Profiteering from a crisis is nothing new. Running around Tennessee and Kentucky to buy up bottles of hand sanitizer from rural stores – before people panicked and then put them up on Amazon for a large profit – might just be labeled as entrepreneurial behavior, or it could be labeled price-gouging.
In a rare bout of ethical behavior, Amazon took the prized bottles off their website. In this case, the perpetrator donated the bottles to needy causes.
Ethical lapse committed, profiteering stopped, penalty self-imposed and case closed. That is what we call swift justice.
Not so with some members of the U.S. Congress and their staffs. Leading the pack were senators Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia.
Here is what happened. Members of Congress and their staff received briefings regarding the seriousness of the coronavirus situation, and what actions the federal government was considering. They then sold stock in companies that would be hurt by those actions, or bought stock in companies that might profit greatly.
This is not illegal, but it is unethical and immoral.
Burr is one of our two senators in North Carolina. That means we vote for this office every six years. He sold stock valued from $600,000 to $1.7 million the day after he received information arising from his position as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The law requires disclosure only of sales and purchases. A liberal watchdog group, Politico, outed the sale after review of the disclosure. Burr refused to admit he had done anything wrong and said let the Senate Select Committee on Ethics review the situation. Membership on the Ethics Committee must be evenly comprised of Republicans and Democrats. The chair is a member of the majority party.
Let’s assume the members of the Ethics Committee are ethical and well-meaning. The last thing we need right now is to waste time in a public flogging of Burr. What he did was wrong and there is only one way to make it right: Burr should immediately resign.
He has said he was not going to run again. His term runs out in 2022. In North Carolina, the Governor makes an appointment to fill the vacancy, but the appointment must be of the same political party as the person being replaced. So we would have a Democratic Governor appointing a Republican replacement. Interesting.
Some of my readers are concerned that this column leans to the left. Well, it is a column and columns are opinions.
To be fair, I listened to Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson’s comment on Burr’s stock sale. Carlson’s opinions are followed by many of my conservative friends. Here is what Carlson said:
“Now maybe there is an honest explanation for what he did. If there is, then he should share it with the rest of us immediately. Otherwise, he must resign from the Senate.”
Carlson also called for prosecution on insider trading, as well.
In this writer’s opinion, prosecution would be a divisive waste of time. So would the hearings held by the Ethics Committee. A resignation and donation of the profits from the stock sale to the North Carolina Unemployment Trust Fund would be sufficient. At least the hand-sanitizer profiteer had the decency to donate his ill-begotten product to needy people.
Roger Carlton is a columnist for The Graham Star.