Make Them Afraid Of Wall Street's Money

Economist Robert Johnson says progressive activists are going to have to fight more aggressively against the forces on Capitol Hill and the White House who are working on behalf of the financial services industry to block financial reform, given the kinds of deals now being cut by the Obama White House and some Democrats in Congress.

Johnson, in the video interview above, says that while there is some good news in the recent moves toward creating a financial consumer protection agency, legislative proposals to curb the behavior of so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks remain seriously flawed.

The bottom-line problem, Johnson says, is that the campaign and lobbying dollars from the financial service industry is speaking louder than the general public. "I'd like to see voters mobilized to make people afraid to take Wall Street money," Johnson says.

Earlier, Johnson had a similar message in an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman [3]. In that interview, he tells a personal story that dramatizes the difficulty reform advocates are having in getting their views heard in Congress. Johnson was invited at the last minute to testify before the House Financial Services Committee, after Americans for Financial Reform helped pressure the committee to allow alternate voices from outside the banking industry. Johnson's testimony was cut short, however, by Rep. Melissa Bean, who was presiding over the committee hearing at the time and who is one of the committee's top recipients of banking industry campaign contributions.

Johnson is now the director of the newly created Institute for New Economic Thinking, which will use a 10-year, $50 million grant from financier George Soros to counter the "free-market fundamentalism" that helped set the stage for the financial crisis.