June 14 2010
...
JAY: So, as we speak, the House is speaking to the Senate, negotiating the final finance reform bill. Some people have said there's no way it's going to touch real structural blackmail. What's your take on that?
NADER: It's a weak bill in both houses, in the Senate and House. It's premised on
weak regulation across the board, rather than shift the power. The only way, really, to get this to work is to bring investors and shareholders into a more powerful role, since they do own the companies but they don't control the companies and they don't control the bosses and they don't control executive compensation. They're just told, if you don't like a company, you know, Citigroup, Bank of America, sell your stock. So unless consumers, investors, shareholders have a way to organize—and this is the proposal that Senator Schumer has put forth. We gave him this proposal in 1985 in the savings and loan scandal, in the House, when he was in the House. It didn't get through. Now he's reintroduced it in the Senate. And it basically sets up a financial consumer association which would have millions of dues-paying consumer members, credit card, mortgage users, etc., and it would be outside the government, lobbying against the huge lobbying force of Wall Street and the banks, which will descend on whatever law is passed in the agencies. Just for example, thin regulation, the consumer agency, which is the best part of the bill, is
strapped in a lot of ways. Elizabeth Warren, who should be new director, said if it's weakened anymore, forget it, it's a waste of time, because it's going to be in the Federal Reserve, for example, and it's going to be vetoed by a group of regulators if they protect credit card holders too much, for example.
JAY: The House bill had it as an independent agency, but apparently more limited in its power. So maybe they'll come out with the best of both. Or are they going to come up with the weaker of both?
NADER: It looks like the Senate is going to have the odds on it. They're going to defer more to the Senate. But that remains to be seen. Barney Frank favors an independent, but, as you say, it's weaker in some ways. But on the rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and so on, ridiculous. It's laughable. On too-big-to-fail we got bigger banks controlling half of the deposits in this country—five giant banks. They're already too big to fail. Nothing in this bill is going to break them up, or tax them to keep them down, or require spinoffs.
...
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5267&updaterx=2010-06-14+12%3A43%3A15Video of interview here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LnQY9CbL-4 Here's more. This is where it gets really good.
No Time For Consumer Power
by Ralph Nader
In the end, late on Thursday’s Senate passage of the financial regulation bill, the Senate had no time for independent, non-government consumer power. In the end, after listening to swarms of corporate bank, brokerage, hedge fund, private equity, and insurance lobbyists, the Senate had no time for Senator Chuck Schumer’s amendment to create a non-profit Financial Consumers Association (FCA, SA 3772).
In the end, this massive 1500 page bill shifted very little power directly to shareholders and consumers of financial services (meaning just about everyone) either to better use the courts and to organize nationwide to counteract the lobbying muscle of the financial goliaths ready to turn the new regulators into procrastinatory putty.
The FCA proposal (see
csrl.org), which Senator Schumer had backed in 1985 when he was dealing with the savings and loan scandal, did not receive the time of day. It would have required the companies to place an invitation to their customers in their mailing and electronic communications (bank statements, bills etc.) inviting consumers to voluntarily join and pay dues to build a powerful consumer lobby to countervail what Thomas Jefferson once called the “monied interests.”
After all, the criminal, reckless, self-enriching collapse of the economy by the Wall Streeters—the millions of lost jobs, the trillions of dollars in lost pensions and savings—Main Streeters deserved some reciprocal gesture for all the Americans who were forced, as taxpayers, savers and workers to bailout the crooks and ultimately pay the costs of this financial disaster.
In the end, the Senate, like the House of Representatives, told their consumers—their voters—to get lost.
There was no room for a Financial Consumers Association in the 1500 pages.The FCA is crucial to assure that many of the other parts of this bill are enforced. For very little in this legislation includes outright prohibitions. Rather the Senate, like the House, delegates the authority, within a broad range of discretion, to a variety of existing agencies, and a new consumer financial protection agency nesting allegedly independently inside the big bankers’ Federal Reserve.
There are so many complex reviews and procedural obstacles for these agencies that the corporate lawyers will collect enough fees to spoil their great-grandchildren.
“Paralysis by analysis” is what consumer groups call such legislation. I call them no-law laws—mired in pits of quicksand that mock everything but eternity....
http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2187-No-Time-For-Consumer-Power.html 
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