More Revelations of Favorable Stock Trading By Members of Congress

The passage of the STOCK Act was supposed, in the eyes of Congress, to end all the intense anger over Congressional insider trading. The system worked, in their eyes. A problem was identified and Congress worked to address it. Everyone goes home happy.
Except that’s not what happened. In a continuing series, the Washington Post delivered the goods on a host of abuses by members of Congress, both within the confines of insider trading and also well beyond them. First, they looked at how members reacted to their holdings in cases where they had lawmaking and oversight power over companies in those holdings.

One-hundred-thirty members of Congress or their families have traded stocks collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars in companies lobbying on bills that came before their committees, a practice that is permitted under current ethics rules, a Washington Post analysis has found.
The lawmakers bought and sold a total of between $85 million and $218 million in 323 companies registered to lobby on legislation that appeared before them, according to an examination of all 45,000 individual congressional stock transactions contained in computerized financial disclosure data from 2007 to 2010 [...]
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) reported buying $25,000 in bonds in a genetic-technology company around the time that he released a hold on legislation the firm supported. Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) sold between $50,000 and $100,000 in General Electric stock shortly before a Republican filibuster killed legislation sought by the company. The family of Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) bought between $286,000 and $690,000 in a high-tech company interested in a bill under his committee’s jurisdiction.

Read more: http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/06/25/more-revelations-of-favorable-stock-trading-by-members-of-congress/