Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I was here last week in this Chamber to discuss a variety of areas in which the American people are not getting a straight deal compared to special interests and folks who have a lot of power for themselves and their industries in Washington. In that speech I proposed a number of concrete steps we could take to help restore the balance of power in our Nation between ordinary Americans on the one hand and the giant corporations and special interests that give themselves special deals and privileges that the American people do not share on the other hand. Today I am here to introduce legislation to take one of those steps; that is, to protect ordinary consumers from runaway interest rates on credit cards from Wall Street banks. This is something that has gone unchecked for far too long. In the last Congress we passed two pieces of banking legislation. We passed the Credit Card Act, which ended some of the worst tricks and traps hidden in credit card contracts, and we passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which restructured our system of financial regulation and created a new agency to protect consumers from hazardous mortgages and credit cards. Regrettably, one particularly bad practice was not addressed in either of those two pieces of legislation: the runaway credit card interest rates with which families are too often burdened. I will add it is not just families.…”