After being bested by Hillary Clinton in a primary contest that saw the deck stacked against him by the Clinton Machine, Bernie is back in the Senate doing what he has always done for the past 30-odd years – fighting a system rigged against blue-collar and middle-class America.
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Meantime, the Improbable President has larded his Cabinet and cadre of counselors with bespoke denizens of the financial community – the very people he railed against – and is working to undermine protections put in place to give the voters who elected him a means to fight back against the banks and credit-card companies that gnaw at their paychecks.
As the Senate prepares to confirm the Treasury Secretary nomination of Steve Mnuchin—an ex-Goldman Sachs banker and financier who foreclosed on thousands of families, including active-duty troops, during the housing bust—Republicans are working to dismantle or neuter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Conservative knives are out for the CFPB, created after the financial crisis as an agency to rein in the excesses of the financial industry. The President who promised on Jan. 9, 2016, when he was campaigning in Iowa, “I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us. We're going to tax Wall Street," seems to be fine with that.
When The Daily Caller asked Press Secretary Sean Spicier, does the President intends to revamp the CFPB yesterday, Trump basically dodged the question. For the record, Barack Obama had 34 former employees from Goldman Sachs in his administration, including Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff; Stephen Friedman, Chair of Obama’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury; and Larry Summers, chief economic advisor.
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As The New York Times reported yesterday, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling has a plan that would make it easier to replace the leadership of the CFPB and at the same time “limit the bureau’s enforcement authority, reduce its ability to make rules and repeal its consumer complaint system.”
In addition, The Times said that the plan contained in a leaked memo from Hensarling, once said to be under consideration for Treasury Secretary, called for legislation that “would also greatly shrink the enforcement tools at the consumer watchdog’s disposal, blocking it from being able to go after businesses engaged in deceptive practices and restricting its oversight of big publicly traded companies that are already regulated by agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Hensarling called the CFPB “the most destructive and dangerous of the new regulatory bureaucracies” created by the Obama Administration.
One of the dangerous and destructive acts of the CFPB was to join with the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office and Office of the Controller of the Currency in going after Wells Fargo for a scheme in which some 2 million bogus bank and credit-card accounts were opened without customers’ knowledge. (The regulators acted after a 2013 investigation by The Los Angeles Times.)
Wells Fargo paid $185 million in fines, including $100 million to the CFPB. Its CEO, John Stumpf was forced to resign. And a recent story in Politico says the bureau’s “enforcement of consumer-protection laws has returned $11.7 billion to people harmed by banks, credit card companies and mortgage companies.”
The Hensarling scheme to undercut the CFPB by making it easier for the President to replace the director, who now can be dismissed only for “cause,” isn’t the only right-wing effort to get rid of Richard Cordray, the agency’s first and only leader since it opened for business in 2012. Cordray has said he intends to complete his term, which ends in 2018.
In a pathetically chicken-something quest for evidence to use against Cordray, The Cause of Action Institute, a so-called government watchdog group, sent a letter to the CFPB director on Wednesday saying he may have violated the Federal Records Act by not saving text messages sent from his private phone to agency employees, The Hill reported.
Cause of Action, according to the Los Angeles Times, is backed by an arm of the billionaire Koch brothers’ vast political influence network. A 2015 story in The Times said, “Tax records show that by 2013, [Cause of Action’s] operations were mostly funded by $4.35 million from Donors Trust, a nonprofit group through which the Kochs and their allies distribute tens of millions of dollars without needing to disclose the sources of the funds.”
The Cause of Action website says the institute's vision is "A society in which liberty and opportunity are fortified by a fair, accountable, limited, and transparent government."
Asked about its backers, a spokesperson said in an email: "We at Cause of Action Institute respect our donors’ anonymity and therefore we do not identify them."
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One reason the GOP may be so hell-bent on taking the teeth out of the CFPB is that it is largely the creation of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive firebrand from Massachusetts who promoted the notion of a voice for the little guy when she was a law professor at Harvard. She managed to get under Trump’s thin skin many times during the campaign and is fast-becoming the face of Democratic Party efforts to confront and confound his presidency.
Bernie Sanders, though, said it all on CNN last Sunday when he allowed that while he didn’t mean to be disrespectful, Trump is “a fraud.”
“This guy ran for president of the United States saying, ‘I, Donald Trump, I’m going to take on Wall Street. These guys are getting away with murder.’ And then suddenly, he appoints all these billionaires.” Sanders told Jake Tapper. “His major financial adviser comes from Goldman Sachs. And now he is going to dismantle legislation that protects consumers."
The Cause of Action website says the institute's vision is "A society in which liberty and opportunity are fortified by a fair, accountable, limited, and transparent government."
Asked about its backers, a spokesperson said in an email: "We at Cause of Action Institute respect our donors’ anonymity and therefore we do not identify them."
