Sen. Bernie Sanders blamed the Donald Trump administration for the catastrophic failure of Silicon Valley Bank, saying the SVB failure is “direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed.”
Both political parties, Sanders contends, were aware of the increased risk such deregulation made manifest, citing a report issued by the CBO’s GOP chief during the Trump administration.
“Five years ago,” Sanders writes, “the Republican Director of the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that this legislation would ‘increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.'”
Sanders spends most of his working days trying to convince American citizens they are getting screwed by the consolidated interests of the rich and powerful. Frequently accused by the right of plotting to “redistribute” America’s wealth to the poor, Sanders argues that middle class Americans routinely diminish their own prospects by voting for politicians who really do redistribute their tax dollars — but upwards to the top 1 percent, as the richest of the rich are known.
Or as Sanders calls them, “the oligarchs and the corporate class.”
The oligarchs and the corporate class of this country are waging class war against working Americans. The working class needs a party that’s going to fight back — and win. pic.twitter.com/WQia4zcQ2q
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 9, 2023
As Sanders puts it in his statement on SVB: “We cannot continue down the road of more socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else. “
Given his history, it’s no surprise that Sanders is among the most irate voices in Washington in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank failure. It’s a debacle he says he saw coming — and one that has required an major emergency federal adjustment to the cap level of FDIC insurance in order to prevent what Sen. Mitt Romney calls “contagion.”