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The Destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is Disgusting
Congressional Republicans have fought unrelentingly for years to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, put into place under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The purpose of the CFPB is to promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services. The CFPB was created to provide a single point of accountability for enforcing federal consumer financial laws and protecting consumers in the financial marketplace.
Remaking the agency, which has unusual authority and independence, has been a priority for Republicans since it was created in 2010. The agency often took an aggressive stance toward regulating and punishing businesses. It extracted nearly $12 billion in refunds and canceled debts for 29 million consumers.
The destruction of the CFPB took a terribly large step in early December when Mick Mulvaney became its acting leader, named by Trump. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is effectively complete.
Under the statute that created the CFPB, the watchdog agency set up after the 2008 crash to police lending abuses, it should now be rightfully run by Leandra English, the deputy director who succeeds the just-resigned director, Richard Cordray, until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. Trump found another statute that he says lets him appoint Mulvaney. English filed suit to defend her legitimacy... and a Trump-appointed federal judge, to nobody’s surprise, ruled in Trump’s favor. An appeal is likely.
.... ultimately, the “coup” will succeed. Whether it’s Mulvaney (who has called the bureau he now proposes to lead a “joke”) or somebody else, Trump will eventually be able to install a director who can defang the watchdog — and Wall Street bankers and corporate lobbyists will plant their flag of conquest at another agency. Already, Mulvaney says he’s freezing new hiring, new rules and payouts to consumers from a penalty fund..
So about that statue that Trump's people found that allow him to appoint Mulvaney immediately..... what is that statue he got one of his newly appointed judges to agree to?
.... the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the memo justifying Trump’s takeover, was a lead counsel for Canadian payday lender NDG Financial, which the CFPB cited for misleading and overcharging U.S. customers. Trump’s legal justification for taking control of the CFPB was written by a lawyer who until just a few months ago was defending a foreign payday lender against the agency’s attempts to punish it for lending abuses.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
It’s difficult to imagine something swampier than a corporate lawyer joining the government and then orchestrating the disarming of a federal agency in litigation with his former client.
Now that Mulvaney is in charge, here's an immediate examples of he and the Republicans' dismantling of the agency he's supposedly leading. This is OUR government that was PROTECTING US from being ROBBED by CORPORATE FRAUD and now Trump's people are saying it's OK, carry on.
After a three-year legal skirmish, the CFPB was victorious. A judge agreed in September that a financial company had misled more than 100,000 mortgage customers. As punishment, the judge ordered Nationwide Biweekly Administration to pay nearly $8 million in penalties. All that was left was to collect the cash. Last week, lawyers from the consumer bureau filed an 11-page brief asking the judge to force Nationwide to post an $8 million bond while the proceedings wrapped up.
Then Mick Mulvaney was named acting director. Barely 48 hours later, the same lawyers filed a new two-sentence brief. Their request: to withdraw their earlier submission and no longer take a position on whether Nationwide should put up the cash.
If you can stomach it, there's more immediate changes, just in his first week on the job working against the American people.
Mulvaney briefly stopped approval of payments to some victims of financial crime, halted hiring, froze all new rule-making and ordered a review of active investigations and lawsuits. Some, he has indicated, will be abandoned.
The bureau has been investigating Santander, the giant Spanish bank, for overcharging auto loan customers. Given the tenor of recent conversations inside the bureau, agency lawyers suspect the investigation could be shelved under Mr. Mulvaney, according to four people with knowledge of the case....
Mulvaney has begun examining lawsuits filed by the agency and its process of gathering information from companies under investigation. That same day, the bureau suspended an inquiry into a company that had objected to the regulator’s demands for information.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/business/cfpb-mick-mulvaney.html