Government Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

There's no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University. Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert assassinations. And, lo and behold, you'll never guess who was leading the [cover up]: "The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period. Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were "improper." The White House edit changed this conclusion.

Note: Read about the CIA's involvement in the 1953 death of military scientist Frank Olson. The Rockefeller Commission report was one of the first official sources to publicly reveal CIA and DOD mind control experiments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Republican-led House intelligence committee wants the Pentagon to provide what it believes are illegally deleted intelligence files pertaining to the U.S. military campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. "We have been made aware that both files and emails have been deleted by personnel at CENTCOM, and we expect that the Department of Defense will provide these and all other relevant documents to the committee," [Committee Chairman Devin] Nunes said at a hearing Thursday. Nunes' assertions led to an extraordinary public acknowledgment from Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was testifying before the committee, of the "unusually high" dissatisfaction inside the agency responsible for providing military intelligence on ISIS. There is already an ongoing Defense Department Inspector General investigation into allegations that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were pressured into changing their analysis to make their reports sound overly optimistic. Congress is conducting a separate investigation. The committee has information from whistleblowers that both intelligence files and emails were deliberately deleted at Central Command, but that copies remain in the hands of analysts. Some Pentagon officials have privately told CNN they believe the problem at Central Command is that some analysts feel their work is not accepted if it shows a negative view of progress.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Real health care for all would be nice, we are told, but there's just no room for it in the budget. What's rarely mentioned ... is that the current version of the budget - the place where our taxes go and metamorphose into services and activities that are supposed to support us - is extremely bad for our health. Much of our tax money, on both the federal and state levels, is funneled toward activities that are literally killing people. Instead of dismissing "health care for all" as an appealing-but-unachievable dream, we need to talk about how we can shift our overall funding priorities from a framework of death and destruction to one of life and healing. In mid-February, the Obama administration released its 2017 budget proposal, in which almost $623 billion is allocated to the Pentagon and related spending. The "global war on terror" has left 1.3 million dead. Beyond Pentagon funding, the administration's 2017 budget calls for $19 billion for nuclear weapons. In fact, President Obama recently proposed [expanding] the US's [nuclear] arsenal, spending $1 trillion over 30 years. This prioritization of state-sponsored death and destruction over health and renewal is by no means limited to the US Defense Department. Each year, in total ... the United States spends about $80 billion on incarceration. This country locks 2.3 million people ... inside cages. In part, real "health care" would necessitate dismantling [our] violent institutions.

Note: Read an excellent article diving deeper into this issue titled "Why the Deafening Silence on Cutting the Military Budget?" For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Has Michael Moore gone soft? You might think so, making a snap judgment of Where to Invade Next, a ... documentary hellbent on seeing the best in people. Other people. Not us Americans. Moore sets up his film by daydreaming about a summons from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Instead of using Marines, use me," he pleads. As we watch a collage of America at its worst – bank scandals, stock frauds, housing foreclosures, black teens murdered by cops – Moore sets out to invade the world for bright ideas. In Italy, he meets a couple who get 30 days paid vacation each year with no loss in productivity. In France, Moore is astonished by school kids who are served nutritional food. On a visit to a Norway prison, the worst felons are treated with compassion, with sentences capped at 21 years, even for murderers. Yet the crime rate is low, as is recidivism. In Tunisia, women win free health care from a hidebound Islamist regime. And get a load of Portugal, where using drugs is not a crime, but rehab is offered to those who want it. A trip to Iceland finds that the bankers who brought economic ruin to their country are thrown in jail instead of being bailed out. Love him or hate his methods, Moore touches a nerve in Where to Invade Next. In a climactic remembrance at the Berlin Wall, he recalls a time when a corrupt regime was brought down by people willing to protest. What counted most were humanitarian principles, the same bedrock concepts that America was founded on. See, the joke's on us.

Note: Moore's films have looked critically at for-profit medicine and the downside of capitalism in recent years.

Testimony at a Senate hearing Tuesday demonstrated that [the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)] remains a dangerous place for whistleblowers who report wrong doing. “The VA has a culture problem with whistleblower retaliation,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The “culture of fear” Johnson spoke of is evident in the number of VA cases handled by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent body that deals with whistleblower retaliation among other things. VA whistleblower reprisal cases received by OSC has been rising quickly, from 405 in fiscal 2013 to a projected 712 for fiscal 2015 – a 75 percent jump. [Special Counsel Carolyn] Lerner expects approximately 35 percent of the possible 4,000 prohibited personnel practice cases filed from across government this year to be from VA employees. Lerner complained to Obama in a Sept. 17 letter about the lack of discipline for VA managers found to have done wrong. After listing cases where managers were not disciplined, or only lightly so, for infractions, Lerner wrote: “The lack of accountability in these cases stands in stark contrast to disciplinary actions taken against VA whistleblowers. The VA has attempted to fire or suspend whistleblowers for minor indiscretions and, often, for activity directly related to the employee’s whistleblowing.”

Note: In 2011, BBC began asking if the U.S. government was "at war with whistleblowers". Watch a fascinating interview with whistleblower Rebekah Roth, an airline attendant who uncovers an abundance of key new information on 9/11. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Zaher Hamdoun is a 36-year-old Yemeni man who has been detained in Guantánamo without charge since he was 22, one of 116 prisoners still detained there six years after Obama promised to close the facility. Hamdoun is not among the 52 men approved for transfer from Guantánamo, nor is he in a dwindling group of detainees the government plans to charge. He is in a nebulous middle category of people the Obama administration has determined it is not going to charge but doesn’t know if it is ever going to release. Though the president in 2011 ordered periodic administrative reviews of men in this group ... the reviews didn’t start until a mass hunger strike broke out in 2013. Still today, the majority of men haven’t been reviewed, including Hamdoun. Though he has been a Guantánamo prisoner for almost 14 years without charge, and doesn’t know if he will ever be released, the administration says this is not indefinite detention. [Hamoud writes of his current state]: "I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo. I fall asleep and then wake up to realize that my soul and my thoughts belong to that world I watch on television, or read about in books. That is all I can say about the ordeal."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing civil liberties news articles from reliable major media sources.

President Obama has spent the summer at war with his own party over how to write the rules of global trade. Not since Woodrow Wilson promised to break the “money monopoly” ... has the Democratic Party found itself so inflamed against the intersection of wealth and power. The giants of the party now find their credentials, and motivations, under attack. The new fire is fueled by a shift in economics that feels like a crisis for many Americans. Real wages have increased 138% for the top 1% of American income earners since 1979, but only 15% for the 90% below. From 2002 to 2013, the only groups of American households that did not see their real incomes on average decline or stagnate were headed by college graduates and young people in their 20s. At the same time, over a quarter-century, fixed costs such as housing, education and health care have outpaced inflation. [Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s] message ... is that both Republicans and Democrats have misread the economic challenge and been co-opted by the forces of greed. “The pressure on the middle class is not simply a natural force,” she says. “It is the result of deliberate decisions made by the leaders of this country.” America’s enemy, in other words, lurks within. “This is not a top-vs.-bottom story,” she continues. “This is a top-and-everyone-else story. This is a 90-10 story.” Two-thirds of Americans now believe that wealth should be more evenly distributed. An even greater share of the country supports raising taxes on those who make more than $1 million.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing income inequality news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Elections Information Center.

Department of Defense personnel spent more than $1 million at casinos and strip clubs on government credit cards in one year, a Pentagon audit by the DOD Inspector General has revealed. Civilian and military employees racked up the vast majority of those charges - about $950,000 - at casinos from July 2013 to June 2014. They charged roughly $96,000 at strip clubs. Using the cards did not violate laws because the cardholders paid their "personal" expenses, DOD officials told NBC News. Taxpayer dollars were not spent in the transactions, officials said. However, the charges did run foul of some standards for the agency. Administrative action has been taken against 364 cardholders, and most have gone through "counseling" for card use. Officials could not confirm to NBC if any of the cardholders lost their jobs.

Note: The US Defense Department routinely lies about its budget and occasionally loses track of trillions of dollars. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

President John F. Kennedy sent an army of anti-Castro exiles backed by the CIA onto the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs to suffer bloody, catastrophic defeat. A few days later, [Kennedy] wondered aloud why nobody had talked him out of it. Could the Miami Herald have done that - talked him out of it? The Herald, seven months before the Bay of Pigs, had prepared a news story saying that the United States was planning to launch a military operation against Cuba. But the paper’s top management killed the story after CIA Director Allen Dulles said publishing it would hurt national security. In 1960, [reporter David Kraslow's] contacts at the Justice Department ... told him of a brutal feud between legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA. The CIA wanted to train an army of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro; the FBI was charged with enforcing the federal Neutrality Act that makes it illegal to stage a military expedition against another country from U.S. territory. Kraslow had a blockbuster story. “It was about 1,500 words and it said the CIA was secretly recruiting and training Cuban exiles for some sort of major military operation against Castro,” he recalls. The Herald wouldn’t run it. Training of the Cuban exiles was moved out the United States to Guatemala. On Jan. 10, 1961, [The New York Times] published a story on the ... base in Guatemala. The day after that, the Herald published its own story. A little editor’s note explained that the Herald had held up the news “for more than two months”.

Note: Although JFK did not stop the Bay of Pigs debacle, his administration did successfully stop a Pentagon plan to fabricate acts of terrorism on US soil as a pretext for war with Cuba. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the manipulation of mass media.

Patrick J. O’Reilly was at times “a cheerleader and an advocate” for the Missile Defense Agency during his four years as director. But he broke ranks with his predecessors at the agency by questioning flawed programs. In a series of interviews, O’Reilly said members of Congress whose states or districts benefited from missile defense spending fought doggedly to protect three of the programs long after their shortcomings became obvious. He described how Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) reacted when he outlined his reservations about the Airborne Laser project, envisioned as a fleet of Boeing 747s that would be modified to fire laser beams at enemy missiles. “He’d immediately start talking about, ‘How much money do you need?’ I was trying to say, ‘On the technical merits, it doesn’t make sense.’” The project was killed in 2012, after a decade of testing and $5.3 billion in spending. O’Reilly grew skeptical of another missile defense project, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, after he learned that Navy ships would have to be retrofitted ... to accommodate the 40-foot-long rocket. Existing ships could not carry interceptors longer than 22 feet, he said. The project’s backers included Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, [and] Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard C. Shelby of Alabama. O’Reilly said the three senators bristled when he suggested that the Kinetic Energy Interceptor was unworkable. The program nevertheless was discontinued [in 2009]. By then, $1.7 billion had been spent on it.

Note: Secrecy and lies about missile defense, whether owing to incompetence or government corruption have been commonplace in Washington for many years - sometimes to devastating effect.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who relinquished the chairmanship of the intelligence committee ... said she objects to Senator Richard Burr's request that the Obama administration return all copies of the full, 6,000-plus-page classified [torture] study. "Doing so would limit the ability to learn lessons from this sad chapter in America's history and omit from the record two years of work," Feinstein said in a statement late on Tuesday. In an extraordinary epilogue to the battle between the Senate intelligence committee and the CIA over the torture report, new chairman Burr, a North Carolina Republican, requested that administration agencies return to the committee all copies of the full report. Burr's request was first reported by the New York Times and the Huffington Post. The Times noted that Burr's request would have the effect of placing the classified report beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act, which exempts Congress. President Obama has [given the report] rhetorical support, but [empowered] the CIA to determine what portions of a critique of the agency ought to be public. A CIA-appointed review panel also recently found that the agency's director, John Brennan, consulted with the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, before agency employees surreptitiously accessed emails and drafts from committee investigators. Feinstein said in March that the breach represented a constitutional crisis, with the CIA spying on its Senate overseers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in intelligence agencies and government.

Following the lashing of blogger Raif Badawi and leaked footage that showed the public execution of a woman accused of beating her daughter, Saudi Arabia's harsh interpretation of sharia law and its use of capital punishment have come under international scrutiny. For many, the Saudi justice system sounds not unlike that of the Islamic State, the extremist Islamist group which has struck fear in much of the Middle East. This week, Middle East Eye, a Web site that focuses on news from the region and is frequently critical of Saudi Arabia, contrasted a set of legal punishments recently announced by the Islamic State with the corresponding punishments in Saudi Arabia. One key difference between the Islamic State and Saudi Arabia, of course, is that the latter is a key U.S. ally in the region – and a member of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State. Some experts argue that the fundamentalist brand of Islam practiced by both has theological links, however, and Riyadh's recent crackdown has been interpreted as an act of appeasement for Saudi hard-liners. Saudi Arabia's own concern about the Islamic State is likely genuine (plans to build an enormous wall along its border with Iraq are a good sign of that), but for many Americans, the extremist group's rise is also bringing with it a renewed skepticism about American allies in the region.

Note: Here is the diagram that compares Saudi justice with I.S. justice, and here is a diagram of the big, expensive security wall mentioned above. Is Saudi Arabia concerned that the Islamic State is less aligned with Saudi interests than other popular Islamic terrorist groups have been?

