When placing bets on who comes out of the Trump administration with indictments hanging over their heads, don't count out this Mick Mulvaney fellow. There’s got to be a shady backstory behind why this man is so obsessively dedicated to making sure that each individual segment of the most dodgy financial markets is able to continue their actions unimpeded. As "interim" Trump-appointed head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, his latest pet project is an effort to ensure predatory lenders and other industry scammers can more easily put their hooks into American military families.
No, really. That's what he's come up with: His plan is to halt the supervisory exams of lenders to ensure their practices comply with the Military Lending Act, a law enacted in response to the all-too-common practice of targeting low-income military families with loans featuring staggeringly high interest rates and other predatory behavior.
John Czwartacki, a spokesman for Mr. Mulvaney, said the rule change came from a top-to-bottom review of the bureau’s procedures geared at curtailing what the administration, along with lending industry executives, have criticized as overly aggressive enforcement by the bureau’s first director, Richard Cordray.
"Overly aggressive enforcement" of laws protecting military families? Got it. Now there's a cause that only Mick Mulvaney, protector of crooks and scammers nationwide, would dare take up.
For the record, the Military Lending Act forbids interest rates of more than 36 percent when lending to military families (credit cards are excluded, of course), and the payday loan industry and other overtly sleazy portions of the financial sector have been very mad about that for a very long time. Mulvaney can't kill the law, but he can bar government watchdogs from monitoring those companies. Apparently.
In any case, the current system of supervisory exams was by all non-crooked accounts quite the success, and more to the point has continued to prove itself shudderingly necessary:
Since its creation under the Obama administration in 2011, the consumer agency has returned more than $130 million to service members, veterans and their families and handled more than 72,000 complaints per year, according to the agency.
Now, it may be that former House Republican Mick Mulvaney is just very, very, very dedicated to stripping the functions of government down to their very core, no matter how many Americans it hurts or how much it hurts them. It's possible. But it's also possible that the man is just crooked, and is supremely devoted to allowing particular portions of the banking industry to abuse the public in whichever ways they like because he, Mick Mulvaney, expects to make big coin from the industry as a reward. He has been quite devoted to the payday loan industry in particular.
It would be wrong to just presume he's crooked. It would be mean, and wrong, and is totally unnecessary, which is why I'm staking my claim to it now before any other pundits can steal my thunder on this one: After all this is over we're going to find out that this man was crooked from his knees to his neck. I may be a cynic, but even I don’t think there’s an ex-congressman alive who would make it easier to steal from American military families—unless he had figured out a way to personally benefit from the grift.
