Sen. Dodd (D-Conn.)

Recently, a financial industry lobbyist said because Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) is retiring, he is now free to “dance with the special interests that brought him to the dance in the first place. Us, his loyal donors in the banking community” (from Politico).

In fact, Dodd is now free to do the right thing and hold the banksters accountable. Because he’s not running for re-election, he’s no longer beholden to big banks for campaign contributions. It’s not too late for Sen. Dodd to make protecting Main Street — not dancing with Wall Street — his legacy.

We’ve set up two petitions you can use to tell Dodd to stand up for us, the people who are struggling through the Great Recession. One is here on our Web site.

The other is a little less traditional. We set up a petition using http://act.ly/that uses Twitter to send the petition directly to Dodd’s Twitter account, @SenChrisDodd. You can sign the petition by going here or simply by “re-tweeting” this message: petition @SenChrisDodd to Stand up to #WallSt & fight for your strong #consumer protection bill http://act.ly/1l6 RT to sign #actly #p2. (And while you’re on Twitter, you can follow us at @Public_Citizen.) Hundreds have already signed!

Why send the petition to Dodd? As Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he’s calling many of the shots in the fight for financial reform.

And he made a great start – late last year, he proposed a strong financial reform package (read the draft bill here) that would rein in Wall Street and create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to make sure fast-talking lenders can no longer rip off consumers or take risks with our economy that could trigger another financial crisis. But he needs to stick to his guns – and we need to tell him to keep up the good work.

Flickr photo by David Berkowitz.