A man is given 50 lashes in a public square for "insulting Islam" on a liberal blog. Another is arrested for filming and uploading a woman's public beheading. Two females are imprisoned and put on trial for writing on Twitter in support of women driving. The cases are part of a sweeping clampdown on dissent. Acts that offend the country's religious hard-liners or open up the kingdom to criticism – like the video of the execution of a woman convicted of murdering her stepdaughter – have landed people in jail as a warning to others. The case of Raif Badawi, a 31-year-old father of three who was flogged this month, has attracted the most attention in recent days, particularly in the aftermath of the deadly attack in Paris. Badawi was arrested in 2012 after writing articles critical of Saudi Arabia's clerics on his Free Saudi Liberals blog. He was sentenced in May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes and was fined $266,000. Just days after the attacks in Paris, Saudi Arabia's minister of state for foreign affairs took part in the huge march that was held there to support free speech and honor the victims. Two days earlier, Badawi was flogged [for "insulting Islam" on his blog]. Critics of the crackdown on dissent point out that public beheadings are also practiced by al-Qaida and IS.

Note: Saudi Arabia continues to be a key ally of the US. Is this really what we want to support? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

With organic food growers reporting double-digit growth in U.S. sales each year, producers are challenging a proposed California pest-management program they say enshrines a pesticide-heavy approach for decades to come, including compulsory spraying of organic crops at the state’s discretion. The California Department of Food and Agriculture’s pest-management plan says compulsory state pesticide spraying of organic crops would do no economic harm to organic producers, on the grounds that the growers could sell sprayed crops as non-organic instead. “I would rather stop farming than have to be a conventional farmer. I think I am not alone in that,” said Zea Sonnabend, a Watsonville organic apple-grower with California Certified Organic Farmers. The fate of the pest-management plan outlined by the state isn’t a theoretical concern. It’s an immediate issue ... due, in part, to a disease-carrying pest. The disease spread by the Asian citrus psyllid kills citrus trees. California’s $2.4 billion citrus industry has found incursions by the bug. The standard treatment for the citrus pest is conventional pesticides, including neocotinoids linked to the decline of crop-pollinating bees. Organic farmers are asking the state to give more consideration to non-toxic controls, including long-term methods to strengthen crops and habitats in advance against marauding tropical species, said Kelly Damewood, policy director for California Certified Organic Farmers.

Note: Read concise summaries of deeply revealing articles that show bee colony deaths and autism are linked to pesticide exposure. Is compulsory state spraying of these pesticides really in the public's best interest?

Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? If you are a big business ... America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement. Repeat with another large company. In many cases, the companies deserved some form of punishment: BNP Paribas ... abetted genocide, American banks fleeced customers. BP despoiled the Gulf of Mexico. But justice should not be based on extortion. Regulators and prosecutors are in effect conducting closed-door trials. The agencies that pocket the fines have become profit centres: Rhode Island’s bureaucrats have been on a spending spree courtesy of a $500m payout by Google, while New York’s governor and attorney-general have squabbled over a $613m settlement from JPMorgan. Not only are regulators in effect judge and jury as well as plaintiff in the cases they bring; they can also use the threat of the criminal law. The public never finds out the full facts of the case, nor discovers which specific people — with souls and bodies — were to blame. Since the cases never go to court ... it is unclear what exactly is illegal. That enables future shakedowns. Nor is it clear how the regulatory booty is being carved up. This ... risks the prospect of a selective — and potentially corrupt — system of justice in which everybody is guilty of something and punishment is determined by political deals.

Note: For more along these lines, see these concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption and civil liberties news articles from reliable sources.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an executive decree banning the centuries old practice of aging cheese on wooden boards. Consumers who eat any kind of aged cheese should prepare for a potentially catastrophic disruption in the market for artisan, non-processed cheese. The FDA’s decision will not only harm American cheese makers, but may also bring a halt to the importation of artisan cheeses from abroad, as Canadian and European Union regulators have not imposed such draconian measures and still allow for the use of wood boards to age cheese. Corporate cheese makers like Leprino and Kraft will be able to weather this regulatory storm — they don’t make cheese, they manufacture cheese, and as such they do not follow the centuries-old [artisanal] techniques. But for small businesses and artisan cheese makers, wood boards are in fact essential to the making of cheese. As cheese expert Gordon Edgar writes, “wood creates a beneficial environment for cheese. After all, what is cheese but a great achievement of the microbe community?” Edgar notes that wood is essential to the flavor of artisanal cheeses: "Over the last 30-40 years cheesemakers here in the States have been trying to use the best practices of traditional cheesemakers to give smaller-scale production a taste/quality advantage over the larger (now almost completely automated) factories that dominate the market. [They] rely — in part — on wood aging. It could be devastating."

