October 2, 2024

Big Banks Say ‘Jump,’ Senator Fischer Responds, ‘How High?’

When it comes to doing the bidding of the big banks, Sen. Deb Fischer’s fealty to Wall Street is complete and obedient. As Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin put it in April 2009 about the finance lobby “they are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” After the 2008 financial collapse, Congress passed the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, commonly referred to as Dodd–Frank, a law which made changes affecting all federal financial regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation's financial services industry. What is critical to understand is that an army of Wall Street firms and their lobbyists in Washington worked around the clock to water down the bill as it made its way through the legislative process. And after it became law, those lobbyists continued to attack the statute’s implementation by weakening its various regulations. Servants of corporate greed like Fischer hated Dodd-Frank and they set about to repeal as much of it as they could. In March 2018, the Senate debated a bill, backed by President Trump, that bore the wholesome and misleading title Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, that Fischer voted for that used smaller community banks and credit unions to push for regulatory relief for the banks. The bill was a gift to Wall Street wrapped in false claims that it would rescue smaller lenders. At the time, banks had hauled in record profits over the past three…

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