Bernie Sanders Trashes the Senate for Passing the Anti-jobs JOBS Act

Last updated on March 25th, 2012 at 10:37 pm

Sen. Bernie Sanders has again spoken out for the people by standing up against a phony jobs bill passed by the Senate that loosens protections for investors and doesn’t create jobs.

After the Senate passed the bill 73-26, Sen. Sanders said in a statement,

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The so-called ‘JOBS Act’ is an extremely anti-consumer, anti-investor, and anti-jobs bill. As currently drafted, the bill is opposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman (as well as past SEC chairmen appointed by both political parties); AARP; the AFL-CIO; the Consumer Federation of America; Consumers Union; and the Council of Institutional Investors among many others. There is good reason for the opposition.

At best, this bill could make it easier for con artists to defraud seniors out of their entire life savings by convincing them to invest in worthless companies. At worst, this bill has the potential to create the next Enron or Arthur Andersen scandal or an even worse financial crisis.

Have we learned nothing? Deregulating Wall Street led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Now the same people who caused this horrible recession are telling us that more Wall Street deregulation will create jobs. Give me a break. I strongly support providing small businesses with the tools they need to create jobs. Sadly, that’s not at all what this bill will do.

The problem is that for the good odds and ends in this legislation, there is one awesomely amazingly bad thing that Sen. Sanders mentioned. The legislation takes us back to the day when analysts were allowed to shill for their own investments.

Specifically, the bill states,

The SEC and any registered national securities association from adopting or maintaining any conflict-of-interest rule or regulation in connection with an initial public offering of the common equity of an emerging growth company that restricts: (1) which associated persons (based on functional role) of a broker, dealer, or member of a national securities association may arrange for communications between a securities analyst and a potential investor; or (2) a securities analyst from participating in any communications with the management of an emerging growth company that is also attended by any other associated person of a broker, dealer, or member of a national securities association whose functional role is other than as a securities analyst.

This is part that Sen. Sanders was referring to with his concern about seniors getting conned, but it won’t just be seniors. The door will be open for Wall Street to con us all again. It is a joke that anyone seriously thinks that loosening the rules on Wall Street will create jobs. This is Clinton-Bush era thinking that greatly disregards the reasons why the U.S. economy collapsed in 2008.

The White House supports this bill because if I may venture a guess, they see the good outweighing the bad, both politically and practically, but please spare us from the bogus and already disproven rhetoric that loosening the rules for Wall Street will create jobs.

We’ve been there, done that, and hundreds of millions of Americans have financial scars to show that it doesn’t work.



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