The most common complaint to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concerns efforts to collect medical bills that are not owed, reports CBS News. The unpaid bills are then reported to credit agencies, triggering a credit crisis for the victim whose most straightforward solution is to pay the fraudulent charges. — Read the rest
The predatory payday lending industry — "'legalized loan sharks collect 75 percent of their fees from people stuck in more than 10 loans a year by charging 300 percent APR" — is lobbying hard to kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's proposed "debt trap" rule, "that would require lenders to determine whether borrowers can afford to pay back their loans and cut off repeated debit attempts that rack up fees and make it harder for consumers to get out of debt."
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a rare gem in the US financial regulatory apparatus, a regulator that actually tackles fraud and criminality by monied, powerful financial institutions, exacts meaningful penalties from them, and forces them to stop. They're one of the only things standing between you and highway robbery.
If you're behind on your bills, beware of any stranger attempting to "friend" you. It could be a debt collector taking advantage of new federal rules approved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that allow them to use social media to communicate with debtors. — Read the rest
In 2018, Katie Porter flipped a Republican safe seat — it had literally never been held by a Democrat– in California's 45th District, and since then, she has been a delightful, brilliant terror of a lawmaker, using her deep background in finance law (she's a tenured finance law prof at UC Irvine who literally wrote the textbook on consumer finance law in the wake of Dodd-Frank and Elizabeth Warren's establishment of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau).
Elizabeth Warren's bid for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination has been dominated by a series of bold, detailed policy proposals that are designed to enact deep, structural changes in American law and policy to reverse 40 years of post-Reagan corruption and wealth accumulation by the richest 1%.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that 67 percent of people filing for bankruptcy were wiped out by medical bills. That amounts to 530,000 families per year, a "figure that is virtually unchanged since before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)." — Read the rest
Mark Corbett has settled with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — founded by Elizabeth Warren and then gutted by Trump appointee and awful person Mick Mulvaney, now the White House Chief of Staff — over the complaints that he ran an illegal loan-sharking operation that swindled veterans out of their pensions for a decade. — Read the rest
Is 911 service down in your area? Got a complaint about your mobile provider? Just invented a new iphone-killer, and need safety approval before your product goes to market? Well, too bad, you'll have to wait. The Federal Communications Commission just went dark. — Read the rest
Andrew Smith is Trump's chief of the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, in charge of investigating companies that abuse Americans — but he can't, because he has previously provided services for over 100 of America's largest companies, including Facebook, a whack of payday lenders, Amazon, American Airlines, Amex, BoA, Capital One, Citigroup, John Deere, Equifax, Expedia, Experian, Glaxosmithkline, Goldman Sachs, Jpmorgan, Linkedin, Microsoft, Paypal, Redbubble, Twitter, Sotheby's, Transunion, Uber, Verizon, Visa, Disney and Wells Fargo.
Sheryl Sandberg asked Facebook staff to research George Soros because he gave a speech boldly critical of the social media giant as a "menace," reports the New York Times tonight.
Last year, the FCC was only able to ram through a repeal of Net Neutrality by refusing to reject the millions of comments sent by bots that used the stolen identities of regular internet users, dead people, and even sitting US Members of Congress.