Courtesy of Pam Martens
Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio
The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week.
Some of the most informed Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate are making impassioned and heartbreaking appeals to their colleagues this week on the floor of the U.S. Senate to vote down Senate bill S.2155, which carries the Orwellian title: “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.” The bill is a Republican/Wall Street lobbyist masquerade to ostensibly help small community banks but will effectively gut enhanced oversight of banks with up to $250 billion in assets – mega banks by any measure – that want to dodge oversight of their derivative counterparty exposure to the largest Wall Street banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.
On Monday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released an analysis showing that the legislation “would increase federal deficits by $671 million over the 2018-2027 period” while increasing the probability of a big bank failure.
Some of the most gut-wrenching and poignant testimony came from Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. (Read his full prepared remarks below.) Brown emotionally went off script from his written remarks to explain how families in his zip code in Ohio, 44105, had to deliver the news to their children that they had to put the family dog in a shelter and that the kids would have to leave their school friends because their home was being foreclosed on. Brown added:
“City officials in Cleveland began to hear reports that predatory home refinances were being pushed on borrowers, regardless of whether they could afford to repay the loans.
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