PRESS RELEASE
Rep. Kaptur and Public Citizen Mobilize for Glass-Steagall
June 21, 2017 (EIRNS)—The American national advocacy organization Public Citizen on moved yesterday to mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members for H.R. 790, the Return to Prudent Banking bill, which reinstates the 1933 Glass-Steagall banking separation legislation. Public Citizen’s Bartlett Naylor—a former chief investigator for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee—interviewed H.R. 790 prime sponsor Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) for 20 minutes about Glass-Steagall, streaming on the Facebook sites of both Representative Kaptur and Public Citizen.
Kaptur explained what the Glass-Steagall Act was and why it was enacted in 1933, and the subsequent long era of banking stability in the United States. She and Naylor both discussed the connection between the elimination of Glass-Steagall in the 1990s and the economically devastating international banking crash a decade later. Of the poor substitute for reinstatement—the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010—Kaptur said,
"Dodd-Frank did not control Wall Street. No big bank executives were really punished. The financial industry are now the largest contributors to political campaigns in the United States."
Naylor concluded the interview by directly calling on all Public Citizens’ members to contact their members of Congress and demand they sign onto H.R. 790. Some 1,100 were viewing the interview on Public Citizen’s Facebook page alone on Tuesday afternoon.
