Obama to Corporate Persons: And This is How You Thank Me?

Poor President Obama. Confronted with an economic catastrophe when he took office, he made a decision – well documented here and here, for example – to save the financial industry from its own misdeeds, foregoing the opportunity to obtain from the Wall Street CEOs any kind of quid pro quo for beleaguered taxpayers and homeowners. And what does he get in return?

Wall Street contributions to the President’s re-election campaign are down 68%, reports the New York Times.

There’s also been a drop in financial support from some of those who were all-in to elect him in 2008.  Some big-name progressive donors, dismayed by the President’s inability to hold the line on everything from foreclosures to a public health care option (which likely would have survived the Supreme Court’s widely expected invalidation of the health care reform law), are sitting this one out – at least for the moment.

Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come for the President, courtesy of the same Supreme Court. Freed from campaign spending restrictions by the court’s ruling in Citizens United, the highly-skilled right wing corporate apparatus is aiming to raise $500 million in “super PAC” money to beat Obama. Pro-Romney super PACs have already out-raised those supporting the President by a factor of eight.

This comes as no surprise to those familiar with the way big business behaves in public.

If corporations are people, as the Republican majority on the Supreme Court says, then the defining trait of the modern corporate personality is ingratitude. When all the federal bailout programs are totaled up (including indirect assistance like being able to borrow taxpayer money at super-low interest rates), Wall Street and many other firms got somewhere around $14 trillion in financial aid from Washington.

Had that money been put in the hands of the American people, it could have paid off every mortgage, credit card and car loan in the United States.

Like President Obama, we are still waiting for our thank you note from corporate America.

Instead, we get surging credit card interest rates, skyrocketing gas prices, outrageous health insurance premium increases and, adding insult to those injuries, the imposition of undisclosed inflated fees by cell phone, airline and other companies for the dishonest purpose of charging hapless consumers more than the advertised price.

Hence the need for parental supervision of corporate persons, also known as "regulation."

Corporate money had already eroded the democratic process under the patchwork of campaign finance laws that pre-dated Citizens United. Our report, “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” (PDF) gets right to the bottom line. Between 1998 and 2008, Wall Street invested $5 billion in Washington, a combination of money for lobbying and campaign contributions that won deregulation and other policy decisions that enabled the Money Industry to do as it pleased. The ensuing orgy of unbridled speculation came to a halt in 2008 when the big banks threatened to shut down the system unless they got trillions of dollars in loans, tax breaks and other taxpayer bailouts.

But by deregulating corporate money in Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court has empowered a crime wave of corporate influence peddling that will dwarf anything this country has ever seen.

Take, for example, Sacramento – California's integrity-free zone.

$ A half-decade-long battle to force health insurance companies to open their books and prove they need rate increases was crushed by industry lobbyists, forcing angry consumers to mount a ballot measure of their own.

$ A package of bills backed by the state’s Attorney General to prevent banks from abusing the home foreclosure process – dubbed the “Homeowners Bill of Rights” – has been blocked by the banking industry, which spent over $70 million on lobbyists and lawmakers in California between 2007 and 2011.

$ A bill that will deregulate telephone service, sponsored by the state’s two biggest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, is sailing through the state legislature, much as electricity deregulation did in 1998 – to disastrous consequences for California taxpayers.

Once upon a time, average citizens might have had a voice in these policy debates.  Now that corporate America is locked and loaded, we don't stand a chance.

Citizens United / Harvey Column / President Barack Obama / Supreme Court - 04/23/2012

No Lobbyist Left Behind

If we forced CNN commentators to wear the names of their clients on their sleeves like NASCAR drivers we might have a deeper, more honest debate over what’s going on in Washington.

Unless you live under a rock without any form of media, it’s hard to miss the nonstop frenzy over dumb comments made by CNN commentator Hilary Rosen about Ann Romney.

Rosen said Romney never worked a day in her life, which made her unqualified to comment on the economy. Republicans then attacked Rosen as another in a long line of Democratic elitists who have no respect for women who work in the home.

