Monday, February 10, 2020

BILLIONAIRE DEMOCRAT FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS TOM STEYER SAYS PAY ILLEGALS $22 PER HOUR TO KEEP THEM JUMPING OUR BORDERS



Tom Steyer Calls for $22 p/Hour Minimum Wage

 
Daniel Greenfield

The $15 an hour minimum wage hasn't cost enough jobs yet. Tom Steyer is trying to outbid his leftier rivals with a $22 an hour minimum wage.
Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer says he would call for a $22 hourly minimum wage if elected president.
The billionaire climate activist made that call during a campaign block party on Sunday afternoon in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Others in the field have called for an increase to $17 an hour.
Steyer is a billionaire. Maybe he can cover it out of his pocket change. 
A national minimum wage is estimated to kill nearly 4 million jobs. How many would that $22 wage kill?
So it's time for Bloomberg to call for a $25 minimum wage and for Bernie Sanders to call for eliminating money and paying everyone in moldy bread from the collective farms.



THERE IS A REASON WHY ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS AND WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIY!

The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.

Tom Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants

 

Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans to provide cheap housing to illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will … ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is combined with promises to provide illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for immigrants to share their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster opportunities for public service that support new Americans, and coordinate with Federal agencies and the private sector in order to build workforce training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with professional qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their specialized skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though housing costs for many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far from work and friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger families.
But those housing costs are high partly because the federal government welcomes one million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities, neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will not be moving into his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New Yorker magazine described his house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

Any inflow of migrants will be a boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers, and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent gain since 2015, even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal housing agency reported January 7 the state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476), despite California’s population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example, another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the United States, according to a Gallup survey published right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S.”


California's poverty rate is worse than Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages -- and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW 

California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs




Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people. We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If you look in New York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable, regardless of their immigration status, to come and get city services. I was always determined that they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need like life-threatening things and does not get medical care. This is not a game. You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New York are very high because it has huge populations of illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has a homeless population of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying jobs, according to a 2017 study about the rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a January 9 meeting. 
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’ housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s immigration plan, for example, is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy, reunite families, and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will immediately issue guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple administrative immigration violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance ensuring that detention is only used where it is actually necessary because an individual poses a flight or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees in my first year, and ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand … As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S. cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new corporate headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan partly because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue. “It is a very potent issue,” he observed.


A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration helps investors in major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland & rural towns. So it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration to spike family housing prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt 

NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers









Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait




Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
The plan would scrap Clinton-era 

regulations that allowed illegal 

immigrants to sign up for assistance 

without having to disclose their status.


Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.

Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years

 

In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.

Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/10/exclusive-mo-brooks-masters-universe-want-more-immigration-decrease-incomes-americans/

Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
 10 Mar 2019122
3:19



Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare … plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific). 
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 



Bank founded by Tom Steyer has long record of lawsuits against low-income borrowers

Beneficial State Bank charged auto loan borrowers as high as 27.99 percent interest rate

 

