After holding the nation hostage during the debt crisis and refusing to extend the payroll tax cut without large giveaways to Big Oil and Wall Street, Congressional Republicans this week decided to begin 2012 just where they left off in 2011.
Embodying their role as hypocrites, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republicans in Congress expressed “outrage” when President Obama appointed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), citing it as a “sharp departure from precedent,” even though the last three Republican presidents all made similar recess appointments.
The CFPB was created to protect people like you and me. But Republicans who prefer to protect the 1 percent blocked appointment of a director for the new bureau, making it virtually powerless. Every day we go without an enforcer of Wall Street is another day we let the big banks, payday lenders, and credit card companies get away with ripping us off – we can’t let partisan gamesmanship stand in the way of stopping them.
Republicans have made a habit of making false and misleading claims, and two aspiring Michigan Senators – candidates Pete Hoekstra and Clark Durant – have joined the Washington crowd that doesn’t want to hold the Wall Street CEOs who fund their campaigns accountable.
Hoekstra, a career politician who still works as a lobbyist, and Durant, a board member of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and right-wing ideologue, are facing off in the Republican primary for the chance to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabenow. Both have come out against the badly needed Wall Street reform that followed the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Durant even went so far as to say the income gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us isn’t wide enough:
“I think it should be wider,” Durant told the Grand Rapids Press. “Does anybody think Steve Jobs should not be (sic) in the 1 percent? He made life better for the 99 percent of the rest of us. You want to create opportunities for people with their unique gifts,” added the former Michigan Board of Education president. He also said Occupy Wall Street protesters should “go find a job.”
Wall Street CEOs have their lobbyists— it’s time that ordinary Americans had someone looking out for them. It’s past time to put Richard Cordray to work enforcing our laws and cracking down on the Wall Street banks and CEOs that break them. Sign our petition supporting President Obama’s decision to put Richard Cordray on the job so the CFPB can now finally get to work cracking down on Wall Street abuses.