Martin O'Malley, a former Democratic presidential candidate and Maryland governor, and Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair and a DNC vice chair, have both formally launched their campaigns for the position.
Other potential contenders for the DNC post include Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler and Chuck Rocha, a political strategist for the latest campaign of Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, said after the elections earlier this month that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
According toCBS News:
Rocha said he's still waiting to see how the field develops before jumping in, and "if there's a better candidate that really stands for what I want to see done with the party."
But Rocha has set several action items he would take as chair: eliminate education requirements for senior DNC positions, mandating that state parties "be more inclusive" and diverse with consultant hiring, and to focus on building party infrastructure in all 50 states.
Asked about Martin's and O'Malley's campaigns, Rocha called them "names that are from the institution."
"I think we need somebody from the outside and a strategist to come in and rebuild the party," said Rocha, who noted that his non-college background and upbringing in East Texas could be an advantage as the party looks to reconnect with working-class voters.
Politicoreported Tuesday that another Sanders ally, James Zogby, "expects to formally launch his campaign in the coming days."
A longtime DNC member and president of the Arab American Institute, Zogby told Politico that he was motivated to run by his anger over Republican President-elect Donald Trump's defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Zogby criticized Harris for campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Okla.), said the Democratic Party was too "focused on suburban women and not on white working-class people," and called the decision to not invite a Palestinian American to speak at the national convention "unimaginative, overly cautious, and completely out of touch with where voters are."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Whistleblowers Challenge Candidates: Stand Against Wall Street Fraud
Feb 26, 2016
Four people who have been at the center of some of the nation's biggest Wall Street scandals have come together to send a message to the 2016 presidential candidates: Pledge to stand against Wall Street fraud and corruption - not just with words, but with the kind of actions that Americans have long expected but have yet to see.
The four veterans of battles with banksters - Gary J. Aguirre, William K. Black, Richard M. Bowen III and Michael Winston - on Thursday called on the candidates to not take contributions from financial companies or officers that have been charged with fraud, particularly related to the 2008 financial meltdown. They have also outlined a set of actions that they say will "restore the rule of law" on Wall Street. They have formed a new organization, Bank Whistleblowers United, to move that agenda forward.
"We use the f-word a lot," said Black, who came into national prominence for his role in exposing the "Keating Five" savings-and-loan senatorial scandal in 1989, "the five-letter word, 'fraud,' that you are supposed to be able to say in polite company."
That word, he said, is central to the issue these whistleblowers are concerned about: the fact that regulators and prosecutors have too often in the wake of the financial crash given a pass to banks and other financial institutions that profited from deception and dissembling.
Black recalled that during the era of the savings-and-loan scandal, when the federal government brought an action involving a financial institution "we actually spelled out in the English language what had happened." The news media echoed that language, and in the glare of that disclosure "the politicians who took political contributions from those institutions rushed to return the contributions or to donate them to charity."
In today's era of no-blame settlements and obfuscatory language, "that never happens now," Black said.
Nonetheless, people running for office have no excuse. It is clear that the financial meltdown was a consequence of actions that done by individuals rather than Wall Street institutions would likely have landed those persons behind bars. The biographies of the founding members of the Bank Whistleblowers United make that clear.
Bowen, for example, was at Citigroup when in 2006 he saw first-hand how the bank was issuing large numbers of subprime mortgages and then selling bundles of those mortgages on the securities market. His warnings that the deals violated bank and regulatory standards not only went unheeded; he was fired for speaking out. His experience, however, was probed by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was created by Congress to document the causes of the Wall Street meltdown and make recommendations. It was also featured in a powerful "60 Minutes" segment.
Winston had a similar experience as an executive in the mortgage unit at the now-defunct Countrywide Financial. He recalled being told by a fellow senior executive of the impetus from the very top of the company to approve mortgages by anyone, regardless of qualification. "If they can fog a mirror, we'll give them a loan," he was told. With the complicity of a bond-rating agency that allowed the mortgages to be bundled as high-quality securities, Countrywide made billions - until the House of Cards crashed, taking with it people who found their homes foreclosed and communities economically devastated. Winston, too, was fired after flagging fraudulent practices he saw and for refusing a direct order to disseminate false information on behalf of the company. For a brief time he found exoneration when a jury ruled in his favor in a California county superior court suit against Bank of America, which absorbed Countrywide during the depths of the financial crisis. The bank succeeded, however, in getting that verdict overturned in an appeals court because critics found highly irregular and suspect.
Aguirre experienced Wall Street corruption from the perspective of a regulatory agency, as a Securities and Exchange Commission attorney. While heading an insider trading investigation of Pequot Capital Management, formerly the world's largest hedge fund, Aguirre resisted his supervisor's demands to give preferential treatment to a Wall Street titan involved in the case. He was fired for "insubordination," but he would later prove to the satisfaction of two Senate committees, a federal court and three federal agencies that the SEC had acted unlawfully.
Then there is Black, who in addition to his Keating Five work is known for having essentially written the book on "control fraud," the methods banks have used to turn fraudulent activity into a business model that is highly profitable and hard to prosecute. The book that explains that topic has a title that says it all: "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One."
Bank Whistleblowers United have devised a "60-day plan" that the next president - or even the current president - should execute. The plan has 19 actions, 18 of which can be done by the executive branch or regulatory agencies with laws and regulatory authority they already have, "so there are no excuses," Black said. Only one action - hiring more FBI agents, Justice Department attorneys and regulatory investigators - would require budgetary action in Congress.
At the top of that list is restoring "the mandatory criminal referral process and Criminal Referral Coordinators at every financial regulatory agency." That would lead to bank executives actually being charged with crimes and the possibility of being held accountable for their actions, rather than a process that allows financial institutions to buy a get-out-of-jail-free card through a settlement negotiation.
But a first step is to persuade presidential candidates, and for that matter congressional candidates, to make the simple pledge to, as Black put it, "no longer take money from financial felons."
The whistleblowers have not yet had a candidate sign on to their pledge. However, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, having sworn off super PAC dollars and shunned Wall Street political donors, is closest in spirit and practice to the pledge. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is selling herself as the candidate who has the most comprehensive plan for curbing what she calls the "shenanigans" of a broad range of financial institutions - a word that Black said reflects Clinton's reticence to call a crime a crime and respond accordingly.
These insiders are offering a tough standard for candidates to measure their Wall Street reform agenda against. But that is because of what they have seen first-hand and the lives damaged by the banks' illicit behavior. It's good that there is a competition in the Democratic Party presidential primary to sound tough on Wall Street. The next step is for each candidate to address how much of the whistleblowers' plan for "breaking Wall Street's power over our economy and democracy" and returning the rule of law to the financial sector he or she is willing to embrace.
"I think the public has to make a decision, and that is why we are trying to tee this up for the candidates so that the public can see and speak to them," Aguirre said.
"It is ingrained in the fiber, in the DNA of our Congress and our government to defer to Wall Street," he added. "And until we change the DNA it's going to remain the same."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular