When pollsters address financial reform
Reblog from American’s for Financial Reform: Heather Booth: Beware Frank Luntz’s Lies
AFR Director Heather Booth has a new column on the Huffinton Post exposing Frank Luntz’s lies about financial reform. Here’s an excerpt from her post:
Seen this ad from the “Committee for Truth in Politics”? If the name weren’t comical enough, the visuals are. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the message seriously. The claim that financial regulatory reform is a $4 trillion bank bailout doesn’t really resemble any truth, as Factcheck.org explains. Yet we know this is just the beginning of what we’ll see and hear as the weeks roll on for the push for real financial regulatory reform. And where did these conservatives get the idea to say black is white and up is down? Frank Luntz.
Frank Luntz, pollster to the right wing and Wall Street agenda, has written a 17-page memo on how to talk about financial reform in order to destroy it. This is the same Luntz whose health insurance reform talking points – on how to best stir up fear and confusion in the American people to derail reform and protect insurance industry profits – showed up across conservative websites and in the mouths of lawmakers. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s at it again. After all, his client list is a who’s who of the corporate interests who helped to create the crisis, including Merrill Lynch and Bear Sterns.
When the Frank Luntz Memo wasn’t making me laugh with its absurdity, I was outraged that he uses 1984 George Orwellian advice to call good, bad; to say the solution is the problem. It’s this kind of thinking that inspired belief in the “death panels” that were a fabrication in the health care debate. And it is dangerous because he may have enough money to promote it again and again — so that it may sound real.
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shaping the new financial architecture... 
Frank Statement on Consumer Protection
Washington, DC—House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) today made the following statement about the need for increased consumer protection in the financial industry:
“I welcome Elizabeth Warren’s forceful Op-Ed in today’s Wall Street Journal making a strong case for increased consumer protection in the financial industry. No one familiar with the track record of the bank regulatory agencies with respect to protecting consumers can deny the need for an independent agency if we are going to have effective consumer protection. Bank regulators have traditionally treated their responsibilities for consumer protection as a second priority.
“Those who cite safety and soundness as a major reason to oppose increased consumer protection have it exactly backwards. In fact, the inability to protect consumers from abuse was a major cause of the financial crisis from which we are just emerging. Professor Warren importantly notes the example of Citigroup’s unsuccessful and unilateral attempt to bring fairness to credit card practices. This experience demonstrates that competitive pressures will obstruct reform unless it is done by thoughtful legislation and regulation that applies to all.
“I welcome Senator Dodd’s intention to fight to preserve an independent consumer agency, as we were able to do against the opposition of the financial industry in the House. Professor Warren’s statement today is a beginning to the national debate that we should have on this issue in the coming weeks.”