Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Brad Sherman Team Up to Break Up America’s Biggest Banks
Building off the momentum from his 2016 campaign launch Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders is taking aim at America's banking behemoths with an aggressively named new bill he drew up with Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., called the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act."Building off the momentum from his 2016 campaign launch Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders is taking aim at America’s banking behemoths with an aggressively named new bill he drew up with Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., called the “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act.”
The congressional tag team will introduce their measure on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. A preemptive announcement released Tuesday about the unveiling, slated to be held in the Senate Radio and TV Gallery at 11:30 a.m. EST, said the aim of the effort is “to break up the nation’s biggest banks.”
Also read: VIDEO: Sen. Bernie Sanders: ‘We Need a Political Revolution in This Country’
A bold move, if seemingly improbable, but we’ll take it over the many implemented acts of legislative hypocrisy that turned out to have the opposite effect in recent history.
The bill’s title draws upon the same rationale that banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America capitalized upon — both while playing roulette with the global economy and then while putting the squeeze on two successive American administrations to bail them out — to illustrate precisely why those same institutions shouldn’t be able to survive in the same destructive form that allowed them to wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale.
“No single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis,” Sanders said of the driving idea behind his and Sherman’s joint project. “If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.”
That’s one way to try to flip the script on Wall Street’s biggest players. The details remain to be revealed, and a GOP-controlled Congress will no doubt act swiftly to block the bill, but then, Sanders is in the running to become boss of both houses.
Meanwhile, he’ll also be working this measure into the national conversation and campaign discourse about the 2008 financial catastrophe that, far from being contained by government interventions ostensibly designed to manage the fallout, has further widened the nation’s economic gap into a chasm.
–Posted by Kasia Anderson
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