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takebackthedream · 6 years ago

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Real Corruption: Mick “Pay and We'll Talk” Mulvaney by Richard Eskow

It’s not just that Mick Mulvaney has no scruples; he has no shame.

It has become commonplace to see Trump administration officials, up to and including the president, abuse public resources for personal gain and comfort.

But private planes, $31,000 dining room sets, and other lavish expenditures at public expense are the petty rewards of narcissists. The corruption that matters most is the kind that hurts millions of Americans to enrich the tiny class of billionaires that is this regime’s true constituency.

When it comes to this kind of deep corruption, which perverts government’s role for the benefit of the privileged few, Mick Mulvaney is a master of the art. In fact, he’s made it his guiding principle.

Mulvaney’s Way

Mulvaney is Trump’s Budget Director. He is also doing double-duty as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency created by President Obamato protectconsumers from being ripped off by predatory and criminally-inclined banks.

As a member of Congress, Mulvaney once called the agency he now leads “sick, sad,” and a “joke.”

Even if Mulvaney uses his position at the CFPB to serve banks, it’ll still cost them. He pretty much said so, in a speech he recently gave to the American Bankers Association.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney told an audience of 1,300 bankers and loan company executives. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

That’s a vision of play-for-play government, and it’s a vision Mulvaney shares with Trump, his party, and other members of his administration.

“As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people,” Trump said in 2015, “when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do. As a businessman, I need that.”

Deficit Shrike

Mulvaney is not just a play-for-pay servant of the banker class, although he is clearly that. He is an economic extremist whose ideology demands that the poor and middle class be sacrificed on the altar of wealth. That’s why he wants to cut Medicare and Social Security, as well as programs to benefit the poor.

As Budget Director, Mulvaney has continued the ideological bait-and-switch he developed as a Tea Party Congressman and co-founder of the so-called “Freedom Caucus.” In Congress, he became known as a “deficit hawk.” Mulvaney obsessed over government deficits whenever progressive programs came on the block – despite the growing number of economists who say federal deficits don’t matter, at least in the way most conservative policymakers believe.

But Mulvaney switched his tune about deficits as soon as the opportunity arose to give money away to the rich. “I’m really not interested in how tax reform handles the deficit,” Mulvaney told CNBC.

Pay-to-Play

In one sense, paying for access has been a feature of our broken political system for a long time. In a little-noted comment to the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board, candidate Hillary Clinton said this in 2016:

I’ve gotten so many donations over so many years that and I’m very grateful for… there have been many (instances) where people have said, ‘Would I look into this.’ I always say I will look into something, but I always tell people there is no guarantee that if I look into something that you are going to like my answer, and that’s been my practice.

Clinton’s comments make plain that in politics, whatever your party, money buys access – if not guaranteed compliance. Her remarks reflect a status quo in the United States that is built around big-money campaign contributions. They bear a strong resemblance to Mulvaney’s, and provide further evidence that our campaign finance system is broken and corrupt, across party lines.

But Mulvaney’s version is even worse – because he was openly shaking down an entire industry for money in real time, and in public. That became even clearer when he went on to say that these cash-driven attempts to sway government officials were among the “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy.”

“And,” added Mulvaney, “you have to continue to do it.”

Government, C.O.D

So Mulvaney spelled out for bankers how the wheels get greased in Washington. How well has he delivered for his pay-to-play clients?

He was instrumental in passing the Trump/GOP tax cut bill, which is a massive wealth giveaway to the richest Americans. And when a “gimmick” was needed to push the bill through (that was Mulvaney’s term for it), the middle-class cuts were made temporary. The corporate tax cuts were made permanent, to protect gains for wealthy shareholders.

His obsession with cutting deficits was quickly discarded, as we’ve already seen.

As acting head of the CFPB, Mulvaney has served Wall Street with more alacrity and enthusiasm than a waiter at Delmonico’s during Friday night Happy Hour.

