Romney: I’d Like To Repeal Wall Street Reform

By Tanya Somanader/think progress

With the constant stream of Wall Street donationsflowing into his campaign coffers, it was only a matter of time before GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called to repeal Wall Street’s number one enemy — the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Though Congress enacted the law to provide vital consumer protections and to prevent Wall Street from spurring another financial crisis, Republicans have continually attempted to cripple the law piecemeal, either by attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or weakening derivatives regulation. But Romney decided yesterday that a repeal of the law was necessary because, in part, the law’s length is too “overwhelming”:

“The extent of regulation in the banking industry has become extraordinarily burdensome following Dodd-Frank,” Romney told a roundtable of 18 businessmen at The Common Man Restaurant.

“I’d like to repeal Dodd Frank, recognizing that some revisions make sense,” Romney said. [...]

[H]e said, the 2,000 pages of the bill are “overwhelming” for community banks and the fact that pages of rules must still be written creates too much uncertainty.

Of course, the fact that Romney has finally read some of the law is a step in the right direction. Just last month, he couldn’t name any specifics of the law, saying only, “It’s 2,000 pages. I’m sure there’s something in there that’s good.” Now, he finds that the law’s regulation of derivatives and policy “to have different capital requirements if someone is holding a home mortgage compared to someone holding high-risk securities” actually “does make sense.”

His realization of the law’s efficacy makes his call for repeal all the more perplexing. After all, a repeal would not only block necessary consumer protections from taking effect but would also “allow the nation’s largest financial institutions — including those at the center of the 2008 financial crisis — to operate just as they did before the crash.” With Republicans already feeling the backlash for their role in the economic downturn, Romney may want to consider exactly whose interests he’s fighting for.

The Astroturf Lobbyists Behind The New ‘Tea Party’ Group Pushing To Repeal Wall Street Reform

By Lee Fang 

In February, while attending the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I came across the grand opening of a new front group called “Dodd Frank Exposed.” Two staffers for the new group were eagerly shaking hands of Tea Party activists while asking them to fill out a survey about their perception of the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform law passed last year.

On a television set up at the booth, a video played on loop claiming Wall Street reform is an “unconstitutional takeover of the U.S. economy.” The video, set to scary attack ad music, argued that Tea Party activists should be as angry at financial reform as they were against President Obama’s health reforms:

NARRATOR: From the same people who brought you Obamacare comes a controversial sequal: Dodd Frank. Last year, President Obama and the Democrat-run Congress rushed through the sweeping overhaul of healthcare amounting to the unconstitutional power grab followed quickly by Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act. Just like Obamacare it created a massive, unconstitutional regulatory bureaucracy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a runaway regulatory machine completely unaccountable to the president, the Congress, and the courts.

Watch it:

I spoke briefly to a young staffer for the group, who told me that the entire law had to be repealed. “All of it?” I asked. “Anything to stop the bleeding,” she replied. According to the survey results posted on the Dodd Frank Exposed website, Tea Party Patriots by a wide margin agreed: repeal the financial reform law.

Who is behind Dodd Frank Exposed? Although the organization is ostensibly hosted by the “Judicial Crisis Network” — a group that has no actual registration or office — Dodd Frank Exposed is actually run by two veteran astroturf lobbyists, Gary Marx and Robert Bork Jr. Marx is a vice president at Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies. Borkruns his own public relations company called the Bork Communication Group.

Bork, the son of famed Reagan Supreme Court nominee, has made a career coordinating front groups on behalf of corporations facing negative scrutiny. In a memoto an association for corporate attorneys, Bork explained that he improves the perception of his corporate clients by using right-wing bloggers and nonprofits to drape an ideological cover over abuses related to environmental crimes or defective consumer products:

“A carefully designed communication strategy that includes third parties has the potential to persuade key audiences. It gives you credibility and increases your chances of success.“

Bork notes that he can be paid to recruit groups like the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other right-leaning think tanks as “allies” for his business clients. Indeed, Bork pitched his services in a letter to tobacco company R.J. Reynolds to create a “campaign of op-eds by surrogates attacking” legislation that would reduce the deductibility of tobacco advertisements. He later used his position as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute to pen anop-ed slamming the Clinton administration for pursuing a RICO suit against the tobacco industry.

I asked Bork if any companies in the financial services industry were backing Dodd Frank Exposed. After a long pause, Bork replied, “we have no banks that I know that are supporting this at this point. I would not object to any individual or corporation supporting our efforts.” He later clarified that he was receiving a monthly check from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a corporate-funded front with a long history of peddling industry-friendly studies.

Marx, on the other hand, did not return any of our calls. His firm, Century Strategies, has a similar history as Bork. Century Strategies created Christian-themed front groups for Enron to lobby for energy deregulation, launched a religion-based direct mail campaign to maintain sweatshops in the Mariana Islands, and was caught up in a money laundering scheme with Jack Abramoff for his casino clients. Although Marx lists companies like Walmart among his clients, it is not clear who is paying him for his new Tea Party group pushing to repeal financial reform. Notably, the Dodd Frank Exposed website applauds litigation sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, for challenging the constitutionality of Wall Street reform.