The United States established one of its first true consumer protection laws in 1872, when it protected consumers from fraud involving the use of U.S. mail. But the modern era of consumer protection didn’t begin for another 90 years, when President John F. Kennedy delivered remarks to Congress that established four basic consumer rights — rights to safety, to choice, to be informed, and to be heard — and laid the groundwork for the consumer protections Americans expect and depend upon today.

Kennedy’s remarks, delivered 50 years ago today, argued that protecting consumers was vital to the stability of the American economy and the country’s national interest:

If consumers are offered inferior products, if prices are exorbitant, if drugs are unsafe or worthless, if the consumer is unable to choose on an informed basis, then his dollar is wasted, his health and safety may be threatened, and the national interest suffers.

Kennedy’s four basic consumer rights led to the establishment of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and to the passing of anti-trust, patent, and price gouging laws, as well as the creation of non-governmental actors like the Better Business Bureau to protect consumer rights.

While Americans take many of these protections for granted, they are often under assault from business interests and lawmakers. Regulatory agencies from the Food and Drug Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission have been subjected to drastic budget cuts, as well as repeated efforts to prevent them from passing new regulations or enforcing those that already exist.

Those same efforts are now focused on the newest consumer protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Obama appointed the CFPB’s first director in January, after more than a year of Republican promises that they would block his nominee. Despite those efforts, the CFPB is already helping consumers in numerous ways, primarily by taking steps to prevent and remedy the predatory, discriminatory, and potentially illegal financial practices that were prevalent during the housing crisis.

“The federal Government — by nature the highest spokesman for all the people — has a special obligation to be alert to the consumer’s needs and to advance the consumer’s interests,” Kennedy said. “Their voice is not always as loudly heard in Washington as the voices of smaller and better-organized groups–nor is their point of view always defined and presented. But under our economic as well as our political form of democracy, we share an obligation to protect the common interest in every decision we make.”

Richard Cordray will make his first appearance on Capitol Hill today since President Obama recess appointed him as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Senate Republicans blocked Cordray’s nomination — and promised to block anyone nominated for the director’s position — but now that the fledgling agency has a director, it can finally begin fulfilling its mandate to protect consumers from the predatory lending practices that were rampant prior to the financial crisis and during the recession that followed.

That Cordray is now the director will likely not quell Republican attacks on the agency or skepticism of his agenda. When Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who conceived the idea of the CFPB and was once the favorite to be its first director, testified before Congress last year, she faced relentless attacks from House Republicans who oppose the Bureau.

But despite GOP opposition, the CFPB has begun taking important steps toward fulfilling its mission. Based on Cordray’s prepared remarks and other reports, ThinkProgress compiled a rundown of the programs the CFPB has already established to aid consumers and the steps it plans to take in the future:

Supervising financial institutions and enforcing the law: In 2011, the CFPB launched a large bank supervision program aimed at ensuring that the nation’s biggest banks comply with federal consumer financial laws. It will also add heightened supervision of nonbanks, like mortgage lenders, servicers, brokers, payday lenders, and consumer reporting agencies. Such supervision should prevent the predatory and discriminatory lending and foreclosure fraud that played a role in the financial crisis. The CFPB has already begun enforcement actions, cooperating with state investigations into lending and foreclosures and filing lawsuits of its own against lenders that broke the law.

Establishing programs to help consumers: The CFPB has already established multiple programs to aid consumers and is in the process of creating others. Know Before You Owe was launched to bring transparency to the financial industry, allowing consumers to better understand agreements made on mortgage, student loan, and credit card lending. The Office of Servicemember Affairs has been tasked with aiding and educating current and former members of the military — many of whom were among the biggest victims of the housing crisis and the deceptive practices that followed. The Office of Financial Protection for Older Americans, meanwhile, is doing the same for senior citizens, who are often targets of scams and fraud. The CFPB has also established a number of feedback programs that allow consumers to share their own stories — good or bad — about dealing with the financial industry.

Addressing discriminatory lending: African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities were twice as likely to be affected by the housing crisis as whites. Many lending institutions pushed minorities into subprime loans even though they qualified for regular prime loans. The CFPB’s Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity was created to end such practices by providing oversight and enforcement of fair lending laws and by working with private industry leaders, civil rights groups, and consumer advocates to ensure fair lending compliance.

Improving and streamlining financial regulation: The CFPB has already begun efforts to streamline and improve the regulations that affect the financial industry and will use feedback from both industry and consumer advocates to do so. The agency will update, modify, or eliminate unnecessary or outdated regulations, while attempting to make complying with others easier. Though Republicans have targeted the agency as anti-industry, the CFPB is committed to maintaining outreach to industry leaders. “A well-grounded understanding of the nation’s largest financial companies is essential to fulfilling our mission to improve consumer financial markets,” Cordray will say today.

As a growing number of Americans slip out of the middle-class into economic insecurity, they are increasingly vulnerable to predatory lending schemes like the payday loan. Each year, about 12 million Americans incur long-term debt by taking out a short-term loan that’s intended to cover a borrowers’ expenses until they receive their next paycheck. Payday lending takes “unfair advantage of lower-income borrowers,” with most taking out nine repeat loans per year with an interest rate as high as 400 percent. Forty-four percent of borrowers ultimately default, even after paying back their loans several times over, and thus are pushed ever closer to poverty.

But, as a new National People’s Action report shows, one borrower’s poverty is a payday lender’s profit. The report finds that lenders “take at the very least $3.4 billion” from low-income communities every year in fees alone. Titled “Profiting Off Poverty,” the report describes how payday lending companies open in areas isolated from traditional banking options to ensure they are the only available line of credit. Faith and Public Life reports:

While payday lenders prey on the most vulnerable and drive the poor into never ending cycles of indebtedness, the lending institutions reap huge profits by borrowing from big banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, US Bank and Bank of America at extremely low interest rates, “which they in turn lend out as payday loans charging between 260% and 570% APR”.

As the “Profiting off Poverty” report details, these companies continue to make record-breaking profits by setting up in neighborhoods isolated from traditional banking options. With more payday lending locations than McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S., these companies gladly admit that they are often the only available line of credit for people in poverty.

Major banks like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo finance about 42 percent of the entire payday loan industry in the U.S. Those loans strip $3.1 billion in wealth from low-income, working poor who are literally trying to pay bills from paycheck to paycheck. This kind of scheme exemplifies the need for an agency like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and indeed is the subject of the bureau’s first public hearing today in Alabama.

Newly-appointed bureau head Richard Cordray intends to research the industry and its enforcement actions that pose “immediate risk to consumers and are clearly illegal.” Endeavoring to answer whether regulation of the industry is necessary or whether the practice should be “explicitly restricted,” Cordray said that the goal will be “to develop a more vibrant, competitive market for small consumer loans.”

Last week, Senate Republicans filibustered the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The GOP’s plan to justify their filibuster seems to be portraying the CFPB director as a “czar” — a favorite way for Republicans to deride federal officials they don’t like — and falsely claiming that the position has some obscene amount of power.

For instance, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) last week said that the CFPB director would be akin to an “almighty god” with no oversight. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continued this narrative yesterday during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: What’s your problem with an agency that would protect consumers from mortgage lenders, from debt collectors and student lenders?

MCCONNELL: Yes, here’s the problem: this new agency answers to no one, absolutely no one — another unelected czar. We’ve got a bunch of those in the White House. We don’t need any more of them. And the only way we can incentivize the administration to change this agency which isn’t subject to oversight by Congress, doesn’t get its money from Congress, answers to literally to no one — it’s one individual who could bring down the banking system in this country if he chose to, has unlimited power. No one has that kind of power.

Watch it:

The GOP may have decided this is a clever line of attack, but that doesn’t make it any more true. For starters, the CFPB was created by an act of Congress, which mandated that the agency have a director. By McConnell’s logic, the head of every cabinet or regulatory agency is “another unelected czar.”

