‘Legalized Bribery’: How Bad is Congressional Insider Trading? You Might be Shocked at Some of the Details Revealed by Glenn Beck and Peter Schweizer

“How can we fix our country with this going on?” Glenn Beck asks Peter Schweizer.

“We can’t,” Schweizer responds, shaking his head. “And you know, Glenn, if we can’t fix this?”

“You can't fix anything,” Beck says, finishing the sentence for him.

What are they discussing that's so serious as to prohibit America from being fixed? Congressional insider trading.

In case you're unfamiliar with Washington's most recent scandal, Peter Schweizer has written a bombshell book titled “Throw Them all Out” that carefully details multiple cases where members of Congress have made outrageous gains in the stock market by trading on information available only to them. Ordinarily, that's called "insider trading" and it's highly illegal. Yet, somehow, Congress is able to get away with it.

And it doesn't end there. It seems that several people have been profiting from Washington's insider information. As reported earlier on The Blaze:

Similar to some members of Congress, billionaire philanthropist and market speculator Warren Buffett has allegedly been using an “informational advantage” to make bets and investments on the market.

The man who once said, “Through the tax code, there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won,” might have been investing in the markets with information that only he and a select few had been given access [because of his government connections].

You think that's bad? How about this:

. . . in July 2008, then-Treasury Secretary Paulson met with several hedge fund managers and told them that a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a very real possibility.

Why is this shocking? Consider the fact that just a week before informing hedge fund managers that the Fed would be moving in on Fannie and Freddie, Paulson testified before the U.S. Senate (as well as various media outlets) that government intervention in Fannie and Freddie was near “impossible.”

...the group of managers could have profited off the the information Paulson gave them...

What's most disturbing--and frustrating--is that this been going on for some time and it’s all completely legal.

How?

“The rules for what can or cannot be disclosed by government officials are often either unclear or nonexistent,” writes Richard Teitelbaum of Bloomberg. Simply put, there's no law against members of Congress engaging in the same behavior that put Martha Stewart behind bars.

Makes sense. Think about it: if you are a government official acting in a way that many would view as illegal, but is only legal because you “failed” to make a law against it, what are the voters going to do? Call a cop?

See Glenn Beck and Peter Schweizer reveal which members of Congress profited from insider information, how much they made, and how they did it via GBTV: