Eliot Spitzer is the Governor of New York. A few years ago he was the Attorney General of the state. In today's Washington Post he reveals the active role that the Bush administration had in stopping him, as AG, from going after predatory lenders who Spitzer believed were breaking the law.

When you think about it, you have to wonder why Americans aren't calling for the impeachment of Bush, even if he does only have a couple of months to run as President.

Here is some of what Spitzer wrote…

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers,
it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent
states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which
the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
(OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission
is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the
OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were
balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years
ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool
against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC
invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal
opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering
them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented
states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against
national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and
so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state
banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet