Last summer, Barack Obama vowed to crack down on banks and credit card companies by passing sweeping reforms to bar abusive practices. He was going to get tough with the malefactors of consumer credit. Well, today the Federal Reserve released new rules to "empower consumers." And how did the bankers, who spent at least $6.9 million on lobbying in just the first three quarters of last year, react?

They were overjoyed.

Here's the official press release from the American Bankers Association.

CONSUMERS TO BENEFIT FROM FED’S SWEEPING NEW CREDIT CARD RULES

By Sahil Kapur
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 -- 3:05 pm

WASHINGTON -- Reflecting on the growing divide between Wall Street and Main Street, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday offered a powerful critique on the state of the economy in an open committee hearing.

"The class warfare is over -- we lost," Kucinich said before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqFLia4_lsEk&pos=8
By Alison Fitzgerald

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street firms are recovering. Their standing with the American public isn’t.

Executives at financial firms, coming off two years of failures, bailouts and writedowns, are less popular than Congress, lawyers and insurance companies. As they prepare to give out year-end bonuses, they risk another wave of public fury, according to a Bloomberg National Poll.

Readers: the scatological references originate with the author not the admin of this site. That being said it seems to be a reasonable response to an extremely outrageous initiative by Goldman Sachs VP and advisor Griffiths. Please, look at the tri-fold flyer listed in the pamphlet and papers section titled "The Normalization of Usury." These people are way over the edge of even common sense.

 Janet Reno Moves From Justice to McJustice
Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks

By PAM MARTENS

This is perhaps the most important thing I learned over my years working on Wall Street, including as a managing director at Goldman Sachs: Numbers lie. In a normal time, the fact that the numbers generated by the nation's biggest banks can't be trusted might not matter very much to the rest of us. But since the record bank profits we're now hearing about are essentially created by massive federal funding, perhaps it behooves us to dig beneath their data. On July 27, 10 congressmen, led by Rep.