By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2017

Vice President Mike Pence Swears In Steven Mnuchin as U.S. Treasury Secretary on February 13, 2017. President Donald Trump and Mnuchin’s Fiancée, Louise Linton, Look On.

The next leg of the insatiable Wall Street heist has begun under the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Under the guise of empowering Americans “to make independent financial decisions,” the Treasury released its set of recommendations for financial reform on Monday. Far from empowering Americans, the new recommendations would effectively place a bigger blindfold on consumers, blocking further their ability to differentiate between serially corrupt financial institutions on Wall Street and those that make an effort at playing by the rules. (The latter being an almost extinct species.)

Wall Street’s fingerprints are all over the Treasury recommendations. The report has singled out for particular scalpel treatment the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which Wall Street loathes because of its independence. The acronym “CFPB” appears 315 times in the 147-page report. One passage reads as follows:

“A significant