Just look at the kind of people who are attacking her, and you begin to understand just how afraid they are of what she can do to protect consumers:

The attacks on Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just keep coming, fast and furious, facts be damned.

The CFPB will be “powerful, hard-nosed and unaccountable,” warns Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard. The agency “will decide its own budget,” its “rulings can’t be vetoed,” and it “will be almost impossible to challenge” in court.

“Who in the world would consider it appropriate to have one person appointed to set the rules for the entire financial industry?” wonders Senator Bob Corker.

The Wall Street Journal describes Warren’s “ideological agenda that banks are the villains of the credit crisis while distributing cash to homeowners who will presumably be grateful on Election Day 2012.”

And the latest? A proposed $20 billion settlement with the Big Banks for foreclosure fraud and abuse is deemed by bank executives as “a naked shakedown” by the CFPB.

(Never mind that banks have illegally foreclosed on some homeowners, and imposed unwarranted fines on others, to name just a couple categories of violations.)

Clearly, what we have here is a scene straight out of South Park: a Godzilla-like CFPB with the face of Elizabeth Warren on a rampage. Upstanding citizens must either run for their lives or join the GOP, Wall Street, and conservative Democrats to bring this monster to its knees—just as these defenders of deregulation brought our economy to its knees.

Don’t let this concerted rightwing smear campaign—straight out of their stale playbook—distract from the facts. These daily hit-jobs on Warren and the CFPB are designed to do one thing only: lay the groundwork to limit the agency’s funding and autonomy and, consequently, its power.

Currently, the bureau is funded through the Fed—just as all bank supervisory agencies are independently funded—in order to avoid politicizing its mission by subjecting it to Congressional appropriations. Yet the GOP would like to create a different set of rules for the CFPB. That’s why Texas Republican Representative Randy Neugebauer has introduced legislation to house the CFPB in Treasury so that Congress can control the purse strings. He didn’t try to hid his objective, saying the move would allow Congress to “have some say-so on how big this organization gets and some of their activities.”

Warren addressed this issue squarely in a recent speech, “While the banking regulators charged with preserving the safety and soundness of financial institutions and ensuring consumer protection compliance by smaller banks would continue to receive independent funding, the agency in the financial regulatory system with lead responsibility for protecting consumers would face a different set of rules – rules that threaten its independence.”

It’s also a downright fabrication when people like Barnes and Corker paint a picture of a completely unaccountable CFPB.

Of course. After all, it’s not as if they could be prosecuting bankers, right? And in a time of economic despair, it’s more important to see that the rich get richer!

• The White House is concerned that “illegal streaming of content” may not be covered by criminal law, saying “questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works.” To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to “clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances.”
• Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move “would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses.”
• Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s generally illegal to distribute hardware or software–such as the DVD-decoding software Handbrake available from a server in France–that can “circumvent” copy protection technology. The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to “inform rightholders,” “provide samples of such devices,” and assist “them in bringing civil actions.”
The term “fair use” does not appear anywhere in the report. But it does mention Web sites like The Pirate Bay, which is hosted in Sweden, when warning that “foreign-based and foreign-controlled Web sites and Web services raise particular concerns for U.S. enforcement efforts.” (See previous coverage of a congressional hearing on overseas sites.)
The usual copyright hawks, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the paper, which grew out of a so-called joint strategic plan that Vice President Biden and Espinel announced in June 2010.

They just resent anyone saying no to them. Didn’t these people have mothers?

Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, “We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through.” And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. March 8th was International Women’s Day. This is—you know, as you pointed out on your show, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s healthcare, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

GOV. JOHN KASICH: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, “We won’t pay for your crisis,” that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, “We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?” Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that. In the ’90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they’re seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the Obama administration fit into this? We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, “If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you.”
Continue reading “Shock doctrine” →