Out of all the corruption in this corrupt and unjust system we're forced to make our way within, right at the moment I'm particularly outraged by the fact that Georgia is represented by not one but two senators who both used their positions to violate securities laws and commit insider trading. And not just insider trading, but insider in its most egregious form, directly selling out the health of their constituents for personal gain.
At first it looked as though it was only Kelly Loeffler who had sold stocks after being told about the impending coronavirus pandemic, as I wrote back in March. But now it has come out that David Perdue also dumped stocks after the January congressional briefing. In his case, he sold high ($86 per share), then bought back low after the stocks crashed ($30). Now the shares have recovered and are worth somewhere north of $120 apiece.
Just thinking about these two crooks gives me a tight feeling my chest. If they were my senators, I don't know what I would be doing.
Their bios are something else.
Perdue, born in 1949, is the son of two Georgia school teachers and his father was later a school superintendent. He got into the Naval Academy but left it at some point, finishing a bachelor's in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech instead. He then did a master's in operations research, finishing his education in 1975.
Right off the bat, he did 12 years at a consulting firm, then was a senior vice president at Sara Lee, Haggar Clothing, and Reebok, where he became CEO in the late 1990s. He left there in 2002 for a North Carolina textile company called Pillow Tex, and from here I'll quote the Wikipedia for a couple of paragraphs:
The company had recently emerged from bankruptcy with a heavy debt load and an underfunded pension liability. Unable to obtain additional funding from the company's investors or find a buyer for the company, he left the company in 2003 after nine months on the job and $1.7 million in compensation. An internal auditor noted that Perdue's long absences from its North Carolina Headquarters was "terrible for morale. We felt he'd given up." Pillowtex closed several months later, leaving 7,650 workers out of work nationwide. With more than 4,000 jobs lost statewide, Pillowtex's closure resulted in the largest single-day job loss in North Carolina history at the time.
After leaving Pillowtex, Perdue became CEO of Dollar General. Before he joined the company, it had recently overstated profits by $100 million and paid $162 million to settle shareholder lawsuits. Perdue overhauled the company's inventory line and logistics network and updated its marketing strategy. After initially closing hundreds of stores, the company doubled its stock price and opened 2,600 new stores. Perdue is credited for arranging the sale of Dollar General in 2007 to private equity investors KKR. He reportedly earned $42 million after the deal and Dollar General paid millions of dollars to settle shareholder lawsuits alleging that Perdue and other executives undersold shareholders.
....In April 2011, he started Perdue Partners, an Atlanta-based global trading firm, with his cousin, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue. [David Perdue's father's brother is the father of Sonny Perdue, who is also now Secretary of Agriculture.]
From all of that, I conclude that there's not a redeeming thing in Perdue's career, from starting as a consultant right out of graduate school, to creating value for the .1 of the 1% at various companies, to running Dollar General and all it represents. It seems pretty clear that he's on this earth to make money, and his insider trading fits in perfectly with that.
Loeffler, born in 1970 in Bloomington, Illinois, grew up on a farm not far from there. It looks like she was a beneficiary of Title IX, since she participated in multiple varsity sports. She got a bachelor's in marketing from the University of Illinois, worked for Toyota in sales for a few years, then got an MBA from DePaul in 1999. In full bootstrap mode, "She financed her graduate school tuition by mortgaging land inherited from her grandparents." MBA in hand, she worked at several companies before settling in 2002 at Intercontinental Exchange. By 2004 she had married the CEO, Jeff Sprecher, who is 15 years her senior.
One favorite detail from the Wikipedia about Loeffler's work at the company:
In 2009 Loeffler helped Intercontinental Exchange establish and market offshore a credit default swap clearinghouse in the Cayman Islands as an offshore tax haven. It allowed the biggest banks to avoid paying taxes on repatriation of income.
Loeffler's work has also clearly added no human value to the world as she looked out for Number 1.
I sure hope the people of Georgia send both of these people packing, and the SEC or some other legal entity enforces the law against them.
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(Oh, and get this... the acronym for Intercontinental Exchange is ICE! Things can get really confusing when you're looking up Kelly Loeffler.)
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