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Biden calls for ban on congressional stock trading
WASHINGTON | President Joe Biden endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading in an interview that’s being released this week, belatedly weighing in on an issue that has been debated on Capitol Hill for years.
“Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re in the Congress,” Biden said.
The interview was conducted by Faiz Shakir, a political adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and published by A More Perfect Union, a pro-labor advocacy and journalism organization. The Associated Press reviewed a video of the interview before its release.
It’s unclear what impact Biden’s statement could have, coming only a month before his term ends.
The Democratic president spoke to Shakir about his economic legacy, which includes supporting unions, investing in clean energy projects and signing infrastructure. But Shakir also asked about congressional stock trading, which has been a catalyst for populist anger at Washington.
For example, when the coronavirus pandemic was approaching, some lawmakers bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stock after being briefed on the virus.
A bipartisan proposal to ban trading by members of Congress and their families has dozens of sponsors, but it has not received a vote.
Although lawmakers are required to disclose stock transactions exceeding $1,000, they’re routinely late in filing notices and sometimes don’t file them at all.
Shakir said he admired Biden for having not “gone in early on Google, and Boeing, and Microsoft, and Nvidia, and, you know, Amazon” while he was a U.S. senator from Delaware, a position he held for 36 years.
Biden said he lived on his senator salary instead of playing the stock market.
“I don’t know how you look your constituents in the eye and know, because the job they gave you, gave you an inside track to make more money,” he said. “I think we should be changing the law.”
Biden had previously declined to take a position on congressional stock trading. When Jen Psaki served as White House press secretary two years ago, she said Biden would “let members of leadership in Congress and members of Congress determine what the rules should be.”
Small winter catch set for New England’s long-closed shrimp industry
PORTLAND, Maine | New England shrimp, long lost from the marketplace as waters have warmed, will come back to seafood counters in small amounts next year due to a research fishing program.
Also called Maine shrimp or northern shrimp, the small pink crustaceans were long beloved by seafood fans in winter. But for a decade now, the seafood industry has been under a fishing moratorium for the shrimp because of concerns about low population levels, which scientists attribute to climate change and warming oceans.
That moratorium is going to remain in place as the shrimp population has failed to improve, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Yet because the regulatory body said there is interest in collecting data about the shrimp, this coming winter there will be a fishing industry-funded winter sampling program for them.
The program will allow fishermen to catch up to 58,400 pounds (26,490 kilograms) of the shrimp this winter. It’s a far cry from the early 2010s when fishermen caught more than 10 million pounds (4.5 million kilograms) of the shrimp per year. But the program will provide important data to better understand the status of the shrimp population while also allowing a small amount of catch, the commission said.
“The sampling program is intended to run early in the new year from mid/late January through March 2025. Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are currently working together to finalize the logistics of the program including the start date,” said Chelsea Tuohy, a fishery management plan coordinator with the commission, on Tuesday.
Fishermen long sought the cold water-loving shrimp in the Gulf of Maine, a body of water off New England that has experienced significant warmth in recent years. The commission said in a statement that recent science has found “no improvement in stock status” for the shrimp. The commission has also described the Gulf of Maine as “an increasingly inhospitable environment” for the shrimp.
Amazon investing another $10B
in Ohio-based data centers
COLUMBUS, Ohio | Amazon Web Services will invest another $10 billion to bolster its data center infrastructure in Ohio.
The company and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine announced the plan Monday. The new investment will boost the amount it has committed to spending in Ohio by the end of 2029 to more than $23 billion.
AWS launched its first data centers in the state in 2016 and currently operates campuses in two counties in central Ohio, home to the capital city of Columbus. The new investment will allow AWS to expand its data centers to new sites, but the company said those locations have not been determined yet and noted that its investment plans are contingent upon the execution of long-term energy service agreements.
AWS said the new data centers will contain computer servers, storage drives, networking equipment and other forms of technology infrastructure used to power cloud computing, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
In June 2023, AWS said it would invest $7.8 billion by the end of 2029 to expand its data center operations in central Ohio. That was on top of $6 billion already invested through 2022.
—From AP reports