When she comments on CNN, the network labels Rosen a “Democratic strategist,” though they don’t disclose any particular strategy that she’s come up with.

CNN doesn’t mention her work representing many high-profile clients in Washington, D.C. with interests across a wide range of issues. Her firm, SKDKnickerbocker is filled with former government employees cashing in on their contacts on behalf of their corporate clients. The firm, which includes President Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn as managing director, isn’t required to disclose clients because it doesn’t acknowledge that what it does is lobbying. In Washington-speak the firm is “political consulting and public relations firm.”

Last year, Bloomberg Business week reported that the firm coordinated an army of lobbyists unleashed by a coalition led by Google, Apple and Cisco pushing for a tax holiday.

The Republic Report compiled a partial list of clients, including big railroads, agricultural interests, PepsiCo and General Mills and for-profit education companies.

In addition, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Dunn pitched SKDKnickerbocker’s services as part of a team that offered to restore hedge funds’ sullied reputations, though apparently nobody swung.

Rosen’s poke at Ann Romney may have stirred up media frenzy, offering just the excuse for a jive revival of jive working mom v. stay-at-home brawl that sheds no light and offers no insight to anybody.

It’s also not the kind of controversy that’s likely to upset Rosen’s clients, who will recognize it for the sideshow it is compared to their free-flowing access to the White House. It’s more likely that it will provide Rosen with an opportunity for some good-natured self-deprecating humor to grease her way as she makes the rounds through the corridors of power.

The Obama administration has made a big deal about how it holds itself to a higher standard by not taking money from lobbyists. But that doesn’t mean lobbyists don’t have a strong presence in the White House, as the New York Times reported Saturday. “Many of the president’s biggest donors, while not lobbyists, took lobbyists with them to the White House, while others performed essentially the same function on their visits,” the Times reported.

Several years ago, GOOD magazine came up with the idea of making politicians wear suits with the names of their biggest contributors, like NASCAR drivers advertise their sponsors. Politicians have been reluctant to embrace the idea. They’re perfectly happy to keep us focused on the sideshow provided by Rosen and those like her, who babble phony nonsense on TV but profit from their access to the real game off-screen.

Lobbying / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama - 04/17/2012

Corporations Gone Wild

It’s a magnificent time to be alive – if you’re a giant corporation, that is.

Spring is here, and after a deep chill, the mighty mega-businesses are not merely reborn, but blossoming. “Big U.S. companies have emerged from the recession more productive, more profitable, flush with cash and less burdened by debt,” swoons the Wall Street Journal.  The seductively sweet smell of speculation – in mortgages, derivatives, oil, wheat – once again fills the air. Amidst the giddy exuberance of the stock market, why dwell on the dreary conditions among the human population, where one out of every six Americans lives below the poverty line, one of every ten is out of work, and one of every five homes are worth less than the loans that secure them?

Oh to be young, free and incorporated – preferably in an island like Bermuda.

Being a Big Business wasn’t always so much fun. For a long time, corporations had to obey the same rules as the rest of us. And after Wall Street drove America into a ditch four years ago, Corporate America was hurting, too. True, many of us never really thought of inanimate objects as capable of suffering. And come to think of it, I never did meet a homeless corporation (though I’ve encountered many a crooked one). But with bailouts, special tax breaks, and the ability to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at .05% interest, that painful period didn't last very long.

And then, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in the infamous Citizens United case that under the U.S. Constitution, corporations are the same as people and spending money is a form of free speech. So when corporations write checks, it’s the same as you and me speaking. And corporations have the right, under the First Amendment, to use money to buy public officials and purchase elections.

Corporate America’s been partying like its in Ft. Lauderdale on Spring Break ever since.

As you might expect from a climate of unrestrained corporate debauchery, there’ve been some ill-fated hook-ups, like AT&T and T-Mobile (the annulment cost $4 billion). But don’t worry about a newly rejuvenated Ma Bell not having any BFFs. Its 100 million customers literally cannot dump the company, at least not without paying a massive “early termination fee.” AT&T’s allies on the Supreme Court ruled last year that the company can strip you of your right to take it to court, leaving you no way to sever the relationship if your service fails, your “unlimited” data plan gets throttled, or you get overcharged.

