Warren Out as Consumer Czar…Make Way for another Anti-Business Zealot

Pick your poison. That is the effect of Barack Obama’s decision to snub interim Consumer Czar Elizabeth Warren and instead nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), now that the agency is officially up and running. (Judicial Watch’s work certainly contributed to scuttling Warren’s bid to head the agency; more on that in a moment.)

Warren, a leftist radical known particularly for her anti-business views, was an in-your-face Obama appointee, who had virtually no chance of gaining U.S. Senate approval. That’s why Obama had to use a czar “special adviser” appointment to install her into her position of power.

Cordray appears to be no better than Warren, who immediately hired him after Ohio voters threw him out of office last November. The Wall Street Journal described the former Ohio Attorney General in an editorial this week as “Mrs. Warren without the charm,” while noting the fact that Cordray has demonstrated “hostility toward business.”

That might be an understatement. More from the Journal:

[Cordray] sued Ally Financial’s GMAC Mortgage over its foreclosure practices–a lawsuit that helped spawn the national robo-signing uproar, which has mushroomed into an effort to force big banks to cough up billions for Democrats to redistribute. He sued rating agencies for grading mortgage-backed securities as safe investments. He sued Bank of America for purportedly hiding losses and bonuses prior to the Merrill Lynch merger. The list of cases is long.

In an interview with the Journal, Cordray compared employees of a financial services company to the “Nazis at Nuremberg” who said they were just following orders. That’s exactly what we need at the top of the consumer protection agency in the middle of an economic free fall — a radical anti-business zealot with a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric.

But let me tell you something else disturbing about Cordray that the press largely hasn’t covered yet.

Remember Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber”? He is the Ohio citizen who had the audacity to ask then-candidate Barack Obama about his socialist economic policies during the 2008 presidential election. The president famously responded by saying he thought it was a good idea to “spread the wealth around,” a sound bite that backfired against the Obama campaign