The Tide Is Turning Against Obama’s Pro-Wall Street SEC© Pick, Mary Jo White

Author: Ben Walsh
Publisher: Huffington Post

More than 110,000 people have signed a petition to remove Mary Jo White as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission because she is too close to Wall Street to regulate it effectively, progressive group Credo said in a release.

The number of signatures gathered to replace a regulator who is relatively unknown outside Washington, DC, policy circles is “pretty astounding, for something that wonky,” Credo’s political director, Becky Bond, told HuffPost. For comparison, she noted that the campaign to draft the much more visible U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run for president, gathered 365,000 signatures.

A June 16 report from Rootstrikers, a campaign finance reform group, criticized White for being too close to the financial firms that she used to represent as a corporate attorney. Rootstrikers pointed out that White has also been unable to cast the deciding vote in cases that her husband, who is a corporate lawyer, has an interest in. When the SEC’s two Republican and two Democratic commissioners are deadlocked, the chair acts as a tiebreaker. More broadly, Democrats are disappointed that White, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, often votes with the two Republican commissioners and against the Democratic commissioners.

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