Monday, October 5, 2020

KAMALA HARRIS - I LOVE BANKSTERS! I KNOW HOW TO KEEP THEM OUT OF PRISON! ERIK HOLDER SHOWED ME HOW TO DO IT.

Harris claims she “achieved landmark results” by “fighting the Wall Street banks” and winning a large settlement following the Great Recession. In fact, her office refused to prosecute blatant foreclosure fraud being carried out by OneWest Bank, run by then CEO Stephen Mnuchin, now Trump’s secretary of the treasury.....DITTO HER GIG FOR CRIMINAL BANKSTER WELLS FARGO.

LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR AT LARGE

https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/lawyer-kamala-harris-pathological-liar.html

Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything. DAVID KELTZ

BANKSTER PARASITCISM RELIES ON BANKSTER-OWNED POLITICIANS.

THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT BARACK OBAMA, JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS ARE BOUGHT AND OWNED.

AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA KAMALA HARRIS PROTECTED HER DONORS WELLS FARGO FROM BEING CRIMINALLY PROSECUTED FOR THE GLOBAL TOXIC MORTGAGE MELTDOWN. SHE DID THE SAME FOR BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN WHO WAS QUITE GENEROU$ WITH KAMALA HARRIS AFTER SHE DEMONSTRATED SERVICES WELL RENDERED THAT KEPT THIS GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER OUT OF PRISON. IN CALIFORNIA, MNUCHIN WAS KNOW AS ‘KING OF FORECLOSURES’.

“The same giant debt buyers known for fighting consumer protection laws at every turn have been raking in cash during this pandemic,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, told ProPublica. “They are now licking their chops in anticipation of profiting even more off families who have their hours further cut or can’t find a job, and can’t keep up with their bills or their mortgage. This is disgraceful and reinforces the need for Congress to protect consumers and small businesses from this predatory behavior.”

He eventually struck a settlement to pay Capital One a total of $300 on a payment plan of $20 a month. But shortly after he made his first payment, he was shocked to find that his wages had been garnished anyway. The seizures continued for weeks, well into March of this year. Both Capital One and the marshal’s office told ProPublica that Robert’s employer had been sent notice not to execute the garnishment, but that it had done so anyway in error and that the checks had been promptly mailed back to the employer.

Stop Seizing Paychecks, Senators Write to Capital One and Other Debt Collectors

Wage garnishments ordered before the pandemic started have continued for many workers during the recession. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown have demanded an end to the practice.

by Paul Kiel

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Jan. 29. Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wrote in letters that the nation’s largest debt collectors should suspend seizing wages “immediately.” (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

The nation’s largest debt collectors should suspend seizing wages “immediately,” two prominent senators demanded in letters sent Wednesday.

The letters came in response to a ProPublica story this month that focused on how the most prolific filers of debt collection lawsuits, Capital One and large debt buying companies, continue to garnish paychecks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While most courts shut down to new hearings in March, wage seizure orders obtained before then were allowed to continue in most places. That left some essential workers and others desperately searching for relief amid the economic downturn.

“Filing collection lawsuits and garnishing the wages of consumers already struggling to pay for basic necessities will only exacerbate the economic and public health crisis,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wrote.

Brown and Warren sit on the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees financial services companies. Brown is the ranking member.

Capital One largely stopped filing new suits after mid-March, but other large collectors did not stop filing new suits. Warren and Brown also wrote to Encore Capital Group and Portfolio Recovery Associates, two of the largest debt buyers in the country. Both of them continued to file suits into April and May, according to ProPublica’s review of online court databases.

In the letters, the senators also request an accounting from the companies of how many suits and wage garnishments they’ve filed this year. Because collection suits are filed in state and local courts, it’s impossible to arrive at a full accounting of such suits (although ProPublica has tried to shed light on the practice by rounding up data from various states). This makes an aggressive form of collection that affects millions of people each year largely invisible to the public. Answers from the companies may help to reveal the scope of the biggest plaintiffs’ activity.

In a statement in response to the letter, a Capital One spokesperson said: “Since the pandemic first began, we have been committed to working with all of our customers who are experiencing financial hardship as a result of COVID-19. In addition to deferring payments, offering tailored payment plans and waiving fees, we have stopped the filing of all new bank garnishments and lawsuits and have taken action to prevent the garnishment of any stimulus funds. We recognize that these are exceptional times and our policy is to work with any customer who needs help and is impacted by COVID-19.”

