Republicans have been hired by the Banksters running the Biggest Banks on Wall Street to neutralize somebody who threatens their shady operations in the derivatives market and curb the shabby way the Big Banks treat their own customers, Elizabeth Warren the person most likely to oversee the implantation.
Well Barny Frank isn't having any of it. Frank is calling the Republicans out on their smear campaign against Elizabeth Warren.
As for Elizabeth Warren? Barney Frank says: “Let’s fight!”
The former Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who co-authored the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, tells MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Warren might survive a confirmation battle.
His reasoning? “This is not just the left and the right. The Republican Party is united against healthcare and united against the environment. They’re not united against financial reform.”
Even more to the point: “The Tea Party people didn’t send people to Washington to defend derivatives. I think the fight over Elizabeth Warren would be worth having and I’m not sure how all the Republican senators would vote.”
This comes from an Editorial in the Seattle Times:
Financial reform: a free market is not a free lunch
The GOP has chosen sides, clearly doing the bidding of those who do not want any new rules, or old rules enforced.
Republicans on a House Financial Services subcommittee tried and failed to rattle Elizabeth Warren, who is organizing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has the credit industry and Wall Street worried because the Harvard law professor is a consumer-bankruptcy expert.
Big banks, mortgage companies, payday lenders and others are appropriately anxious. For starters, Warren is focusing on providing homebuyers with clear mortgage-disclosure language.
GOP surrogates for rapacious lenders are trying to short-circuit Warren's mission by cutting the funding for the new consumer agency.
As Paul Krugman wrote about the fight over Elizabeth Warren, this is a political gift from the Republicans coming the year before a presidential election.
The War on Warren
The fact that she’s so well qualified is, of course, the reason she’s being attacked so fiercely. Nothing could be worse, from the point of view of bankers and the politicians who serve them, than to have consumers protected by someone who knows what she’s doing and has the personal credibility to stand up to pressure.
The interesting question now is whether the Obama administration will see the war on Elizabeth Warren for what it is: a second chance to change public perceptions.
In retrospect, the financial crisis of 2008 was a missed opportunity. Yes, the White House succeeded in passing significant new financial regulation. But for whatever reason, it failed to change the terms of debate: bankers and the disaster they wrought have faded from view, and Republicans are back to denouncing the evils of regulation as if the crisis never happened.
By the sheer craziness of their attacks on Ms. Warren, however, Republicans are offering the administration a perfect opportunity to revive the debate over financial reform, not to mention highlighting exactly who’s really in Wall Street’s pocket these days. And that’s an opportunity the White House should welcome.
The White House has a golden opportunity to pillory the Republicans unmercifully over their "sheer craziness of their attacks" on Warren as Krugman put it. Time for Mr. Obama to use that bully pulpit of his to focus public attention to the Republicans' efforts to carry out a political hit on behalf of the Banksters who wrecked our economy.