AMY GOODMAN: After months of fierce opposition from Wall Street,
corporate lobbyists, and mostly Republican lawmakers,
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
officially launches in Washington this week.
A product of last year’s overhaul of financial regulation,
the bureau was established to protect consumers
from deceptive practices.
Republicans have sought to weaken its reach
with a number of restrictive measures,
including granting other regulatory bodies veto power
over the bureau’s decisions.
This week Republicans scored another victory
with President Obama’s announcement of his choice to head the bureau.
Obama has tapped former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray
instead of Elizabeth Warren,
the Harvard professor who first proposed the bureau
and has overseen its establishment for the past year.
Warren had been the choice of many progressive organizations,
but her nomination was strongly opposed
by Republican lawmakers and the banking industry.
Flanked by Warren, Cordray and Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner,
President Obama said he’s confident in his choice to head the bureau.
BARACK OBAMA: I am proud to nominate Richard Cordray
to this post.
And we’ve been
recently reminded why this job is going to be so important.
There is an army of lobbyists and lawyers right now
working to water down the protections and the reforms
that we passed.
They’ve already spent tens of millions of dollars this year
to try to weaken the laws that are designed to protect consumers.
And they’ve got allies in Congress
who are trying to undo the progress that we’ve made.
We’re not going to let that happen.
I will fight any efforts to repeal or undermine
the important changes that we passed,
and we are going to stand up this bureau and make sure
it is doing the right thing for middle-class families
all across the country.
Middle-class families and seniors don’t have teams of lawyers
from blue-chip law firms.
They can’t afford to hire a lobbyist to look out for their interests.
But they deserve to be treated honestly.
They deserve a basic measure of protection against abuse.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking shortly afterwards on MSNBC,
Elizabeth Warren said she also supports Obama’s decision
to nominate Cordray.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Oh, let’s be clear here.
I’ve had a chance to see this thing come to light.
And Richard Cordray is one of the first people
I recruited to be part of the team to stand it up.
He’s tough. He’s smart.
It’s exactly what we need.
It’s a new chapter for the consumer agency,
and I couldn’t be more proud.
AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth Warren has left open the possibility
of a Senate run in her home state of Massachusetts,
where she would take on Republican Senator Scott Brown,
but said she has to go home to Massachusetts first
and think outside of the Beltway.
For more on President Obama’s decision
to overlook Elizabeth Warren,
we’re joined from Washington, D.C., by Ralph Nader,
longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic
and former presidential candidate.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ralph Nader.
What are your thoughts on the passing over
of Elizabeth Warren?
RALPH NADER: Well, our spineless president
speaks again with a forked tongue.
He talks about a tough agency, and he’s just thrown overboard
the toughest federal cop on corporate crime, fraud and abuse
against millions of Americans’ pensions and savings,
and then tries to convince people that he’s really being tough
against Wall Street.
He’s basically a political coward.
And the problem with that is not just
detonating Elizabeth Warren’s career culmination of heading the agency
that she conceived and built out of the Treasury Department
in the last few months,
but he’s signaling once again to the rogue Republicans in Congress
that he has no backbone, that he’s going to cave.
And that’s what he’s been doing.
He threw Van Jones overboard,
because Glenn Beck attacked—
of all people—
attacked Van Jones, his assistant in the White House.
He doesn’t stand by his people,
unless these people stand for Wall Street,
like William Daley, Timothy Geithner,
Larry Summers.
You’d think he’d give at least one post—
one post— to the consumer constituency,
the liberals and progressives, that brought him to the White House.
But that is not the way he calculates it.
You know, he’s in trouble politically in the minds of some people.
Bill Curry, who was a special assistant to Clinton,
very astute political observer in Connecticut,
said recently that if Romney is the candidate,
Romney will take over 46 states, including Connecticut.
So, some people think that he’s making a strategic
and tactical mistake by constantly turning his back
on the people—minorities, poor people—never mentions the poor,
you notice that?
Geez, there are only 60 million people
living in grinding poverty in this country.
He mentions the shrinking middle class.
So this has a lot of ramifications, Amy, as to what he did.
But one aspect of it should not be ignored,
and that’s sexism.
The Treasury Department is full of ex-Wall Street males.
It’s an old boys’ club.
And they don’t like an uppity woman who happens—
in Theresa Amato’s words,
an article on the Washington Post web yesterday,
Theresa Amato’s words—
having a woman who has both brains and backbone,
and instead of getting the job, she gets the pink slip.
And there are people on Capitol Hill who have told me recently
there is not a little sexism involved here.
And that’s another shame on Barack Obama.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Ralph Nader,
about why you think Elizabeth Warren should have been appointed?
What is her background?
How did she come to be so involved with setting up this consumer bureau?
RALPH NADER: Well, she starts with a blue-collar family in Oklahoma,
and she never forgets that.
They worked with their hands. They worked hard.
And she comes up and becomes a tenured professor at
Harvard Law School,
one of the nation’s leading experts on bankruptcy,
and clearly the nation’s leading expert
on consumer finance and all the abuses
people who have credit cards and have to hook into payday loans
and rent-to-own loan rackets and who’ve lost their homes
because of fine print in mortgages, etc.—
she is the nation’s expert on this.
She comes to Washington at the request of Harry Reid
to head a special congressional oversight entity,
pursuant to the Wall Street collapse and bailout,
does a sterling job,
has a heavy cross-examination of Timothy Geithner in public.
He didn’t like that, and he never forgot that.
And she is—
then finds herself in Treasury,
wondering whether she’s going to be the new head of this agency,
which passed as part of the Dodd-Frank bill.
And it turns out that she was allowed to build it.
She recruited very competent people in the agency.
I think it sets the standard for American consumer protection,
in terms of competent staff.
And then she wants the job.
Everybody knows she wants the job.
But listen to how this coward in the White House
handled it yesterday.
He said, "Elizabeth Warren,
you’ve done a great job building this agency,
and one of your charges was to find a director.
And you have found a great director, Richard Cordray." Imagine.
He puts the words in her mouth, when he knows very well
that she wanted this job as the culmination of her career.
And it’s too bad that the leading women’s organization,
such as NOW and [Feminist] Majority and others,
did not take a strong stand,
because this was a legitimate women’s issue,
not just a consumer issue.
There was sexism involved here.
They’re too involved in other things,
and they didn’t take a strong stand for her
on behalf of all the working women in America,
many of them poor, many of them chief candidates
for continued Wall Street ripoffs and crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: What about, Ralph Nader,Cordray?
What about his background and where you think
he’ll take the agency?
RALPH NADER: Well, I think it remains to be seen.
When he was in the Ohio attorney general’s office
in 2004,
before he became attorney general,
he was in charge of signing off on ways to get me off the ballot
when I was running for president.
And they did get me off the ballot in a very disreputable manner.
But as attorney general, he was pretty good.
So, let’s put it this way: he’s a work in progress.
But he’s no Elizabeth Warren.
He doesn’t have her communication skills.
She’s a superb communicator.
And I hope we’ll hear from her in the future,
whether politically or in some other position.
She is a rare find.
And by throwing her overboard, Obama has signaled
to hundreds of good, smart people all over the country,
who would like to turn our government around
and make it stand for the people, that they may be too good
for the president, they may be too good for the rogue Republicans.
And so, in that sense, it has a ripple effect,
that’s a very negative message to a possible resurgence
of the quality of political appointees
in Washington,
as well as the civil service,
that’s begging for quality political appointee leadership.