A spokesperson for Portfolio Recovery declined to comment, saying the company was reviewing the letter and preparing its response.

Sheryl Wright, an executive from Encore Capital's subsidiary Midland Credit Management, said, "In keeping with the long-standing hardship policy in our Consumer Bill of Rights, we suspend collections when a consumer tells us they’ve been directly impacted by COVID-19, and we stopped bank garnishments for all consumers in mid-March. For any bank garnishment that was initiated prior to the stoppage, if the consumer informs us that we inadvertently levied exempt funds, including CARES Act relief payments, we immediately initiate a refund."

Capital One and Other Debt Collectors Are Still Coming for Millions of Americans

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Americans got protection from evictions, foreclosures and student debt. But debt collectors have continued to siphon off their share of paychecks from those who still have jobs.

by Paul Kiel and Jeff Ernsthausen

Capital One recovered hundreds of millions of dollars of debt beyond any other card issuer last year and has continued collecting despite a global pandemic.

Since 2018, Capital One has been a looming presence in Julio Lugo’s life, ever since the company sued him, as it did 29,000 other New Yorkers that year, over an unpaid credit card. But when the coronavirus hit the city this March, it wasn’t on his mind.

At Mount Sinai in Manhattan, where he works, he’d been drafted into the hospital’s frenzied effort against the virus. He normally gathered patient information at the front desk of a radiology clinic in orderly shifts, 9 to 5. Now he was working 16-hour days, often overnight. At one moment he might be enlisted to help a team of doctors or nurses put on their full-body protective equipment and then he would rush to disinfect another team. He lost track of the days, only orienting himself by the need to juggle care with his ex-wife of their two young children who were now out of school.

But despite a global pandemic, Capital One didn’t forget about him. The company began in late March to seize a portion of his wages to collect on that debt — one that he says wasn’t even his.

Federal, state and local officials have all taken some steps to protect Americans from the ravages of the economic crash due to COVID-19. Congress halted a substantial portion of evictions, foreclosures and collection on student loans. And when it sent $300 billion in stimulus checks out to families, many states took steps to make sure that debt collectors didn’t grab the money. But one of the most aggressive and common forms of debt collection has generally been allowed to continue: seizure of wages for old consumer debts.

The main protection Americans have gotten from debt collectors has been inadvertent, a byproduct of state courts being closed to most hearings, including those pushed by debt collectors. But this didn’t help people like Lugo who were the target of actions that began before the closures. Wage garnishments can run indefinitely once begun. As a result, essential workers and others who were lucky enough to keep their jobs have still been at risk of forfeiting a portion of their paychecks.

No one tracks wage garnishments either federally or at the state level, and that’s a key reason they get little public attention. But ProPublica has found that it hits workers earning $40,000 or less the hardest and is particularly common in predominantly black communities. Because garnishments are set at a percentage of income (25% in most states) regardless of whether someone can afford it or not, they often provoke a financial emergency and cause the debtor to let other bills go unpaid.

While new collection activity has dropped off, some major debt collectors have been laying the groundwork for a return to normal by filing suits by the thousands, according to a ProPublica review of online court records from county and state court websites. For example, in Maryland, two major debt collectors alone filed over 2,000 suits in April.

When the courts fully reopen, as they already have in some states, these companies will be first in line to win new court judgments. Those debtors who still have jobs will be forced to either make payments or risk their wages being seized. With 48% of American households having experienced a loss of employment income in the past few months, many will have no wages to take. But debt collectors can be patient and wait until they do.

Even more worrying to consumer advocates is what lies ahead. Households often rely on credit cards during moments of financial stress. In recent months, more have been paying rent with their cards. Eventually the bill will come due, which could lead to a wave of collection suits as the nation attempts to recover.

“There’s going to be a whole swath of people who never thought they’d be in a position to default,” said Pamela Foohey, a law professor at Indiana University who argues in a recent paper with two colleagues that Congress should impose a debt collection moratorium to allow for recovery. “It’s not productive to be garnishing people’s wages when they need to pay for food and get back on track financially,” she said.

