Party Like It’s 2013

Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee are having a campaign fund-raiser this week.

Starting on Wednesday, the committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations.

What do the banks want in exchange? For starters, they want even stricter constraints on the agency than those that were written into the law last year — and that were expressly included to address banks’ objections to the agency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/opinion/04wed1.html

taken to get the banking industry and Wall Street under control and the rest of these outfits too big to fail that have the potential to take the country financially down, as well as those that are eating away the majority of the citizens financially.