An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- March 18, 2024
- March 17, 2024
- March 16, 2024
- March 15, 2024
- March 14, 2024
- March 13, 2024
- March 12, 2024
Payday lenders switched their trade show to a Trump hotel and sent Trump at least a million bucks, then he gave them carte blanche to make billions preying on poor people
The payday lending industry is the pinnacle of predatory, corrupt capitalism, unabashed loan sharks who prey on the poorest and most desperate Americans, charging interest rates in the hundreds and even thousands of percent APR, using strongarm tactics including threats of violence and rape to collect on debts, and papering over the whole thing by flooding notice-and-comment proceedings with bot-generated comments and secretly bribing academics to write papers explaining that usury is a social good.
Payday lending got a lot more vicious and a lot more profitable under Obama, thanks to the financial crisis and the decision to bail out banks but not the people they stole from, but in a parting shot, Obama created Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which imposed modest regulations on the sector, just as Obama was leaving office. Predictably, Trump reversed all that, even making a loan-shark an assistant AG (the Trump campaign took millions from payday lender PACs).
Now, Propublica reports from the second annual payday lending convention to be held at the Trump Doral resort (the industry had never held an event at a Trump property prior to Trump's election), which have pumped at least $1m into Trump's personal coffers. The investigation reveals the suite of measures that Trump has put in place to benefit the predatory lending industry, and describe how Warren and Obama's plan to Republican-proof the CFPB by giving it an untouchable executive who wouldn't be subject to executive or congressional meddling backfired spectacularly when their chairman, Richard Cordray, quit to run unsuccessfully for the governorship of Ohio, leaving his position vacant for Trump to fill with a series of deplorable swamp creatures who have gutted the bureau. Read the rest
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/4mv9bOWx6Hc/great-roi.html