Flickr: fpsurgeon
As I’m writing, the eyes of the whole country are on health care, and that’s where they should be. But as social justice activists, we have to keep a lot of balls in the air at once, since they are often connected — as a matter of policy, but also politically. That’s why I’m pushing everyone to take one moment this week to push Congress to work on another critical piece of the Obama agenda: preventing another financial crisis and the hardship it would mean to consumers and our economy.
In the past year, our economy was brought to the brink of disaster because of deceptive, irresponsible actions by the banking and financial services industry. While financial executives directed their companies to prey on the American people, those same banks and financial institutions have taken trillions in taxpayer dollars to protect themselves from the crisis that they brought on themselves. This outrageous conduct can’t be allowed to continue!
I saw a lot of the impact of financial irresponsibility when — before I started working at Citizen Action — I was an attorney for the New York State Consumer Protection Board — a state agency that took a whole host of different types of complaints from unscrupulous financial players: from mortgage scams, to misleading credit card offers, to ridiculous fees for all sorts of financial transactions.
In most cases, we couldn’t help the people who called us, because the federal (and sometimes state) regulators often sided with the banks and big financial companies. And even when the law was technically on the consumer’s side, it was hard to get consumers help quickly because of the confusing web of federal and state agencies that regulated each type of financial entity: including banks (state and federal), insurance companies, mortgage companies that passed consumers from agency to agency.
Right now, the House of Representatives is considering the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would address many of these problems. Having one agency will help, because financial institutions won’t be as able to game the system by designing transactions to pick which regulator they want, or even avoid any regulation altogether.
It’s no surprise the banks and financial companies are making defeating this bill once of their biggest priorities – with lobbying and big campaign contributions. We can’t let them once again buy off the Congress!
Now’s your chance to protect America from the continued wrath of broken regulations and irresponsible corporations. Call your member of Congress now: 202.224.3121 and tell him or her to support the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.