Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner Nominee, Testifying at Her Senate Confirmation Hearing, March 15, 2016
Democrats sitting on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing to take testimony from President Obama’s two nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must have felt like they were having an out of body experience — listening to the human personification of billionaire Charles Koch’s money aping his Ayn Rand, anti-regulatory double-talk from a witness seat. What had to be particularly nauseating to them was that this nominee was sent to them by President Obama who ran as a Democrat on a platform of hope and change. While the political makeup of the SEC is prescribed by law, so that one of these two nominees had to be a Republican, why pick this particular Republican?
On October 20, 2015, President Obama announced that his nominee to fill a Republican seat on the SEC would be Hester Peirce, a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Financial Markets Working Group at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. According to SourceWatch, the Mercatus Center “was founded and is funded by the Koch Family Foundations.”
The Board of the Mercatus Center looks like a Koch brothers’ fan club. Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, sits on the Board as does Richard Fink, Executive Vice President of Koch Industries, a sprawling oil, lumber and commodities trading company that is majority owned by Charles and David Koch who each have a net worth currently estimated by Forbes at $42.3 billion.
Also on the Mercatus Board is Brian Hooks, President of the Charles Koch Foundation, and Manuel H. Johnson, a former professor at Koch-funded George Mason University where he held the Koch Chair in International Economics.
Peirce has repeatedly testified before Congress in an effort to neuter the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB looks out for the little guy in areas such as credit card abuses and student loan rip-offs. It is universally hated by Wall Street predators. In testimony before a House Committee on May 21, 2014, Peirce suggested making the CFPB’s budget subject to the “congressional appropriations process” which would effectively allow its budget to be neutered by Wall Street sycophants in Congress. She also recommended replacing its Director, Richard Cordray (who has apparently shown too much independent thinking) “with a bipartisan commission.”
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