Note: The FDA appears to be backing down on this, yet the fact that they would even consider a move which effectively bans traditional cheese while promoting processed cheese shows the true colors of the FDA.

China has allowed direct domestic trading of the yuan against the New Zealand dollar to encourage such trading as it internationalizes the Chinese currency. The move ... comes after China doubled the yuan's trading band over the weekend in a milestone step that gives investors more freedom to set the value of the tightly controlled currency. The move was seen as promoting trade between the two countries, which rose 25.2 percent to NZ$18.2 billion ($15.71 billion) in 2013. As part of China's sweeping plans to overhaul its maturing economy and let market forces drive a host of industries, the government wants to gradually relax its hold over the yuan and turn it into a global reserve currency that one day rivals the dollar. The government's wish to promote international use of the yuan is partly driven by its concern that China is too vulnerable to the fluctuating value of the dollar. China is home to the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, worth $3.82 trillion at the end of last year. About a third is invested in U.S. government bonds. To promote international use of the yuan, China has signed a series of currency swaps with foreign governments in order to increase the overseas circulation of the Chinese currency. The New Zealand dollar is the 10th foreign currency that can be directly traded against the yuan in China.

Note: The US dollar's role as a global currency is gradually fading.

According to reports, one of the first acts of the Republican-controlled Congress will be to fire Doug Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, because he won’t use “dynamic scoring” for his economic projections. Dynamic scoring is the magical math Republicans have been pushing since they came up with supply-side “trickle-down” economics. It’s based on the belief that cutting taxes unleashes economic growth and thereby produces additional government revenue. Dynamic scoring would make it easier to enact tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, because the tax cuts wouldn’t look as if they increased the budget deficit. Few economic theories have been as thoroughly tested in the real world as the asserted revenue effects of supply-side economics, and so notoriously failed. Ronald Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent and ended up nearly doubling the national debt. George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton, but then slashed taxes, mostly on the rich. The Bush tax cuts reduced revenue by $3 trillion. Yet Republicans don’t want to admit supply-side economics is hokum. As a result, they’ve never had much love for the truth-tellers at the Congressional Budget Office. The pattern seems to be: If you don't like the facts, make them up. Or have your benefactors finance think tanks filled with hired guns who will tell the public what you and your patrons want them to say.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption and income inequality news articles from reliable major media sources.

It was the part of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that spooked American officials the most, as the complex spiraled out of control two and a half years ago: the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, with more than 1,500 radioactive fuel assemblies left exposed when a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off the building. In the next 10 days, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, is set to start the delicate and risky task of using a crane to remove the fuel assemblies from the pool, a critical step in a long decommissioning process that has already had serious setbacks. The operation addresses a threat that has hung over the plant since the crisis started. It is still dangerous to have the fuel high up in a damaged structure that could collapse in another quake, experts warn. But removing it poses dangers, too. The fuel rods must remain immersed in water to block the gamma radiation they emit and allow workers to be in the area, and to prevent the rods from overheating. An accident could expose the rods and — in a worst-case scenario, some experts say — allow them to release radioactive materials beyond the plant. “There are potentially very big risks involved,” Shunichi Tanaka, the head of Japan’s nuclear regulator, said last week. “Each assembly must be handled very carefully.” “All I can do is pray that nothing goes wrong,” said Yasuro Kawai, a former plant engineer who now heads a group that is independently monitoring the decommissioning process.

Note: For further assessment of the risks associated with any attempt to remove the rods from the damaged Fukushima Reactor #4 fuel pool, click here. For more on the risks of nuclear power, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said the political system is still “rigged” by lobbyists and special interests who work to keep the public “in the dark.” “I’ve been in the Senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families,” Warren said. Warren, a critic of Wall Street, rose to prominence by highlighting “tricks and traps” of credit-card disclosures and creating [the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)] as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Warren said despite progress by the consumer bureau and confirmation of its director after a two-year delay, lobbyists for the financial industry continue to fight it and consumer groups shouldn’t let down their guard. “We all know that the fight isn’t over and that the lobbyists are still working to undercut the agency’s work,” Warren said. She compared the CFPB to government agencies that test the safety of physical products like cribs and paint, and said the bureau’s work on the safety of financial products will become just as valued by the public. “You tell me: When was the last time you heard someone call for regulators to go easier on companies that want to use lead paint on our children’s toys or leave the safety switches off toasters?” Warren asked. “The CFPB was designed from the very beginning to cut out tricks and traps in consumer finance and add transparency to the marketplace.”

Note: For an excellent video showing the courage and forthrightness of Elizabeth Warren, click here. For more on government corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.