Big businesses were screwing people way before Citizens United and Concepcion v. AT&T, of course. But those decisions fundamentally altered the balance of power between citizens and corporations in the courts, Congress and the executive branch.

Philosophers, scientists and science fiction writers have long predicted that the moment would come when artificial creatures, created by humans, would become more intelligent than humans – a technological "singularity" projected to arrive later this century. But no one would have guessed that 2010 would become the date of the political singularity – the year in which a legal construct – a corporation – would become more politically powerful than humans.

That corporations don’t yet have all the benefits of personhood misses the point. Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United  warned: “Under the majority's view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.” But corporations don’t need to vote. Corporations decide who gets elected simply by dumping vast quantities of cash into elections on behalf of candidates who will do their bidding.

As a student of American civic life named Tony Montana once explained, “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.”

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 04/12/2012

Court vs. Court

I’ve been a lawyer for thirty-two years, and I’ve never read a judicial decision like the one that the Montana Supreme Court issued last December 30.

While every court in this country – from the lowest state court to the federal tribunals – sees its job as obeying the dictates of the United States Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court chose to obey the U.S. Constitution instead.

The bottom line: the Montana court refused to comply with the US Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 decision in Citizens United, which struck down legal limits on how much corporations could spend on electing politicians or passing ballot measures. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to intervene and influence our democracy with cash. Spending money is a form of free speech, said five of the nine justices. And by that one vote majority, the United States Supreme Court made corporations more powerful than government, more powerful than human beings. The second anniversary of the Citizens United ruling sparked a day of national protest, as my colleague Marty Berg reports.

Like many states, Montana had strong campaign spending laws, including disclosure of campaign contributors and one that prohibits corporations from giving money directly to candidates for public office out of the company treasury. Instead, corporations that want to get involved in elections are required to set up a special fund that can receive donations from individual corporate employees or shareholders and use that money for gifts to politicians or political causes.

As the Montana opinion explains, a Colorado-based organization known as “Western Tradition Partnership” sued to invalidate Montana’s corporate campaign controls, saying they were unconstitutional under Citizens United. Now known as “American Tradition Partnership,” the organization’s supporters and funding are murky, but it’s views are clear: it is extremely anti-environment. The Montana Supreme Court described its purpose as “to act as a conduit of funds for persons and entities including corporations who want to spend money anonymously to influence Montana elections. WTP seeks to make unlimited expenditures in Montana elections from these anonymous funding sources. WTP’s operation is premised on the fact, or at least the assumption, that its independent expenditures have a determinative influence on the outcome of elections in Montana.”

Lots of states have dealt with Citizens United by repealing or rewriting their campaign spending laws. Not Montana.

The Montana Supreme Court decision begins by discussing how in the late 1800s, big mining interests used money to back or bribe elected officials in Montana to take control of state government. The corruption got so bad that many citizens of the state lost their faith in government. “This naked corporate manipulation of the very government (Governor and Legislature) of the State ultimately resulted in populist reforms that are still part of Montana law,” writes Montana Chief Justice Mike McGrath. Among the reforms: the initiative process, and, in 1912, the limits on corporate spending.

“The question then, is when in the last 99 years did Montana lose the power or interest sufficient to support the statute, if it ever did,” the Chief Justice writes. If the statute has worked to preserve a degree of political and social autonomy is the State required to throw away its protections because the shadowy backers of WTP seek to promote their interests? Does a state have to repeal or invalidate its murder prohibition if the homicide rate declines? We think not.”

While the US Supreme Court justices saw no “compelling interest” in limiting corporate contributions, the Montana Supreme Court had a different view: “Montana has a clear interest in preserving the integrity of its electoral process”;  “it also has an interest in encouraging the full participation of the Montana electorate”; and “a continuing and compelling interest in, and a constitutional right to, an independent, fair and impartial judiciary,” one that is not subject to being bought by corporations who elect friendly judges.

