If you missed this segment on 60 Minutes, please take some time to watch. At issue here is the ability of elected officials in Congress to act on non-public information and make stock purchases off of it. If your representative sits on a committee that is making decisions that affect the market, he/she has access to very powerful information; some call it 'Insider trading' information. However, when a private citizen does it, he goes to jail. When a congressman does it, it's legal.
For example, Peter Schweizer, Editor in Chief at Big Peace, tells Steve Kroft that just prior to the 2008 financial meltdown, a large number of public officials were getting out of the market. One of the men who benefited greatly from closed-door meetings with Bernanke and Paulson before the crash was Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who coincidentally made a lot of money on decisions that more than conceivably could have been made based on the content of those meetings.
It's not just good optics in this piece to showcase this behavior on the part of both Democrats and Republicans (Pelosi and Boehner were both challenged on their financial dealings); it's also the right thing to do.
Via Big Government:
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