Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

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Phoebe Connelly, a Yahoo News editor who worked with Roth on the project, and intern Galen Bernard helped sift through the entries and planned out the Tumblr, Connelly told me. She said Tumblr made the most sense for the project because it offered the ideal layout for individual stories as well as an additional means of discovery for readers. On July 14, Roth’s piece was published, featuring around 20 people who submitted their stories to The Lookout. The same day the Tumblr was launched with 58 stories. “The appeal was doing it quickly and not with a ton of manpower or tech power, and just using the editors we had to get it up,” Connelly said.

The other benefit may also have been a more immersive experience, as the posts on Tumblr aren’t encumbered with ads, buttons or a lot of links, which makes for a quieter reading experience. (Of course, the lack of ads has a monetary downside, too.) And it appears to have clicked with readers: On the day they launched Down But Not Out, the average time-on-site was around 8 minutes, Connelly said.

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I remain hopeful that those who want to cripple this consumer bureau will think again and remember that the financial crisis — and the recession and job losses that it sparked — began one lousy mortgage at a time. I also hope that when those Senators next go home, they ask their constituents how they feel about fine print, about signing contracts with terms that are incomprehensible, and about learning the true costs of a financial transaction only later when fees are piled on or interest rates are reset. I hope they will ask the people in their districts if they are opposed to an agency that is working to make prices clear or if they think budgets should be cut for an agency that is trying to make sure that trillion-dollar banks follow the law. I hope they will ask their constituents if they are opposed to the confirmation of someone who saved $2 billion for retirees, investors, and business owners as Ohio Attorney General and who has worked hard on the front lines fighting against fraudulent foreclosures and abusive lending practices.

This week is the culmination of two years of hard battles. The President put the consumer agency in his first outline of financial regulatory reform, and he never wavered in his support for it. The agency was declared dead several times, and weak versions and lousy bargains were offered again and again, but he stood fast. When he signed Dodd-Frank into law, creating the new agency, he offered me the chance to stand it up — something for which I will always be grateful. The fights continued, and again, the President never wavered in his support. In fact, just last week he issued a veto threat if the Republicans try to move the agency’s funding to the political process, and I know that in the future he won’t allow opponents of reform to succeed in weakening the CFPB.

The agency has stepped out in the right direction. The work is good. But this agency needs to have its full powers right now, and that means we need Rich in place as Director. Today, I’m celebrating — but I’m not taking my eye off those who want to cripple this agency. We got this agency by fighting, we stood it up by fighting, and, if takes more fighting to keep it strong and independent, then we can do it.

“We’re very concerned that this is essentially an entity funded around Congress and yet it has the ability to bully banks.”

“Is this holding us back at this point?”

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Take, for example, what comes from an increasingly shrill conservative chorus. After eliminating most of the usual suspects, the source of our fiscal problem becomes pretty simple. Our debts can’t be the cumulative result of multiple tax cuts. The crisis has nothing to do with our ongoing, unnecessary and counterproductive wars. It can’t be the fault of the bankers and brokers who defrauded millions with securitized debt obligations based on bundling large numbers of “liars’ loans.” It probably has nothing to do with our failure to tax most Internet sales, and it certainly can’t be because hedge fund managers are allowed to treat a portion of their income as capital gains.

Instead, the cause identified by most Republican governors, legislators and pundits is simple; government spends too much, and a lot of the blame falls on the public service unions. Indeed, at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., one panel was titled “Bleeding America Dry: The Threat of Public Sector Unions.” That’s right: The firefighters, the police and the teachers are bleeding the country dry.

“As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to [U.S. embassy economic officers] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”