Concluding that “the impact of unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual citizens,” the Montana Supreme Court refused to apply Citizens United and upheld the state’s campaign 100 year old reform law.

But that was only the majority opinion. Wait till you hear what the two dissenting justices had to say:

The first, Justice Beth Baker: “The value of disclosure in preventing corruption cannot be understated.” But, she continues, “I believe it is our unflagging obligation, in keeping with the courts’ duty to safeguard the rule of law, to honor the decisions of our nation’s highest Court.”

Justice James Nelson gets the last word, and it’s a doozy.

He writes:

“I thoroughly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United…. I am deeply frustrated, as are many Americans, with the reach of Citizens United. The First Amendment has now been elevated to a vaunted and isolated position so as to endow corporations with extravagant rights of political speech and, with those rights, the exaggerated power to influence voters and elections….. In my view, Citizens United has turned the First Amendment’s 'open marketplace' of ideas into an auction house for Friedmanian corporatists. Freedom of speech is now synonymous with freedom to spend. Speech equals money; money equals democracy. This decidedly was not the view of the constitutional founders, who favored the preeminence of individual interests over those of big business.”

“It defies reality to suggest that millions of dollars in slick television and Internet ads—put out by entities whose purpose and expertise, in the first place, is to persuade people to buy what’s being sold—carry the same weight as the fliers of citizen candidates and the letters to the editor of John and Mary Public. It is utter nonsense to think that ordinary citizens or candidates can spend enough to place their experience, wisdom, and views before the voters and keep pace with the virtually unlimited spending capability of corporations to place corporate views before the electorate.”

“I absolutely do not agree that corporate money in the form of ‘independent expenditures’ expressly advocating the election or defeat of candidates cannot give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. Of course it can. Even the most cursory review of decades of partisan campaigns and elections, whether state or federal, demonstrates this. Citizens United held that the only sufficiently important governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption is one that is limited to quid pro quo corruption. This is simply smoke and mirrors.”

“Citizens United distorts the right to speech beyond recognition. Indeed, I am shocked that the Supreme Court did not balance the right to speech with the government’s compelling interest in preserving the fundamental right to vote in elections.”

“I am compelled to say something about corporate ‘personhood.’ While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in the law… I find the entire concept offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited-liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”

Having explained, in the most vivid terms, why Citizens United was decided wrongly, Justice Nelson concludes: “I must return to the central point of this Dissent. Regardless of my disagreement with the views of the Citizens United majority, the fact remains that the Supreme Court has spoken. It has interpreted the protections of the First Amendment vis-à-vis corporate political speech. Agree with its decision or not, Montana’s judiciary and elected officers are bound to accept and enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling….Citizens United is the law of the land, and this Court is duty-bound to follow it.”

Students of the law know that courts are always disagreeing with each other. Like the majority of the Montana Supreme Court, judges seek to “distinguish” the circumstances of one case from the facts in another in order to rule a different way. But rarely do the cases involve issues so fundamentally important to the nation; rarely are the stakes so great and rarely are the differences so stark. My guess is we're going to be seeing more of this gentle judicial civil disobedience as the present US Supreme Court ventures ever farther into the realm of re-writing the Constitution.

All the Montana justices seemed to agree that the United States Supreme Court had made a terrible decision in Citizens United. It’s most vehement critic on the Montana court, certain of that as he was, nevertheless felt bound to obey a higher principle – to obey the law of the land. If only the five justices in Washington had felt the same way.

 

 

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Outrage / Supreme Court - 01/23/2012

Occupy the New Year

Watch live streaming video from califather at livestream.com

Where’s Our Money greeted the New Year in church – All Saints Church in Pasadena.I moderated a panel on the foreclosure crisis, with three people who have been on the front line of trying to find solutions, help people save their homes and hold bankers for their continuing fraud.

