So, I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why every American has a stake in Wall Street reform.

First and foremost, you have a stake in it if you’ve ever been treated unfairly by a credit card company, misled by pages and pages of fine print, or ended up paying fees and penalties you’d never heard of before. And you have a stake in it if you’ve ever tried to take out a home loan, a car loan, or a student loan, and been targeted by the predatory practices of unscrupulous lenders.

The Wall Street reform bill in Congress represents the strongest consumer financial protections in history. You’ll be empowered with the clear and concise information you need to make the choices that are best for you. We’ll help stop predatory practices, and curb unscrupulous lenders, helping secure your family’s financial future.

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With reform, we’ll make our financial system more transparent by bringing the kinds of complex, backroom deals that helped trigger this crisis into the light of day. We’ll prevent banks from taking on so much risk that they could collapse and threaten our whole economy. And we’ll give shareholders more of a say on pay to help change the perverse incentives that encouraged reckless risk-taking in the first place. Put simply, Wall Street reform will bring greater security to folks on Main Street.

You can view the full remarks here.

Democrats helped Krystal Ball (D-Fredericksburg) shed the presumptive nominee label by selecting her to be the official democratic nominee from Virginia’s 1^st Congressional District at a convention this past Saturday.

Ball wasted little time in drawing a sharp contrast between her and Congressman Rob Wittman (R-Montross).

When we passed Social Security they threatened to repeal it, when we passed Medicare they threatened to repeal it and now, now that we have passed health care reform they are threatening to repeal it. Well I have one message for Eric Cantor and John Boehner and to Rob Wittman. Let me say this clearly. I don’t care what your buddies in the health insurance lobby want we are not going backwards!

So what are Wittman’s legislative priorities? You’ll have to ask Eric Cantor (R-VA-7^th).

As long as we have politicians like Rob Wittman, nothing is going to change. You know Rob Wittman. He has been our Congressman for three years now. And in that three years he’s basically learned one thing, which is how to vote the way Eric Cantor tells him to.

You see Wittman is nothing more than a lap dog for Cantor. As I’ve previously written, Wittman has done Cantor’s bidding 1657 times or 93 percent of time. Folks in Virginia’s 1^st district deserve some real representation and not a lap dog!

Ball also notes that while folks in the 1^st district are being left behind, Wittman is taking good care of his friends on Wall Street.  While Wittman votes against extending unemployment insurance, he fights to preserve Wall Street executive bonuses. It’s called “No Banker Left Behind!”

Worse yet, while Wittman fights for Wall Street over Main Street, he also continues to pay lip service to our veterans and the environment. Priorities Rob, priorities!

Rob Wittman is the worst kind of politician. He is the kind of politician who talks about veterans and then votes against Sen. Webb’s 21st century GI bill. He is the type of politician, who talks about the [Chesapeake] Bay, and how important it is and how we have to clean it up, and then he turns around and votes against the Clean Estuaries Act. Rob Wittman takes his orders from credit cards companies, health insurance companies and banks. But you know what, those guys already have enough members of congress fighting for them. We need a fighter for the 1^st district of Virginia!

Ball concluded things best by saying that voters have a clear choice come November.

They can choose between tax cuts for the few and balancing the budget for everyone, between preserving the middle class and preserving Wall Street executive bonuses, between leaders who are willing to stand up for what’s right and those who only stand for their own re-election.

It’s time to fire wrong way Rob and hire a full-time representative who stands up for Main Street over Wall Street, who does more than provide lip service to our veterans and environment and who doesn’t take orders from credit card companies, health insurance companies or banks, but the American people. That person is clearly Krystal Ball!

Now, unsurprisingly, these reforms have not exactly been welcomed by the people who profit from the status quo – as well their allies in Washington.  This is probably why the special interests have spent a lot of time and money lobbying to kill or weaken the bill.  Just the other day, in fact, the Leader of the Senate Republicans and the Chair of the Republican Senate campaign committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue.

Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed.  In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite.  Every day we don’t act, the same system that led to bailouts remains in place – with the exact same loopholes and the exact same liabilities.  And if we don’t change what led to the crisis, we’ll doom ourselves to repeat it.  That’s the truth.  Opposing reform will leave taxpayers on the hook if a crisis like this ever happens again.

So my hope is that we can put this kind of politics aside.  My hope is that Democrats and Republicans can find common ground and move forward together.  But this is certain: one way or another, we will move forward.  This issue is too important.  The costs of inaction are too great.  We will hold Wall Street accountable.  We will protect and empower consumers in our financial system. That’s what reform is all about. That’s what we’re fighting for.  And that’s exactly what we’re going to achieve.

Read the full transcript here.