While paying homage to School House Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” and a host of other classic instructive cartoons of that series that began in the 70s, the Daily Show pulled no punches in describing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law including its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - “a sham.” The show’s version of Bill — HR 4173 — took the stage and castigated itself:
“The only way Congress would have passed me was if the details of the rules and regulations were unspecified giving K Street lobbyists all the time they would need to water me down post-passage … and if any actual tough rule managed to squeak through, Congress people [would] cut the budget of the agency responsible for enforcing it. The whole thing is a giant punt. I’m no law. I’m no law, John. I’m just an undefined, impotent, 2,300 page piece of legislative sh#t.”
Dodd-Frank Act, as portrayed by John Oliver of the Daily Show, July 29, 2011, clip here (including crass humor).
When CFPB was created, many (including me) feared it would become the next OSHA or Consumer Products Safety Commission, and that fear has become fact. The agency has become a political football. American Banker, here.
The Obama Administration has made big promises for American families tolling with the financial services industry — like the creation of the HAMP program, but the reality is that the pillars of all his promises are easier to dodge than the Maginot Line.
The administration at least should have stuck with Elizabeth Warren who conceived the bureau to let her head it. It is not clear whether he could have appointed her during a Senate recess (Daily Show says he could have by now, but story here re May recess) — regardless he abandoned her. Story here. (Now of course Senate Republicans are vowing to block any nominee until the agency is stripped of power.) The administration could have reigned in the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for the issuance of weak corrective suggestions (aka “consent orders”) in response to overwhelming evidence of systemic fraud in the foreclosure process across the county — which were made by OCC and other federal agencies some say to remove the political force behind a real enforcement effort by a task force of all 50 state attorneys general. Story here. When will borrowers achieve justice?
Filed under: National Foreclosure News
