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Nazareth, Pa., United States

Thursday, August 17, 2023

MacKenzie Campaign Expands on Need For Stock Ban and Transparency in Grant Funding

Yesterday, I told you that GOP Congressional candidate supports term limits, a ban on insider stock trading by Congress members and a need for more transparency in grant funding. I asked for clarification about stock trading and the need for transparency in grant funding. His campaign sent this response: 

  • The current laws in place are woefully inadequate to oversee Members of Congress and their influence-peddling.  
  • The STOCK Act of 2012, which supposedly banned insider trading for Members of Congress, has clearly not sufficiently addressed the issue. 
  • The New York Times highlighted the issue in its 2022 reporting through a series of articles and noted that, “Some members of Congress have strangely good timing when it comes to stock investments…With inside knowledge about forthcoming policy changes or economic developments, the members could buy stocks shortly before they rose in price or sell them shortly before they fell.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/briefing/congress-stock-investments-profits.html)
  • To further address this, Congress has introduced a number of good proposals they should pass. Two of those that I would support are the Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act and the Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust (TRUST) in Congress Act. 
  • While the media and legislators are talking a lot about possible conflicts with stock trading, which is good, less attention has been paid to grant funding and possible conflicts of interests in that space. 
  • In 2022, it came to light that “House Dem [Congresswoman Susan Wild] Lands $1 Million for Former Client Implicated in Child Rape Case.” (https://freebeacon.com/democrats/wild-spending-house-dem-lands-1-million-for-former-client-implicated-in-child-rape-case/)
  • Congress should address these types of conflicts as well and Congresswoman Wild should have been required to disclose that she was seeking this funding for a former legal client. Without such a law in place, this particular case only came to light through investigative reporting.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well it is open season on Wild again.
The free beacon--really?
they are so slanted to the right they need velcro to keep the letters on the page.
Wild was doing her job representing the company she worked for and sometimes you have to deal with some ugly stuff.
Wild worked for a hospital in the area --so she has to avoid getting them funding ?
Any client she ever worked for is on the list of folks she cannot get funding for?
What you have there is a smear campaign that does not care about the crime but smears the person.
Mackenzie can disclose how tight he was with say Perry and Mastriano when good ole rudy and trump were pushing the coup attempt to the republicans in the PA legislature.
Was he screaming this is wrong when that happened?
Was he clueless when that was going on?
Lastly as he is not in Congress it is pretty easy to claim more transparency as he has never had to do it.
BTW where was he when it came to transparency in the PA legislature?
nowhere to be found--so why would anyone think he will follow through if elected to Congress?

Anonymous said...

This has got to be the dumbest criticism ever. Kidspeace is a gigantic underfunded essential facility that her old firm used to represent. Likewise she represented every hospital in the Lehigh Valley. And her old firm or lawyers there represented or ran all sorts of other local institutions (DaVinci Center, Trexler Trust, ArtsQuest, etc. etc.). It’s laughable that this is even being bright up. Shows how little they have on her.

Anonymous said...

The idea of transparency is not a bad idea.
The using of a child rape to attack Wild is just an example of how a right wing organization will try to smear anyone they see as an opponent.
There are also some folks that have a problem with women in power.
Tends to be older folks raised with different values.
Women in power are a threat to their masculinity so anything that the women in power does gets
judged by a different standard.
For example if a male Congressman had the same situation --well he was doing his job so it is not a problem and that would be the end of it.

Anonymous said...

As to stock trades
https://www.newsweek.com/republican-senator-stock-trade-linked-russia-war-raises-eyerbrows-1820658
"Of the purchases Tuberville made during July, Humacyte was arguably the most obscure, with the trades listed alongside investments in firms like Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, and Under Armor. The stock was also performing relatively poorly, approaching a near-all-time low at the time of his purchase."
"However, smart investors buy low. And as things turned out, Tuberville bought Humacyte stock at exactly the right time."

Anonymous said...

You gotta love MacKenzie's boldness.

Sign a pledge for term limits that will never get a vote from McCarthy and Schumer's Congress, while he clearly didn't care about term limits when he kept seeking reelection and climbing the ranks in the state House.

Talk about job creation when he has never worked a day in the private sector in his life.

Claim to be "battle-tested" because his ancestors served in the military, but he did not serve a day in the armed forces.

Oh, and rail about election integrity and mail-in ballots, when he voted for Act 77 that brought no-excuse mail-in voting to Pennsylvania in the first place.

Give me a break. This guy will say anything.