Yesterday afternoon, Senator Richard Shelby laid out very clearly what Congressional Republicans consider to be one of their major priorities – rolling back legislation that will provide more security and stability to middle class families, and more accountability to Wall Street.  He joins the Republican Leader in the House who promised to try to repeal Wall Street Reform in July.

Senator Shelby wants to go back to a time when there was no such thing as a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and when consumers were left without a voice at the table. This is an agency whose mission is to look out for American consumers and empower them with the clear and concise information they need to make the financial decisions that are best for them. Its existence is enormously important, because one cause of the financial crisis and the Lost Decade for the middle class was the unscrupulous practices of credit card companies and mortgage lenders, who reaped billions at the expense of consumers from hidden fees and penalties.

Today I am in Manor, Texas (pop. 6,500), to celebrate the burgeoning open government movement underway in America’s towns and cities. Manor is embracing the Obama Administration's vision of creating effective and efficient government that fosters transparency and innovation. By using new technology to enable open and collaborative ways of working, government—whether federal, state, or local—can deliver better citizen services with fewer resources.

In an oped for the Wall Street Journal this morning, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor took the Congressional Republicans' commitment to holding middle class tax cuts hostage to a new level by pledging to fight any effort to extend them without an extension for the top two percent of the wealthiest Americans. 

Here’s what Cantor and the Republicans are holding hostage: a tax cut for all Americans on the first $250,000 of their income. Under the Obama plan, every middle class family would receive the immediate certainty and comfort of knowing their tax cuts were permanently extended. Every American making more than $250,000 per year they would receive a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income. And for income above that amount, this change would leave their tax rates at or below the rates that existed when President Clinton was in office and when the economy created 23 million jobs. 

And here’s what they’re holding middle class tax relief hostage for: having our nation borrow $700 billion that we can’t afford to provide an average tax cut of $100,000 to millionaires and billionaires. This tax cut would be, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, just about the worst way to jumpstart our economy and help create jobs. That is why the President remains focused on strengthening the middle class to help grow the economy.

The President explains how the most dire warnings about the Citizens United case have been proven valid as Republicans in Congress have blocked legislation to fix it.

The President began his remarks today in the Rose Garden laying out the motivation for what was to come:

Before we begin I just want to mention a report that was released by the Census Bureau yesterday about what happened to wages during the last decade.  It revealed that between 2001 and 2009, the incomes of middle-class families fell by almost 5 percent. 

The fact that the middle class has been chipped away at is well known, and obviously is not easily reversed.  The economic crisis of the past two years has been devastating in itself, but was all the more tragic because so many middle class families had been pushed to the brink even beforehand.  That's why the President was again tenacious in demanding that "the leaders of the other party to stop holding middle-class tax cuts hostage and extend this relief to families immediately."  As  the President has been explaining all week, Republicans in Congress have been refusing to allow an extension of middle class tax cuts unless there's also an additional tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans -- an average of $100,000 for everybody making a million dollars or more per year.

But the news of the day was the announcement that Elizabeth Warren would lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- one of the central features of Wall Street Reform as explained in our animated video -- in getting it off the ground:

She’s a native of Oklahoma.  She’s a janitor’s daughter who has become one of the country’s fiercest advocates for the middle class.  She has seen financial struggles and foreclosures affect her own family.

Long before this crisis hit, she had written eloquently, passionately, forcefully, about the growing financial pressures on working families and the need to put in place stronger consumer protections.  And three years ago she came up with an idea for a new independent agency that would have one simple overriding mission:  standing up for consumers and middle-class families.

The President touched on some of issues the bureau will focus on:

Never again will folks be confused or misled by the pages of barely understandable fine print that you find in agreements for credit cards or mortgages or student loans.  The bureau is going to crack down on the abusive practices of unscrupulous mortgage lenders.  It will reinforce the new credit card law that we passed, banning unfair rate hikes and ensure that folks aren’t unwittingly caught by overdraft fees when they sign up for a checking account.  It will give students who take out college loans clear information and make sure that lenders don’t game the system.  And it will ensure that every American receives a free credit score if they are denied a loan or insurance because of that score.

Basically, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be a watchdog for the American consumer, charged with enforcing the toughest financial protections in history.

Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.

The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started—right now.  The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.

President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea:  people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal.  They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them—way too late for them to do anything about it.  The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market.  The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over.  This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.

If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field,  we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families.  But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything.  Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings—there’s a lot of work to be done.

When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.  Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back.  When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression.  She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same:  she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.

It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work.

Ed. Note: Today President Obama announced the launch of Change the Equation, a CEO-led effort to dramatically improve education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), as part of his “Educate to Innovate” campaign.

Years may go by and memories may fade but just about everyone remembers a special teacher they had in the K-12 years who made a big difference—don’t you? A teacher who opened your eyes to something new or beautiful or showed you something about the possibilities of a subject in school that you had not appreciated before?

Those of us who have the privilege of serving on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology were talking about this recently and comparing stories about our own favorite and life-changing teachers, and we had an idea: Why not make a short video in which we could tell our stories, as a means of amplifying a message we were already developing about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education?

The discussion came up in the course of preparing a new report on STEM education that PCAST released today, and it resulted in the production of the short video you can see below, which was produced by Visualante Media and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. We hope you enjoy getting a peek into the academic beginnings of some of the President’s science and technology advisors, and that it inspires you to do your share—as a student, a teacher, a corporate donor or philanthropist—to reach for the stars and do whatever you can do to strengthen this important backbone of American education.

Jim Gates is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

No matter where you live, emergencies can happen anytime, anywhere.

Whether it’s a personal emergency, a car accident, or a large scale disaster, an earthquake, taking a few simple steps now to prepare, can keep your family safe and secure.

The problem is, too few families in our country are taking those steps. According to a 2009 Advertising Council survey, 55 percent of Americans have taken steps to become ready – an improvement over previous years, but still not enough.

Whether you live in a city or in a rural area, along a coast or in a central state, it’s imperative that all Americans take steps to prepare for a natural or man-made disaster. These steps are as simple as getting an emergency supply kit, making a plan for how you will communicate with your family if a disaster strikes, and being informed of the types of emergencies that can happen in your area and how to respond. 

Today, the Census bureau released new data on the number of Americans who went without insurance in 2009. The numbers are yet another reminder that the passage of the Affordable Care Act came at a critical time.  The data show that the number of Americans without insurance increased by 4.4 million since 2008, with a total of 50.7 million uninsured Americans. 

The Affordable Care Act marks a crucial turning point for our health care system and will help make affordable, high-quality care accessible to millions of Americans. Under the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans will be able to purchase better coverage in the new competitive private health insurance exchanges where individuals and small businesses will be able to choose coverage from a range of insurance options – the same options members of Congress will have. The law also helps cover millions of Americans who have been priced out of the market.  Taken together, the provisions in the law will expand coverage to 32 million Americans.  For more information on the new law please visit: www.HealthCare.gov.