As Donald Trump and his crew of wannabe-oligarchs take over and file off the teeth of every government protection agency in the country, it’s good to know how transparently swamp-filled the White House has actually become. When rumors began that OMB head Mick Mulvaney was being tapped to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it would have been laughable if it wasn’t really happening. International Business Times put in a FOIA requestion to the CFPB and received hundreds of pages of correspondence between them and Mick Mulvaney. Guess what Mr. Mulvaney was asking them about?
During his congressional campaigns, Mulvaney vacuumed in more than $567,000 from donors in the commercial banking, credit and securities/investment industries, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That includes more than $55,000 from donors in the payday and title loan industry, according to datafrom the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
The letters reviewed by IBT show that much of Mulvaney’s criticism of the CFPB revolved around the agency’s attempts to regulate the payday lending industry, which provides short term, high-interest loans.
The unregulated scam of payday loans was beginning to see a possible comeuppance over the past year and a half as more and more consumers were banding together and demanding satisfaction. The payday loan industry got their man in Mulvaney, and Mulvaney got his position at the top of the agency that could regulate their predatory practices. There’s a treasure trove that IBT put together, of Mulvaney’s letters to the CFPB, along with other Republican colleagues, attacking things like mortgage regulations—but mostly the payday loan protections.
One such CFPB effort came in June 2016, when the agency proposed a rule that it said would require payday and title lenders to “reasonably determine that the consumer has the ability to repay the loan.” The CFPB also said that for certain loans “with an annual percentage rate greater than 36 percent,” lenders would be barred from withdrawing “payment from a consumer’s account after two consecutive payment attempts have failed.”
Three months after the agency proposed the rule, Mulvaney and eleven other lawmakers wrote a letter to the agency asserting that the rule “has the potential to severely restrict access to credit that millions of Americans rely on” and arguing that “in an effort to keep unscrupulous actors out or the industry the CFPB will simultaneously be harming the very consumers it is trying to protect.”
Mulvaney’s campaign was compensated handily for those kind words. According to IBT, they received a quick $18,500 from payday lenders’ related outfits. #DrainTheSwamp.