Moreover, it’s simply a lie to say that the CFPB director has unlimited power and is subject to no oversight. As we explained last week, the CFPB, unlike any of the other federal financial system regulators, can have it’s rules struck down by a vote of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a panel composed of the heads of the bank regulatory agencies, the Treasury Secretary, and the Federal Reserve Chairman. No other financial regulator is subject to this sort of check. Theoretically, the FSOC could veto each and every rule that the CFPB makes.

Finally, McConnell has a dim view of the banks in this country if he believes that consumer protection rules would bring the whole banking system down. Implicit in that argument is the belief that banks must rip people off in order to make a profit. McConnell’s rhetoric leads to the conclusion that the GOP not only believes banks must hose consumers to survive, but that Republicans are only too happy to help the banks achieve that end.

Senate Republicans today filibustered the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For months, the GOP has been insisting that it would not confirm any director for the Bureau until the Bureau’s structure is changed so as to weaken it significantly.

Since the GOP’s ultimate goal is to render the Bureau as toothless as possible, it makes sense for senators to portray the Bureau’s director as some out-of-control bureaucrat taking credit cards away from hard-working families. (This is the same tactic that they used during the debate over the creation of the Bureau.) On CNN today, a clearly fired-up Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) went so far as to call the Bureau’s director an “almighty god,” falsely claiming that the Bureau has no oversight:

We can not give a total czar, that even the President can’t suggest things to or can’t control, running this agency and determining the creditworthiness, the credit situation for people all over the country…You’re going to give a total czar total power, not even reportable to the President, not reportable to the appropriations processes and Congress, not reportable to Congress, total power over the credit of people throughout the country. That is not what our country’s about, we’ve never done that before, and yet that is how broadly this Dodd-Frank bill is…What we’re asking for is not unusual, it certainly isn’t flagrant, it certainly isn’t execessive, it’s having a board of directors that supervises this person so that this person is not an almighty god in bureaucratic dress.

Watch it:

Hatch’s rant would be amusing if it weren’t so wildly off-base. The Consumer Protection Bureau, unlike any of the other federal financial system regulators, can have it’s rules vetoed by a vote of what’s called the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a panel of composed of the heads of the regulatory agencies along with the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chairman. Literally no other regulator is subject to this kind of check.

Senate Republicans have been raking in millions in donations from Wall Street banks as they’ve continued to block Cordray’s confirmation. In the meantime, the only agency meant explicitly to protect consumers from financial industry excess — and which already has extraordinary restraints placed upon it — isn’t allowed to get off the ground. (And, at the end of the day, doesn’t Hatch know that it’s the Congressional Budget Office that’s actually god on Capitol Hill?)

The Senate today is scheduled to vote on the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It’s unlikely, at this point, that Democrats have enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Forty-five Republican senators have pledged to block any nominee until structural changes are made to the Bureau that would undermine its effectiveness.

Wall Street banks have been fighting the new agency tooth and nail, and as it turns out, the 45 Republicans who have vowed to block the agency’s director have been lavished with donations from the financial services industry, as the Public Campaign Action Fund noted:

– The 44 Senate Republicans who signed a letter in May pledging to filibuster any CFPB nominee (plus Sen. Dean Heller who later added his name once appointed to the Senate) have received over $6.5 million from the financial industry in 2011 and nearly $125.6 million over their careers.

– Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking committee (and lead signer of the letter), has received at least $81,850 in 2011 and $6.2 million from the FIRE sector throughout his career.

Shelby, in fact, received a $5,000 donation from Goldman Sachs the day after he denounced the Bureau as “dangerous.”

So far, just one Republican has broken ranks and said that he will support Cordray: Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who is facing a strong challenge from Prof. Elizabeth Warren. As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser has noted, if the GOP continues to filibuster Cordray, President Obama can always break out the Roosevelt precedent, in order to allow Cordray to do his job and allow the Bureau to begin the work for which it was created.