House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced this week that she had reversed her position on an effort that would prohibit lawmakers from trading stocks. This is a reversal of her previous position, under which she argued that politicians should be allowed to participate in America’s free market economy. According to The Washington Post, she has also since expressed support for “[seeing] fines tightened for violating the Stock Act, which requires members of Congress to report any stock trades they make within a certain time period.” The TRUST in Congress Act, proposed by U.S. Rep. Abigail Davis Spanberger (D-VA), would require members of Congress and their spouses “to place specified investments into a qualified blind trust (i.e., an arrangement in which certain financial holdings are placed in someone else’s control to avoid a possible conflict of interest) until 180 days after the end of their tenure as a member of Congress.”
This is after the Stock Act has been continuously violated and has gone largely unenforced. I do believe that this new ban would help deter corporate interests from influencing the political sphere. However, one must wonder, when the government has such difficulty enforcing the Stock Act — a relatively small bureaucratic initiative — how effectively it would be able to take on a project that would attempt to prohibit stock trading altogether.
I am personally skeptical that this will be enforced given the members of its opposition, including U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who just last year blocked the passage of a stimulus package that would have combated climate change and assisted millions of people in recovering from the pandemic’s economic fallout. Like many other opponents to this bill, Manchin is invested in the stock market in the form of a $1 to $5 million stake in the Enersystems corporation, a coal company, from which he took $492,000 in 2020. Manchin’s interest in the coal industry likely factors into his unwillingness to disrupt it, which the stimulus package would have done. Thus, millions of people were deprived of aid so greatly needed in a post-pandemic society.
If successfully enforced, this initiative would, to a degree, help curb the problem of monetary involvement in politics. The oil and gas industry, for example, spends an average $84 million a year on donations to American lawmakers, many of whom own stock in the industry. According to the Guardian, “researchers found a correlation between an increase in anti-environment votes and an increase in contributions.” Because they benefit from the oil industry’s success, politicians are unwilling to regulate it in the way that is needed.
Besides the problem of the environment, the oil industry also consistently advocates for imperialistic intervention in the Middle East, with a disastrous cost in civilian lives. Additionally, at least 15 lawmakers have financial ties to the weapons industry, including Raytheon Technologies — a corporation that has continued to advocate in favor of America taking part in the genocidal war being waged in Yemen. Allowing politicians to own stocks enables their direct profit from the industries that benefit from inadequate environmental regulations and motivates them to benefit their choice industries rather than the future generations whose homes they are destroying or the innocent civilians killed with American-made bombs.
If we hope to stop our genocidal involvement abroad and to combat climate change, and if we hope to build a government that will serve the interests of its people and their descendants, we need to ensure that corporate interests are put to the side in favor of those left harmed by capitalistic enterprise. If anything can be said about the bulk of our politicians, it is that they are interested in profit. If we want them to serve us, we will have to disrupt their accumulation of wealth.
However, whether this bill will end up being enforced remains to be seen. Given the failure of the Stock Act and the deep level at which American politics and corporate interests are engrained, I am skeptical that a bill on a grander scale, under the same circumstances, would be enforced in the same way. It is worth noting that not all corporate backing is given in the form of stocks. Manchin has claimed to own many of his stocks via blind trust, but remains very much in service of the coal industry, as seen through his stopping of the stimulus package last year. On the whole, I remain skeptical that America’s capitalist imperialist system can be remedied through simple reforms like this, even if they do help. While this may be a step, true change will have to be implemented on a much grander, systemic level.
Desmond Keuper is a sophomore majoring in philosophy.