Carol Shea-Porter on Financial Reform

by Steve MacDonald

Carol On… Financial Reform

Carol thinks she’s done you a great service by supporting the Wall street Reform legislation. She’s clearly not read it. Here’s what she want’s you to think.

• Create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that will ensure that bank loans, mortgages, and credit cards are fair, affordable, understandable, and transparent;

• End abusive predatory lending practices such as those that occurred during the sub prime lending frenzy;

• Shut down “too big to fail” financial firms before their risky and irresponsible behavior threatens to bring down the entire economy;

• End costly taxpayer bailouts with new procedures to unwind the failing companies that pose the greatest risk – paid for by the financial industry and not the taxpayers;

• Enhance oversight and transparency for credit-rating agencies;

• Rein in egregious executive compensation;

• Enact new protections for grocers, retailers, and other small businesses facing excessive swipe fees; and

• Audit the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs used during the financial crisis and limit the Fed’s emergency lending authority.

That’s what Carol thinks it does. But what does it actually do….

It purposefully over-regulates the private loan and banking industry to force people in to the unregulated government loan monopoly—a major cause of the first mortgage bubble which created the current economy and which continues apace towards a more destructive future, untouched by this legislation. Smaller banks and lenders will not be able to meet the burdensome liquidity requirements making it harder to make loans. This is deliberate. It allows them to control as much lending as possible at the federal level.

The bill has already saved some jobs though Carol never brings that up. Hundreds of professional banking lobbyists for all the major Wall Street Firms will be working with regulators to craft the rules needed to turn the 2400 page bill into actionable law. Carol didn’t read it, not that she’d understand it, she just passed it. The details do not concern her.

It empowers an unelected government board within Tim Geithner’s Fed to shut down any company that does business with a consumer where debt or risk can be considered a factor. Carol didn’t mention that the “Consumer Protection Agency” will be overseen by Tax-Cheat Timmy Geithner and the Fed? She probably didn’t know. But again, details. Not her concern.

I don’t suppose she explained how she just voted for a 50 Billion dollar permanent TARP-like Bailout fund for Geithner to manage either? No? We’ll it’s in there. It removes congressional oversight (I’m sorry–responsibility) for having to publicly lie, I mean vote, I mean deem any more big dollar bail outs. They are built into the legislation. The executive branch and its fiscal entities can now bail out anyone they want without taxpayers ever really needing to know. That means government has the power to bailout any business they like, and close up or let die any business they do not like. That’s a power you want your government to have isn’t it?

It also forces gender and minority hiring mandates and all the extra costs associated with them on just about everyone who might have business with the banking industry. Who might not be affected is a mystery to be unraveled by unelected regulators.

It empowers activist groups by giving them federal dollars to act as “watchdogs.” Translation—your tax dollars pay for community organizers and grievance mongers to drive up costs with endless lawsuits and the abuse of pressure politics to advance their agenda and to find businesses for the regulators to shut down.

Unions make out quite well. (Very likely Carol’s motivation for supporting it—right after “Nancy said so.”) They are one of the groups empowered by bail outs to find those un-American businesses and report them.

It gets worse but let’s save some for later.

So what we actually have here is a massive intimidation effort, run by a tax cheat, taking cues from liberal special interests, written by Wall Street lobbyists, that comes with a 50 Billion built in bail-out fund, so politicians and bureaucrats can pick winners and losers and intimidate anyone they want under the guise of ‘consumer protection.’

Thank Carol come November by introducing her back into the private sector where she can learn to live with what she hath wrought.
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Steve MacDonald is a blogger and talk show host whose work appears on NH Insider, GraniteGrok.com and in various other locations across the NH blogosphere.