1 of 12
Presidential candidate Tom Steyer speaks during the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in San Francisco on August 23, 2019. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP)
By CASEY TOLAN | ctolan@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: January 26, 2020 at 5:00 am | UPDATED: January 26, 2020 at 3:39 pm
Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the photo gallery on a mobile device.
In one of his many campaign ads airing across California, presidential candidate Tom Steyer has touted the work of a nonprofit-owned bank he founded, portraying it as a counterweight to Wall Street corruption.
But while the Oakland-based institution has a well-regarded record of making socially responsible investments, its auto loan program has left behind a long trail of defaults and lawsuits against low-income borrowers in the state, a Bay Area News Group review of financial and legal documents found.
Beneficial State Bank — which Steyer co-founded with his wife, Kat Taylor, and served as board chairman until joining the presidential race in July 2019 — has filed lawsuits and won court judgments against 1,800 borrowers who fell behind on their payments over the past three-and-a-half years, out of more than 22,000 total loans, according to court records and data provided by bank executives.
Most of the lawsuits were concentrated in some of California’s poorest Central Valley counties. One lawyer who’s represented borrowers in numerous car lending cases called the bank’s litigation strategy the most aggressive he’d seen by an auto lender to collect on loans.
In interviews, a janitor, meat cutter, preschool teacher and hotel manager who defaulted on loans from Beneficial and were sued by the bank described spiraling into debt, unable to keep up with annual interest rates as high as 27.99 percent — only to lose their cars to repossession. None of them had any idea that the bank that brought them to court was founded by a billionaire candidate for president.
“I kinda thought we were getting robbed,” said Justin Casto, who works at an Oakdale meat company and received a 27.99 percent loan from the bank. “There’s no way I’m able to pay what they’re asking for, and my credit is so shot now it’s unreal.”
The auto loan program came to Beneficial with its acquisition of a separate Central Valley bank in June 2016. Steyer and Taylor say they inherited that bank’s practices and have been significantly overhauling the business in order to help people with poor or no credit get cars: In January 2018, bank executives said, Beneficial capped interest rates for new loans at 19.99 percent and improved its underwriting model to successfully reduce defaults.
But Beneficial has continued to charge some borrowers who signed their loans before 2018 considerably higher rates, and taken them to court when they default — collecting on loans and interest rates that bank executives say they would not approve under their current standards. When a lender successfully sues a borrower, they’re entitled to garnish part of their paychecks to cover the balance of the loan.
Beneficial said it has made over 22,000 auto loans, including loans inherited from the acquisition, and that the 1,800 court judgments also include many cases that stem from those older loans. Executives point out that the large majority of borrowers are successfully repaying, and say that the bank has a responsibility to collect on defaulted loans in order to stay solvent and protect other customers’ deposits.
In an interview, Steyer — who gets no profit from Beneficial and has never been involved in its day-to-day management — said he was proud of the bank’s practices and stressed that “it’s trying to do well enough to stay in business to make more loans to help more people.”
“There is no attempt here to do anything except run a loan program that gives people access to capital in a way that will help their lives,” he said. “If it doesn’t work in some case … do we feel terrible about that? Sure. Is that working out for us? Absolutely not. Is there anything deceptive or is there something we’re trying to get out of that? Absolutely not. But in a loan program, are some people not going to make it? Yeah.”
Still, Steyer said he was “disturbed” that the bank had been charging borrowers as high a rate as 27.99 percent, saying he had “never heard that high number before.”
A new kind of bank
Steyer, who made his $1.6 billion fortune through a San Francisco hedge fund, started Beneficial — originally named OneCalifornia — with Taylor in 2007. The purpose, they say, was to show how a bank with a public mission could serve as a tool for social good, just as the financial collapse was shaking public confidence in Wall Street.
The bank is owned by a nonprofit, the Beneficial State Foundation, which is mandated to reinvest all of its profits in the community. Steyer and Taylor, who serves as CEO, receive no financial benefit from Beneficial’s work, even though they’ve donated more than $110 million as capital for the bank.
Beneficial has launched respected programs helping fund small businesses, affordable housing developments and green energy projects. It refuses to invest in private prisons or fossil fuels and has received accolades from groups urging corporate social responsibility.
Beneficial got into the auto loan business through its June 2016 acquisition of the Central Valley bank Pan American. It aimed to transform the bank to serve used-car borrowers with poor credit and offer an alternative to predatory payday loans, executives said.
Beneficial executives said it took the company until January 2018 to restructure Pan American’s lending practices because of the need to rewrite its computer programs. The bank “had a software underwriting application system that everything was hardcoded in, in terms of credit profile and pricing,” Randell Leach, Beneficial’s chief operating officer, said in an interview.
In that year and a half, Beneficial continued making loans under the old system. The alternative, Leach said, would have been “shutting off the entire business.”
Struggling to pay
The bank declined to identify the top rate it had charged a borrower before its new system went into place — but a review of dozens of Beneficial lawsuits found contracts with annual interest rates that ranged from 10.49 to 27.99 percent.
That range is higher than the national average, but not wildly so. Average interest rates for used car purchases in 2017, when many of the loans were inked, ranged from 4 to 19 percent depending on borrowers’ credit scores, according to the credit reporting firm Experian — although that didn’t include borrowers with no credit score. About 5 percent of Beneficial’s auto borrowers had no credit history at the end of 2018, according to the bank’s annual report.
It’s a market reality that people with poor credit have to pay higher rates. And experts in fair lending practices say that while APR’s above 20 percent are high, they’re lower than many payday loan companies and other unregulated lenders, whose rates can reach into triple digits.
Still, “if what you’re trying to do is help people lift themselves up out of situations where their credit is poor, those kind of interest rates (in the mid-to-high-20 percent range) are self-defeating,” said Mark Chavez, a consumer lawyer who works on auto-lending cases and reviewed several of the bank’s contracts for the Bay Area News Group.
Last year, California passed a law capping loans up to $10,000 at 36 percent. Many of Beneficial’s auto loans are technically “retail installment sales contracts” between a car buyer and an auto dealer that are assigned by the dealer to Beneficial, which means that they aren’t covered by the new law and there’s no legal cap on their interest rate, experts said.