I met Walter Hackett when I first began writing about foreclosures in early 2009. He’s a former banker who became a homeowner’s advocate, as well as a leader in training other lawyers in one of the most complex areas of law. Jono Shaffer and Carlos Marroquin were two of the great people I met through Occupy. Jono, a veteran labor organizer who spearheaded the Justice for Janitors campaign, now works with ReFund California, a coalition that is fighting the austerity agenda across a range of issues, including education, housing and making Wall Street and the 1 percent pay its fair share, rather than making the middle-class bear all the costs of the economic collapse.

Carlos is one of the great spirits of Occupy LA, who through his advocacy and blog, No2HousingCrime.com has helped individual homeowners and put the spotlight on the foreclosure crisis.

The panel was part of stellar afternoon teach-in sponsored by Occupy’s Interfaith Sanctuary as part of the run-up to the Occupy the Rose Bowl Parade the following day.

I thought Walter, Jono and Carlos each made strong presentations and I recommend that you catch up with them in the video shot by my friend Vincent Precht, a stalwart Occupier, special education teacher who also has a terrific blog, California Father, where he writes about education issues, among other things.

It was a great way to start the new year, joining with people who have been doing good strong work for a long time, realizing how much resources we have, along with all the people who are finding their own way into the Occupy movement.

 

 

Foreclosures / Occupy - 01/08/2012

Fill In the Blanks

A New Yorker story published online this morning describes yet another example of a financial debacle abetted by government corruption. As I read the first paragraph, it struck me that the basic plot is always the same – all you need to do is fill in the blanks:

In the spring of _______, as the reelection campaign of ______ was gathering momentum, a group of prominent _____ businessmen met for breakfast at the ________ to see the candidate. Among them was _____, the chief executive officer of _____, a fast and freewheeling financial institution that had brought together some of the most colorful and politically well-connected _____ in the country….

Last week’s final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission explains in intricate detail why and how the U.S. economy imploded in 2008, but isolates no single, primary cause of the crisis. The Commission says that the crisis was “avoidable” and notes that “widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets,” but this is just one Commission conclusion of many. As Joe Nocera points out, the report never gets to the bottom line.

Our report, “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America,” published in March 2009, got right to the bottom line in its title. We didn't need subpoena power or a large staff to figure out what happened, just the willingness to say what everybody in the Wall Street/Washington axis of power already knew. Between 1998 and 2008, Wall Street invested $5 billion in Washington, a combination of money for lobbying and campaign contributions that won deregulation and other policy decisions that enabled the financial industry to do as it pleased. The ensuing orgy of unbridled speculation, based on "derivatives" and other financial schemes that even the CEOs themselves didn't understand, came to a halt when the housing bubble burst and Wall Street couldn't even figure out the value of the investments it held. The financial industry panicked, threatened to shut down the system, and got the government to undertake the mother of all bailouts - trillions of dollars in loans, tax breaks and other goodies.

In short: the power of money poisoned our policies and our politics, with dire consequences for all of us who don't enjoy the special favors that only vast quantities of money can buy.

The Commission, created and appointed by Congress and composed of members of the political elite, could not possibly issue that indictment. Which is why the discussion of the bailout – the most obvious example of the special status of the privileged in our country – is a measly five pages out of 410.

The American public deserves better. In other man-made national disasters, like the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle 25 years ago, experts in the field – astrophysicists, geologists, academics – were asked to undertake an independent investigation. Their reports secured the confidence of the public, and led to remedial actions. NASA was not allowed to investigate itself, and lo and behold, it turned out that the culture at NASA was ultimately responsible for a design defect in the rocket.

Because it retreats from the fundamental truths, the Commission's report does nothing to help us come to grips with the root cause of the financial crisis: the corruption of our democracy by special interest money.  I know from more than thirty years of fighting for consumer rights – particularly in the insurance marketplace – that industry lobbyists and unlimited money to politicians almost inevitably kill  legislation that would help average people. Even the feeble, loophole-ridden campaign laws that limited how much big corporations could spend in elections are in jeopardy, thanks to the United States Supreme Court’s decision last year in the Citizens United case, which decreed that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings. Here in California, the voters have the ability to go around a paralyzed legislature and put matters on the ballot for a direct vote of the people, but even this populist process is increasingly abused by special interests that want to block consumers from having their day in court, or by a single company like Mercury Insurance, who thought it could fool the voters into permitting auto insurance overcharging.

