A candidate has landed in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District with the grace of a military helicopter and the stock portfolio of a Wall Street robber baron.
Rebecca Bennett, a Texas native seeking the Democratic nomination, presents herself as a champion of the everyday family, a “mom to two young girls” who understands the grind of inflation.
Bennett’s financial disclosures tell a different, more familiar story, one of considerable wealth built in part on the very pharmaceutical pricing schemes that have bled American patients dry.
The public record reveals Bennett holds a substantial personal stake in the machinery of modern medical misery.
As of September 30, 2025, Bennett raised over $1.35 million for her campaign, as would any typical New Jersey mom. Last month, she was feted
Her investments include stock in AbbVie, a company currently defending itself in an Amsterdam courtroom against allegations it extracted over a billion euros in “excessive profits” from the Dutch healthcare system for its drug Humira, profits a human rights group contends cost citizens 13,950 years of healthy life.
This is the same AbbVie that a U.S. Congressional investigation detailed as hiking Humira’s price by 470% since its launch, a maneuver that directly boosted executive bonuses.
Her portfolio is diversified in its cruelty.
It also contains shares of Merck, a firm that sued the United States government to stop Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices, calling the lawful process “tantamount to extortion” while charging the public $700 for a COVID-19 pill that cost roughly $18 to produce.
Bennett also invested in Eli Lilly, a company that perfected the art of “shadow pricing” to keep insulin costs astronomically high for decades and recently lost a Medicaid fraud case for hiding price hikes from the government.
This is not merely an investment strategy; it is a direct financial alignment with a business model that views patent law as a weapon and human health as a vehicle for unlimited extraction.
While Bennett’s website speaks of navigating the rising cost of living, her personal fortune is partially moored to companies that have systematically engineered that rise for vital medicines, from arthritis treatments to diabetes care.
The dissonance deepens.
The candidate who asks for the trust of New Jersey families reported a household income of over $400,000 last year, with $150,000 in liquid assets and a $1.8 million investment portfolio.
That portfolio, a sprawling collection of 76 corporations and 22 ETFs, further stakes claims in what her would-be constituents might call climate arsonists like ExxonMobil and Chevron, defense contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, in addition to her price-gouging pharmaceutical firms.
The warmongering millionaire carpetbagger Bennett has the endorsement of anti-abortion State Sen. Joseph Cryan, a sexual pervert and crooked politician whose career is a ledger of nepotism, exploitation, and salacious behavior conducted on the taxpayer’s dime.
It is a curious brand of populism that funds itself on monopolistic drug pricing and fossil fuels while offering empathy for the working parent choosing between groceries and prescriptions.
One is reminded that the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once observed: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
The spectacle of a millionaire candidate, whose wealth is intertwined with the most predatory practices of the pharmaceutical industry, campaigning as a tribune of the economically squeezed would seem to test that very premise.
Bennett’s biography is undeniably distinguished: a former Navy helicopter pilot, an Air National Guard officer, a healthcare executive. It is a resume of service and savvy.
Yet in America today, the question of whom one serves is often answered not by the words on a website but by the stocks in a brokerage account.
Bennett faces a crowded field of eight other Democratic candidates, each vying for the opportunity to secure the party’s nod to unseat incumbent Republican Tom Kean Jr., one of the nation’s most vulnerable GOP incumbents.
As the Democratic primary approaches, voters in New Jersey’s 7th District are left to weigh the promise of a working mother’s understanding against the evidence of an investor’s ledger, a document that shows a comfortable financial participation in the systems that make working life so hard for so many.