He shut down the Office for Students and Young Consumers, despite the fact that 44 million Americans owe roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt. As Americans for Financial Reform points out, that office has returned $750 million to borrowers, helped address 50,000 complaints, and provide information to student borrowers.

Closing it leaves borrowers with fewer defenses against predators in the banking industry and in loan servicers like Navient, the privatized student loan servicing company. An ethics investigation found that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had financial interests in this area.

The bill Mulvaney helped engineer netted the country’s six largest banks an estimated $3.6 billion in tax giveaways last quarter alone, according to the Associated Press. Their further enrichment is all but assured, now that Mulvaney has put a freeze on hiring and suspended rule-making at the agency. Enforcement actions are at a standstill.

Payday Predators

Mulvaney has been very kind to the payday lending industry, an especially predatory form of capitalism that preys on lower-income and minority communities. The industry specializes in luring customers into repeated short-term loans at rates that can exceed 400 percent annually. The CFPB had proposed rules to rein in this legalized usury, and Mulvaney is doing everything in his power to stop the implementation of those rules.

Payday lenders and their friends in government insist that they perform a useful function by providing banking services to the “unbanked.” That’s not true. There are other ways to meet the needs of the unbanked, including postal banking. A survey was taken after North Carolina banned payday banking, and “at a two-to-one ratio, former borrowers report that they are better off now that it’s gone.”

In a major win for consumer activists, Congress has now backed away from a bid to undo the CFPB’s final rule for payday lending and other high-rate loans. In a reflection of money’s corrosive political influence, that bid was introduced by a “bipartisan group of lawmakers.”

But this only increases concern that Mulvaney, who received tens of thousands of dollars from payday lenders while in Congress and has already ended the CFPB’s probe of payday loan collectors, will abuse his position at the CFPB once again for his benefactors.

Rough Water

Mulvaney appointed Eric Blankenstein, an attorney who opposed the CFPB in court, to a senior CFPB position. As the National Law Journal notes, Blankenstein came to the Trump Administration last September after spending eight years at white-shoe law firm Williams & Connolly.

Before joining the Trump Administration, Blankenstein represented TCF National Bank against the CFPB. The agency found that Blankenstein’s client had systematically tricked customers into accepting overdraft charges on ATM withdrawals and bank card use. The CFPB found that TCF had offered its employees up to $7,000 in bonuses for getting customers to accept the charges.

The program was so successful at bilking customers that the bank’s CEO reportedly named his boat the “Overdraft.”

That CEO is the kinds of person the Trump administration, and the entire Republican Party, exists to serve. And when that happens, working Americans pay a price.

In Mick Mulvaney’s case, Americans will pay every time their bank rips them off – in overdraft charges, foreclosures, short-term loans, and in ways yet to be determine. Bankers will buy more boats, while working Americans remain underwater.

And that’s the real corruption.

(See also, “Real Corruption: The Scott Pruitt Story.”)

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topinforma · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on Mortgage News

New Post has been published on http://bit.ly/2ikP4yU

the-war-around-cfpb-director-richard-cordray

The controversial position Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray sits in is only intensifying as government officials push to have him fired and policy groups urge consumers to defend him.

From surprisingly grabbing the role from Elizabeth Warren to getting grilled by Congress on the impact of financial regulations, the former Ohio attorney general has spent a lot of time in the hot seat. Most recently, HousingWire’s own Magazine Editor Sarah Wheeler argued that the CFPB’s enforcement approach is smoothing innovation in the mortgage industry.

But nothing compares to Cordray’s current situation, as his entire role at the CFPB, along with the CFPB itself, lies in question.

PHH won a landmark victory against the CFPB back in October 2015 after the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shockingly handed an earth-shattering victory to PHH, declaring the CFPB’s leadership structure unconstitutional and vacating a $103 million fine against PHH.

The move quickly escalated the viability of Corday getting kicked out office, following continuous talks from the House Financial Services Committee on the lack of accountability at the bureau.