Naming a thing for what it is aids understanding, which leads to action and ultimately recovery. Absent the cleansing force of honesty, we remain rooted in fear for our kids, for America’s future. Indeed, there is something deeply foreboding about the country’s degraded democracy and disabled economy. Some of the old clichés are becoming a sickening reality. We used to idly wonder, are we Rome, a corrupt empire in the process of collapse? A thoughtful, almost poetic book by that name, written by Cullen Murphy, suggests we are.

The term “third world” was once a sneer, connoting abject poverty, corruption, gross disparities between rich and poor, the absence of government services, a state controlled by a cabal of self-perpetuating leaders. Now consider the statistics on post-collapse America, which Arianna Huffington marshals in her latest book, "Third World America."

This would be a good point to fill in the blanks in the piece I excerpted above from the New Yorker story. The missing words are: 2009, President Hamid Karzai, Afghan, presidential palace, Khalil Ferozi, Kabul Bank, Afghans. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that fraud and mismanagement at the largest bank in Afghanistan has resulted in $900 million in losses, potentially triggering a financial debacle. Kabul Bank is “too big to fail,” according to Western diplomats quoted by the Times. It's the same story everywhere, and thus it would hardly come as a surprise if U.S. taxpayers ended up funding the bailout of Kabul Bank.

Congress / Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Harvey Column / Too Big To Fail - 01/31/2011

Around the Web: On to Financial Reform

With the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership declaring historic victory on health care reform, the next big item could be fixing the troubled banking system.

It could make the battle over health care look like a walk in the park. The financial industry, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are all lined up to kill or weaken it.

They’ve already succeeded in getting Sen. Chris Dodd to weaken his reform proposal, which the Senate Banking Committee passed Monday on a 13 to 10 party line vote. Here’s the Atlantic’s take, including what Dodd had to say Monday.

Getting Dodd to soften his stance probably wasn’t that tough. He’s traditionally a staunch ally of Wall Street and only took a strong stance when it looked he was going to have to face angry voters. But then Dodd dropped out of the race, became a lame duck and returned to form as the financial industry’s best friend.

For example, Dodd has abandoned support for a strong independent financial consumer protection agency, instead placing it within the Federal Reserve, which has ignored consumers in the past even though it had authority to protect them. In National Journal’s Clive Crook’s assessment, Dodd’s proposal will enshrine “too big to fail” banks in law rather than fix the problem.

Now the full Senate will consider it. Here’s Barry Ritholtz’s analysis of what should be on the final bill.

Around the Web / Consumer Financial Protection Agency - 03/22/2010

Around the Web: Rewarding Fed Failure

Bottom line on the new Chris Dodd reform proposal: much watered down from his earlier proposal and maybe even weaker than the weak House bill.

Here’s the summary from A New Way Forward: “The bill contains no real solution to too-big-to-fail, no real enforcement guarantees, the bad guys are off the hook, the financial system will continue to be as big and dangerous and full of risk taxpayers will likely own. Dodd made a few good steps forward and major steps backwards”. The rest of their analysis is here.

From the Atlantic Wire, a solid roundup of assessments. The takeaway: Too many concessions to the big banks, and it is still faces many obstacles to passage. And who exactly besides Chris Dodd and Wall Street thinks it’s a great idea to house consumer protection within the Federal Reserve? Only last year, Reuters reminds us, Dodd was labeling the Fed “an abymsal failure."

But Elizabeth Warren, the congressional bailout monitor who has campaigned aggressively for strong reform, including an independent agency to protect financial consumers, offered a lukewam endorsement of Dodd’s plan.

I’ll give Alan Sherter the last word. When Dodd says that he doesn’t have the votes for an independent financial consumer protection agency, what he really means is that “lawmakers have more to gain by advocating the interests of banks than those of consumers.”

Around the Web / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Derivatives / Executive Pay - 03/15/2010