•  Campaign Videos (July 2011) « Obama for America
  

Obama (clip from speech): The financial crisis and the recession were not the result of normal economic cycles or just a run of bad luck, they were abuses, and there was a lack of smart regulations.  So we're not going to just shrug our shoulders and hope it doesn't happen again.

[Music] Female Announcer: The first few years of this century were boom times on Wall Street.  Mortgage lenders drove a housing boom with sub-prime loans offered on terms that seemed too good to be true. 

And they were.

But before the bubble burst, Wall Street moved to capitalize or record home sales, developing new, largely unregulated financial products to bundle up and trade these suspect mortgages.  Everything worked as long as house prices kept going up. 

Until suddenly they didn't.

In September 2008 Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a full-blown financial crisis.  Markets plummeted.  Millions of jobs were lost and trillions in savings were erased.

When President Obama took office, he took action to protect consumers and our economy and make sure a crisis like this could never happen again.  One year ago this week, he signed a law that does just that.  The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. 

Here's what it does.  It sets up a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard people from dishonest mortgage lenders, unfair fees on credit cares and complicated fine print designed to exploit Americans who apply for loans.

This followed the passage of a landmark law in 2009 cracking down on deceptive practices by credit card companies.  It brings an end to the days of too big to fail, giving regulators the authority to intervene early on behalf of the American people so that no single bank's troubles can endanger the broader economy.  It guarantees that when banks do fail, their management and ownership will be the ones to pay the consequences, ensuring no more taxpayer bailouts of banks.  And finally, it ends the shadow banking system that allowed Wall Street to hide reckless behavior from regulators.

Fairness.  Transparency.  Common sense rules of the road.

All sounds pretty good, right?

Yet the fact is that some on Wall Street and their allies in Washington don't want to change their ways.  They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to roll back this law, and they have found strong allies in the new Republican Congress.

Obama (clip from speech): There's an army of lobbyists and lawyers right now working to water down the protections and the reforms that we passed.  They've already spent tens of millions of dollars this year to try to weaken the laws that are designed to protect consumers, and they've got allies in Congress who are trying to undo the progress that we've made.  We're not going to let that happen.

Female Announcer: This reform represents the most significant action taken since the Great Depression to curb the excesses of the financial sector, protecting everyday Americans from further abuses and prevent another economic collapse.

But there's much more to do.  And President Obama is committed to ensuring that Wall Street plays by the rules and Americans get a fair shake at building their own secure financial future.

---

Notes: This is a curious video to come from a campaign.  It is very policy oriented, and doesn't have a specific ask.  Interestingly, in the clips of Obama speaking, the presidential seal is blurred so as not to mix the official and the campaign.  The graphic design and flow of the video is very well done.

Copyright © 2011 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.