Share
Trump Administration is Systematically Ending Consumer Protections to the Delight of Corporations
The slogan "Drain the Swamp" actually meant undoing many well-researched societal protections put in place over the years. These protections, known to most as regulations, can take years and sometimes a decade to implement. Republicans are thrilled to have control of Congress despite the lunatic in the White House so they can undo as many as possible at the behest of their corporate overlords.
Trump and the regulators he appointed....delaying key regulations and imposing fewer penalties against financial institutions and other corporations accused of wrongdoing....
Without getting into great detail, here are a few high level examples:
- At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau... enforcement actions have dropped from an average of three-to-five each month during the past four years down to zero since a Trump appointee took charge of the agency in late November.
- Labor Department has delayed full implementation of a rule requiring financial advisers to act in their clients’ best interest.
- Department of Education has withdrawn Obama-era regulations meant to strengthen protections for student borrowers.
These politicians are elected or appointed solely to work on our behalf. Yet they do the exact opposite, accepting money from industry groups and lobbyist and pay them back by making or changing rules to favor them at our peoples' expense.
The new approach — welcomed by banks and business leaders — has alarmed consumer advocates who fear it gives an advantage to Wall Street and other powerful industries while leaving ordinary Americans more susceptible to fraud, discrimination and predatory lending.
The new direction affects agencies that touch nearly every aspect of consumer life.... from how Americans access credit and car loans to the safety of cribs and cellphones.
As has been well-documented on Smart Dissent (here, here, and here), some of the most aggregious offenses have been at the CONSUMER Financial Protection Bureau. Not a week goes by without a blistering report of Mick Mulvaney's destruction of the CFPB, truly one of the most infuriating results of this presidency.
Nowhere is Trump’s deregulatory efforts more evident than at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent watchdog agency established after the financial crisis that has delivered more than $12 billion in consumer relief to more than 29 million people.
He installed White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who once compared government regulations to a “slow cancer” and called the bureau a “joke,” as the bureau’s interim leader last November.... has not filed any new enforcement cases since he took charge, would increasingly defer to state regulators and attorneys generals rather than file its own lawsuits, he told a group of state attorneys general also in Washington last week for a conference.
Last week, Mulvaney told a gathering of credit union executives what many had been clamoring to hear: “We are not going to bend over backward to try to come up with creative ways to sue people just because we have the authority to do that.”
Already, Mulvaney has bolstered the hopes of payday lenders.... in January dropped a nearly four-year-old investigation into a subprime lender that allegedly charged customers exorbitant interest rates. It also dropped a lawsuit against four payday lenders that charged interest rates as high as 950 percent.
The destruction of regulatory safeguards to protect us, often following lobbying and donations by various industries, reaches beyond the CFPB.
Smart Dissent's Education Page and literally dozens are posts discussing this next waste of life.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, last spring, revoked Obama-era directives that penalized student loan servicing companies for poor service and held companies accountable for providing borrowers with accurate and timely information about their debt.
Her actions.... place student borrowers at greater risk of default, followed complaints from companies that the demands would be expensive and unnecessarily time consuming. She has also delayed forgiving the loans of students defrauded by for-profit colleges.
Yes, there's more. Smart Dissent discussed the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Ann Marie Buerkle back in December 2017.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission also appears to be easing enforcement now that Trump has nominated Republican Ann Marie Buerkle to head the agency... Since Buerkle was named acting chair last February, the commission has overemphasized “collaborating” with manufacturers instead of investigating them and potentially assessing penalties....
The commission has yet to issue any penalties for the 2018 fiscal year, which began in October. It negotiated six penalties in the 2017 fiscal year averaging $4.9 million each and five penalties in 2016 averaging $6.3 million each.... Buerkle routinely voted against civil penalties for companies that failed to promptly report product safety problems.
THIS IS THE SWAMP. This seems like a sick, cruel joke. Except lives are actually being lost so there's nothing to joke about.