Guiding Uniform and Responsible Disclosure Requirements and Information Limits Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, our capital markets and our capitalist system are the envy of the world.

How does that system work? Investors decide how to allocate capital, not the government. Investors control the corporation through voting, not the corporate insiders, not the board, and not the executives.

This bill is designed, with a Marxist tint in mind perhaps, to blind and cripple the capitalists of America, the shareholders, the investors.

Let's say an investor agrees with Republicans on how to allocate their money. That is fine, but some investors may care about the environment, or they may just believe that investing in low carbon is more profitable and investing in resilient companies is more profitable.

This bill blinds them. It says: You are just the investor, and the government has decided what criteria you are going to use, and we are going to blind you and not give you the information to make a decision based on carbon footprint. You don't decide. The government decides.

There is more for the Marxists here in this room. Not only does this deprive capitalists of the right to allocate capital, but it specifically helps the Chinese Communist Party because American corporations are going to have to decide, in many cases, do they sell their artificial intelligence secrets to the highest bidder in Shanghai? If the corporation wants to, its shareholders now can come forward and say: No, we care about America. We are patriots. Do not sell.

Under this bill, the shareholders cannot stop their company from selling AI to the Chinese Communist Party.

There is a lot here, not only for Marxists in general, but for the Chinese Communist Party in particular. They achieve that by blinding investors, by not giving them information, and crippling investors' ability to control their corporations.

It has obviously come to a low point here in Washington that you need a member of the Progressive Caucus to defend capitalism from the Republican Party, but I believe in a system in which investors have the information they want and get to vote on how the corporation behaves.

Instead, we will see. Investors can only make decisions based on the information that the Republican Party is willing to let them have, and investors can't stop their corporations from selling out our technology knowing that the insiders, the corporate board and the executives, might have a giant payday, a huge bonus, a huge run-up in money, and they might sell our artificial intelligence secrets to Beijing, and the investors are blocked by this bill.

Marx would vote ``yes.'' I am voting ``no.''

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