In a unanimous decision of the three justices of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the court ruled that the CFPB’s current structure allows the director to wield far too much power, more than any other agency in the government.

In short, the court stated, the director of the CFPB is the “single most powerful official in the entire U.S. Government, other than the President,” in terms of unilateral power.

As a result of the decision, the CFPB will operate as an executive agency. The President of the United States will now have the power to supervise and direct the Director of the CFPB, and may remove the director at will at any time.

The CFPB, however, isn’t going down without a fight. Shortly thereafter in November 2015, the CFPB filed for an en banc review with the D.C. Court of Appeals, meaning that it wants the entire court to hear the case, rather than the three judges who ruled on the case in October. This is where the case still currently sits. Here’s the latest update on the case.

As America awaits a decision, politicians are trying to go a different route to get Cordray removed as director. Under the current law, the president may remove the director for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

An article from the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, however, noted that no president has removed an appointee for cause. “Most presidents have not attempted it and the three times a president has tried to remove an official with for-cause protections—on the ground that the for-cause protection were invalid (not that there was cause for removals)—the courts stopped the president from doing so.” The group urged that Cordray shouldn’t be the first.

But this isn’t stopping Republican politicians from pushing for it. On Monday, U.S. Sens. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, urged the incoming administration to fire Cordray in a letter.

“It’s time to fire King Richard,” said Sasse, a member of the Senate Banking Committee. “Underneath the CFPB’s Orwellian acronym is an attack on the American idea that the people who write are laws are accountable to the American people. President-elect Trump has the authority to remove Cordray and that’s exactly what the American people deserve.”

“The Constitution was written to protect the American people from unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats,” said Lee. “Considering the damage CFPB has done to credit unions and community banks, President Trump should act quickly to remove the director.”

However, policy groups are standing in the line of fire for Cordray and even made #defendCFPB one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter on Monday.

Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to protecting homeownership and family wealth by working to eliminate abusive financial practicesm published a piece on The Hill asserting that Americans can’t afford to lose Cordray or the CFPB. The article, which was published on Sunday, helped to rally support behind the trending hashtag.

Calhoun stated, “In its five years as an agency, the CFPB has recovered more than $11 billion for 27 million consumers harmed by illegal practices of financial institutions. The bureau has secured relief in more than 100 cases, directly putting money back in the pockets of American consumers who have been victimized by companies that refuse to follow the law.”

It’s this same passionate support for the CFPB that fueled many of the tweets seen below.

When #WellsFargo hid behind forced arbitration #RipoffClause to evade justice, @CFPB shined a light on their nasty tactics! #DefendCFPB

— People’s Action (@PplsAction) January 9, 2017

.@CFPB‘s proposed rule is “the best chance consumers have” to avoid the debt trap https://t.co/ssoWnSuhhc#DefendCFPB

— Consumer Federation (@ConsumerFed) January 9, 2017

The @CFPB is there to #ProtectConsumers from financial fraud: https://t.co/4ipQYueLQ5#DefendCFPBpic.twitter.com/822symkSFQ

— U.S. PIRG (@uspirg) January 9, 2017

For every $1 in funding @CFPB has returned $5 to victims of financial wrongdoing–standing up for you. https://t.co/o4TNQYdXo2#DefendCFPB

— Joe Valenti (@moneyjoev) January 9, 2017

The @CFPB has been incredibly successful, so why do some Senators want to weaken it? #DefendCFPB#StopTheDebtTrappic.twitter.com/cZP8RFCxGh

— StopTheDebtTrap (@StopTheDebtTrap) January 9, 2017

For now, the future of the CFPB and Cordray rests in the fate of two different situations. The first, which urges President-elect Donald Trump to fire Cordray, obviously requires Trump to be president. He doesn’t even take the position until Jan. 20.

The second situation has an even looser timeline as the court reviews the CFPB’s en banc review request. So for now, we can only wait and see.

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