"The Dodd-Frank bill, which created it, was an effort by the Obama administration and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, to pretend to crack down on Wall Street while actually doing very little."
Democrats
posture as opponents of Wall Street in CFPB dispute
By Patrick Martin
28 November 2017
In what can
only be described as a stage-managed publicity stunt, the director of the
Consumer Financial Protection Board, Democrat Richard Cordray, resigned
abruptly on Friday after promoting his chief of staff, Leandra English, to the
long-vacant position of deputy director.
English then
declared herself to be Cordray’s successor and acting director, under the
provisions of the Dodd-Frank bill, which established the CFPB in 2010 to act as
an extremely limited, essentially toothless consumer watchdog on the
depredations of US financial institutions.
The Trump
White House, momentarily confused by the maneuver since Cordray had been
expected to resign a week later, hastily named Budget Director Mick Mulvaney
the acting director of the CFPB, and instructed English to report to Mulvaney
as his deputy.
On Sunday
night, English filed a civil lawsuit with the US District Court for Washington
DC, seeking a declaratory judgment that she was the rightful CFPB director.
However, the CFPB’s own general counsel, Mary McLeod, issued a memorandum to
the agency’s employees instructing them that Mulvaney, as the nominee of the
president, had the legal authority to direct the agency.
On Monday,
Mulvaney visited the CFPB and took possession of the director’s office,
announcing that he was halting all new hiring and regulatory actions for 30
days, pending a review of the agency’s operations.
While the
1,600 employees of the agency are concerned about an imminent threat to their
jobs and livelihood—Mulvaney is an open enemy who, while in Congress, described
the CFPB as a “sick joke” and advocated its abolition—the actions of Cordray,
English and their Democratic congressional supporters are purely a political
stunt.
There is
little doubt that Trump has the authority, as president and head of the
executive branch, to name interim replacements for vacancies at any executive
agency. This authority is further codified in legislation enacted as recently
as 1998.
The CFPB has
been the subject of political posturing by both Republicans and Democrats since
it was established six years ago in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash. The
Dodd-Frank bill, which created it, was an effort by the Obama administration
and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, to pretend to crack down on
Wall Street while actually doing very little.
The
Republicans, for their part, treated the CFPB as the second coming of the
Bolsheviks, claiming that the tiny agency, with little enforcement power, was a
threat to US financial markets and to the capitalist system itself.
Each
capitalist party has used the agency for its own political purposes, while the
CFPB itself has been nothing more than a minor annoyance to Wall Street. In six
years of operation, it has been responsible for fines and restitution to
consumers totaling $12 billion, or $2 billion a year. This amounts to barely
one percent of the net profits of the US financial industry ($173 billion in
2016), and less than one half of one percent of bank revenues alone (over $400
billion and rising every year since the 2008 crash).
Cordray’s
own role personifies the uses of the CFPB as a political cover. He was named to
head the agency after Obama caved in to Republican opposition to Elizabeth
Warren, his initial choice. Warren parlayed her undeserved reputation as a
scourge of the bankers, and victim of the Republicans, into a successful
campaign for a US Senate seat from Massachusetts.
Cordray’s
fixed five-year term runs until July 1, 2018, so he was practically the sole
Obama appointee to continue serving in the Trump administration. But he decided
to abandon the post eight months early—and thus cede control of the CFPB to
Trump—in order to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio. He then
engineered the handover of authority to English, setting off the subsequent
media firestorm, to jet-propel his own political campaign.
BLOG: YOU TAKE GOLDMAN SACHS OUT OF THE SWAMP KEEPER'S ADMIN AND THERE WILL BE NO AT HOME!
More
broadly, the obvious determination of the Trump administration to stamp out
even a fig leaf of accountability for the big banks allows the Democratic Party
as a whole to adopt the stance of opposition to Wall Street.
NEXT TO OBAMA, CLINTON, FEINSTEIN
AND TRUMPER, CHUCK SCHUMER IS THE
BIGGEST BANKSTER SLUT IN THE SENATE
Senate
Minority Leader Charles Schumer met with Leandra English and Elizabeth Warren
Monday afternoon, and then denounced Trump for “putting the fox in charge of
the henhouse.” So says the paid agent of the foxes, who has received more
campaign contributions from Wall Street than anyone else in Congress.
Schumer’s
deputy, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, hailed the CFPB, declaring, “Wall
Street hates it like the devil hates holy water”—perhaps uttering an
inadvertent truth, since the CFPB is precisely as useless as holy water in
fighting the domination of Wall Street over the US economy.
BOOK:…..TRAGIC!
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
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