After a number of conflicts with SEC Chair Mary Jo White, Elizabeth Warren has called for Barack Obama to replace her as head of the SEC with another board member.
It’s unlikely to happen, because, after 7 years of coddling banksters and a revolving door that could power Rhode Island, it’s pretty clear that White is doing exactly what Barack Obama wants her to do:
A long-running feud between a leading critic of the finance industry in the Senate and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a new peak Friday, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked President Obama to replace SEC chair Mary Jo White.
In a letter to Obama, Warren calls White the “biggest barrier” to progress on a push to force corporations to disclose their political spending, and she says that White “has refused to develop a political spending disclosure rule despite her clear authority to do so.”
“Enough is enough,” Warren writes to Obama, adding: “I respectfully urge you to exercise your unilateral authority under (federal law) to immediately designate another SEC commissioner as Chair of the agency.”
Later, she adds: “While demoting an existing Chair and selecting another from among the agency’s current Commissioners would be an uncommon act, Chair White’s extraordinary, ongoing efforts to undermine the agency’s central mission make such a step necessary.”
Before she became SEC Chairman, she worked at a law firm which represented the financial industry, and her husband continues to work for a similar law firm, and prior her appointment to the Securities and exchange commission, she had no regulatory experience.
Obama knew all of this when he appointed her, which is why, in addition to his hiring of Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, I think that Mary Jo White is doing what the President wants.
Obama has never been interested in creating meaningful accountability or reform in Wall Street.
After all, Presidential libraries don’t pay for themselves.