H.R. 5037 is a House bill that marks the latest salvo in Republicans’ war against the American people. With this poison pill, they now seek to encourage securities fraud and endanger retirement plans.
According to Paul Bland at The Hill, Trump’s SEC head Jay Clayton hopes to stop Americans’ from being able to protect their retirement savings from criminal corporate chicanery by crippling our ability to bring collective legal action against them.
In the same spirit, Republican New Jersey House Rep Thomas MacArthur has introduced H.R. 5037, a bill that would stop states from being able to protect constituents from harm by the same corporate fraud.
According to Bland,
H.R. 5037... would block private enforcement of state protections against securities fraud and even restrict a state’s ability to defend its own citizens in enforcement actions.
The bill’s broad language is designed to preempt any state law that even tangentially touches on securities fraud. The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), the oldest international organization devoted to investor protection, calls H.R. 5037 an “attempt to tie the hands of the regulators who are the ‘cops on the beat’ and the closest to Main Street investors in favor of large companies engaged in or suspected of securities fraud.” NASAA’s opposition letter goes on to decry these policies as “overwhelmingly against the interests of all law-abiding market participants” – impassioned emphasis theirs.
H.R. 5037 is plainly a “get out of jail free” card for white-collar criminals….
Because the SEC has limited resources, state law enforcement officials work to ensure their residents recover retirement savings stolen from them in fraudulent schemes and scams. Indeed, there has been a 33 percent decline in federal securities enforcement and a more than 80 percent drop in SEC settlements since 2016 — making state action more necessary than ever.
But H.R. 5037 would take away states’ ability to protect their constituents from financial ruin at the hands of corporate fraudsters and Ponzi schemers. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood warns H.R. 5037 would “likely cause a dramatic increase in securities fraud, creating more victims and jeopardizing Americans’ retirement savings.”
Congressional opportunists count on the fact that most Americans pay no attention to what legislators are doing, let alone to what individual bills they push through. The average citizen is too busy making ends meet and trying to get through life—that is, until our lives collide with policies put in place that work against us. Then, many Americans, with their limited knowledge, blame “the government” in general. Their resentment toward “the government” grows, making them more likely to support dubious candidates like the current president who portray government as the enemy and promise to destroy it.
But government is not the problem. In this case, a single corrupt party devoted to putting corporate interests over what’s best for everyone is deliberately using laws as weapons against the people: the GOP.
The president praises himself for the efforts of his flying monkey hordes in cutting regulations without telling his cheering supporters that the regulations he’s cutting keep their air safer to breathe, their water safer to drink, their workplaces less deadly, their finances more secure from being ripped off.
Since the first days of the 2017 Congress, Republicans have been actively codifying corruption and destroying protections intended to help people. One of the House GOP’s first acts was to try to gut the government ethics office in preparation for an administration that would bring a tsunami of ethical violations. H.R. 5037 is a clear example of how they hope to enshrine their bankrupt values into law.