The Consumer Finance Protection Board started out all shiny and with considerable promise, though some critics say it was greatly underpowered. But the Trump regime is speedily turning it into a rotting husk.
Jeff Sovern is law professor at St. John’s University and a member of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. At The Conversation, he writes—Mick Mulvaney turned the CFPB from a forceful consumer watchdog into a do-nothing government cog:
[...] Many are wondering what will change once the president’s nomination to helm the bureau, Kathy Kraninger, is confirmed. We can’t be certain, because Kraninger has never spoken publicly about her views on consumer protection, but, given that she serves as Mulvaney’s deputy, I fear the answer is not much.
Many observers were surprised by the pick of Kraninger, who is not known to have any experience with the laws that the bureau enforces and interprets.
You might think that’s not a big deal. After all, how difficult can it be to master consumer law, which ought to be readily understandable by consumers?
But the truth is that consumer law is often terribly complex. I still learn new things about consumer law every week, and I’ve been teaching it for 30 years.
Kraininger’s supporters have noted that she acquired considerable managerial experience as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget and deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. That may help her with management issues, but it’s hard to see how it will help her make decisions about which cases to bring or what protections consumers need.
To make the problem even worse, the CFPB’s jurisdiction is vast. The next director will have to work with laws governing credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, student loans, car loans, debt collection, consumer leases, payday loans, credit reports, lending discrimination and much more. In short, the director’s work touches the life of nearly every American in multiple ways –which makes it important that the director know what she is doing.
Bureau critics complain that it is too powerful, making ignorance of the law even more troublesome. In fact, even a conservative commentator has said that Kraninger lacks the needed expertise, comparing her nomination with President George W. Bush’s ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in 2005. [...]
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QUOTATION
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution”
~~Aldous Huxley (1961)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Agreement Signed to Build Nuclear Fusion Reactor:
The existing crop of nuclear power plants all rely on fission, a somewhat messy process which yields some rather unpleasant radioactive waste products behind. So it's heartening to see that an international consortium has agreed to try to build a fusion reactor:
Science's quest to find a cheap and inexhaustible way to meet global energy needs took a major step forward on Tuesday when a 30-nation consortium chose France to host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor.
After months of wrangling, France defeated a bid from Japan and signed a deal to site the 10-billion-euro experimental reactor in Cadarache, near Marseille. The project will seek to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy. It would be cleaner than current nuclear reactors, would not rely on enriched uranium fuel or produce plutonium.
It may be many, many years before this project yields any positive results, if it ever does. But given the twin problems of fossil fuel shortages and pollution that our current system faces, I think this is the kind of bold experiment we need to undertake.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Once again under the cloud of a mass shooting, and this one’s on them. The much talked-about backstory on Kennedy's retirement. Trump's getting his military parade after all. Putin's puppetry continues. "Abolish ICE" moves the Overton window.
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