Other progressive leaders have pushed for much lower limits — a federal bill introduced by Steyer’s presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would cap interest rates for almost all consumer loans at 15 percent.
Tom Steyer looks on as his presidential rivals Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speak after the Democratic presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa earlier this month. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) 
For Casto, paying a 27.99 interest rate meant that the $12,346 he borrowed from Beneficial to buy a used 2013 Dodge Journey in December 2016 would have cost him an additional $10,696 in interest payments over the course of the nearly five-year loan, according to the contract he signed.
He quickly fell behind, according to court documents, and the bank repossessed the car in December 2017 after he went about a month and a half without making a payment. A week after his car was repossessed, Beneficial completed its software upgrade and launched its new auto lending system, which included the 19.99 percent cap on new loan rates. But the bank didn’t give Casto the opportunity to refinance at that rate, he said.
The bank auctioned off the car and sued Casto for the balance in April 2018, and the interest continued to pile up as the case worked its way through the court system. By the time a judge ruled against him almost a year later, he owed Beneficial just over $15,800, including $2,500 in additional interest charges and $2,335 in attorney’s and court fees — for a car he drove one year.
Beneficial executives said they couldn’t comment on individual cases for confidentiality reasons, but that their loans have been a lifeline for thousands of other borrowers who would have been turned away by many other banks.
“Borrowers not paying back their loans is an unfortunate part of every lending institution, never more so than when you are lending to communities neglected by the rest of the financial system,” Taylor said in a statement. “We knew this would be true when we stepped in to lend where other banks would not.”
In this March 16, 2018, file photo political activist Tom Steyer speaks during a “Need to Impeach” town hall event at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) 
Loans and lawsuits
A Bay Area News Group review of court records in more than two dozen counties around the state found over 1,400 lawsuits filed by Beneficial in the last three-and-a-half years. After being presented with those figures, the bank confirmed they had won court judgments against 1,800 auto borrowers out of the 22,000 total loans — which means it has gone to court and won against about one out of every twelve.
Chavez, the lawyer who’s worked on scores of class actions against automobile lenders around the country, said that rate was substantial and noted that the bank appeared to move unusually quickly to sue borrowers.
“I have never seen such an aggressive utilization of litigation as a collection tool for an automobile loan portfolio,” he said.
Most auto lenders resort to litigation only in limited circumstances after other debt collection programs fail, Chavez said, adding that suing borrowers will “inevitably result in frequent default judgments, increased debts resulting from the imposition of attorneys’ fees, and seriously impact the credit of consumers.”
But Beneficial stresses that many of the lawsuits involved older loans that were made under Pan American, and says the bank doesn’t try to collect the full unpaid balance from every borrower it takes legal action against. It also avoids using third-party debt collectors. “Contrasting Beneficial Bank’s lending to other institutions is a false comparison” because of the bank’s focus on borrowers with poor or no credit, Leach said.
In dozens of cases reviewed by the Bay Area News Group, almost none of the borrowers made any legal filings, and judges ruled in Beneficial’s favor by default. Beneficial dismissed other cases voluntarily or after being unable to serve borrowers with legal documents, which means its total number of lawsuits against borrowers is higher than 1,800.
The large majority of the lawsuits were for loans signed before Beneficial overhauled the underwriting process in 2018. Experts say that it’s even more important for banks that serve low-credit customers to do enough due diligence to determine whether borrowers can afford the loans — and in general, high numbers of lawsuits can be a red flag.
“It could be that in running a lending program for people with poor credit, a bank is trying to do the right thing for low-income communities,” said Carolyn Carter, the deputy director at the National Consumer Law Center. “But a bank that has an unusually high rate of lawsuits and repossessions doesn’t sound like a beneficial low-income car access program to me.”
Beneficial continues to sue borrowers such as Robert Holguin, a janitor who commutes 45 miles each way from Manteca to Dublin and was taken to court by the bank earlier this month for defaulting on a 23.99 percent interest loan he signed in 2017.
“I was sitting there paying it and paying it and paying it, and it seemed like what I owed barely went down,” Holguin said.
Positive trends
After Beneficial’s reforms to Pan American’s old practices, the average APR on the bank’s auto loans is now at 12.99 percent, executives said. In addition to the cap on new loan rates, the bankers said they improved their underwriting with practices like lowering the maximum ratio of debt to income a new borrower can have. The bank also launched programs lending to people with no credit history and drivers with licenses available to undocumented immigrants.
Financial data shows the bank has made progress. In December 2016, about 18 percent of Beneficial’s $77.1 million auto loan portfolio was more than 30 days past due or was not accruing interest, according to reports it filed to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. By September 2019, the most recent report available, that rate was down to 9 percent.
JaNeé Moore, a preschool teacher who lives in Stockton and was sued by Beneficial after defaulting on an auto loan, is photographed in Manteca, Calif. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group) 
Still, some of Beneficial’s former borrowers remain near financial ruin. In January 2017, JaNeé Moore, a preschool teacher who lives in Stockton, got a 17.99 percent interest loan from Beneficial to buy a used Nissan Sentra for her daughter to commute to college.
“I tried to keep up with it, but I just didn’t have enough,” Moore said. Beneficial repossessed the car in January 2018 when she was two months behind, and eventually won a judgment against her of $13,800, including more than $1,600 in attorney’s fees and $1,700 in interest racked up during the court case.
Now, $225 is garnished out of Moore’s monthly paycheck, according to a paystub she showed the Bay Area News Group, which she said goes to pay the bank back. Because of that, she said, she’s had to take out multiple payday loans to keep up with daily expenses — the exact type of financing that Beneficial’s program is designed to help its borrowers avoid.
When she was told that the founder of the bank that sued her was the presidential candidate who shows up in commercials on her TV several nights a week, Moore laughed.
“Can he help me out?” she asked. “I’m in quite a bind.”


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