Financial Justice

The People's Campaign to Stop Lender Abuse

Larry Kirsch, Robert N. Mayer

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781440829529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Banks & Banking
• Index: Economics

This provocative and accessible narrative recounts the inside story of how a broad-based people's campaign was mobilized and subsequently succeeded in pushing Congress to create a consumer financial regulator with clout. What would Congress do—if anything—to tame Wall Street and the nation's lenders following the financial meltdown of 2008? This book tells the true story of how an alliance of consumer, civil rights, labor, fair lending, and other progressive groups emerged to effectively challenge Wall Street and its official protectors and to win substantial new legislative reforms—actions that resulted in the Dodd-Frank Act and its path-breaking Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Based largely on in-depth interviews with the leading activists involved in the campaign, Financial Justice: The People's Campaign to Stop Lender Abuse taps into the world of contemporary citizen movements to present evidence into the conditions that determine the success and failure of social movement campaigns. It goes well beyond general, global variables, such as "effective management, " to show how the formal and informal rules adopted by a campaign can serve to preclude fragmentation and incoherence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. How Did We Ever Get into This Mess?
• 2. Elizabeth Warren Has a Notion
• 3. The Magic Moment for Reform
• 4. Activists Need Leaders, Too
• 5. Coalescing the Coalition
• 6. The Battle in the House
• 7. Wanted: A Few Votes in the Senate
• 8. Auto Dealers Drive for an Exemption
• 9. Preemption: The Role of State Reformers
• 10. What Did the Advocates Accomplish and How?
• Afterword: Backward and Forward with Elizabeth Warren
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index