Over the past couple decades, Capital One, Lugo’s pursuer, helped lead the way in transforming the nation’s local courts into collection machines. As recently as the 1990s, these courts conformed to the picture most people have in their heads, primarily working as a venue where a judge resolved disputes between two sides represented by a lawyer. Now the most common type of case is debt collection, a recent Pew Charitable Trusts report found. Lining up against debtors who are almost never represented by an attorney, debt collection companies win millions of court judgments each year, which then allow them to seize debtors’ wages for years into the future. An old unpaid bill will fall off a credit report after seven years, but a court judgment can haunt someone forever.

While different types of plaintiffs may flood the courts in different areas (from payday lenders to nonprofit hospitals), those collecting on credit card debt have driven this trend over time, according to ProPublica’s review of court data from several states.

The change has been obvious in courts everywhere, from New York to Las Vegas (where the local court decided to give such cases their own category, “Civil – Credit Card Collection”) to rural Iowa.

“It does bother me that courts have become sort of a tool for credit card companies. We’ve just become part of their business machinery,” said Judge Chris Foy, who presides over the district court in the small town of Waverly, Iowa.

The most common plaintiffs don’t tend to be household names that advertise with bold TV campaigns: Most are debt buyers, companies that buy up bad debts in bulk. The exception is Capital One.

Aggressive debt collection is key to Capital One’s profitability. Last year, the same year the company reported $5.5 billion in net income, it recovered $1.4 billion from its card accounts that had been previously charged-off, or recognized as losses. It was a haul hundreds of millions of dollars beyond any other card issuer, even much larger ones like JPMorgan Chase.

In a statement, a Capital One spokeswoman said the bank files more suits than other banks because it makes riskier loans. According to public filings, as of the end of this year one-third of Capital One’s cardholders had a credit score under 660, generally considered the threshold that identifies those most likely to have trouble paying debts back. The bank’s current card offers for such customers carry an annual interest rate of 27%.

“Most regional, community and especially large banks retreated from the subprime segment to focus on more affluent customers, resulting in a growing population of people with less access to the banking system,” the spokeswoman said. “Capital One remains a full spectrum lender.”

“Debt collection for us is about helping customers resolve their delinquent debt and reducing losses, not making money,” she said, and the bank always attempts to work with borrowers before suing. As for Lugo’s case, the company said it couldn’t comment because it was currently in litigation.

The best estimate of the national scope of garnishments comes from ADP, the nation’s largest payroll services provider. At the request of ProPublica, ADP first undertook a study of payroll records six years ago. It followed up with a second survey in 2017. Both times, it found that 2.9% of workers had their wages garnished for consumer debts in the previous year. That works out to about 4 million nationally. Notably, both surveys were done during a period of economic expansion. In the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2009, the number of suits skyrocketed, according to ProPublica’s review of filings from several states.

Court judgments also allow collectors to seize money from bank accounts, often emptying them. But taking a portion of a paycheck is far more common, according to a ProPublica review of court data in Missouri and Georgia.

When the coronavirus outbreak hit, New York, like many other states, took several steps to protect vulnerable people, such as halting evictions or new garnishment orders. But the state let existing wage garnishments continue. Consumer advocates and the New York City Bar called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to fill that gap and suspend all garnishments. So far, he has not, despite moves by some other states, such as Nevada, to do so. In New York, plaintiffs can take up to a tenth of a debtor’s pay.

Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. hospitals are in the spotlight for being on the frontline of fighting the pandemic. But in the shadows, debt collection operations continue, often by the same institutions treating coronavirus patients, all while unemployment and uncertainty soar.

Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the New York State Courts, told ProPublica that garnishments were allowed to continue because “existing orders were considered essential matters.”

Those burdened with a garnishment amid the pandemic could request an emergency court hearing to have it suspended, according to guidance given to the city’s marshals, who administer garnishments. Michael Woloz, a spokesman for the marshals, said they “do everything they can to accommodate” people with hardships.

Susan Shin, legal director of the New Economy Project, a legal aid organization in New York City, said her group has been getting calls since March from New Yorkers asking for help with ongoing wage seizures. Capital One was often the plaintiff. People were afraid of risking their health to go out and seek help from the courts. “Why put someone in that position?” she said. Relatively few people who need help find their way to legal aid.

ProPublica spoke with three New Yorkers who struggled to address seizures of their pay after the pandemic hit. Although all three managed to eventually halt the garnishments with the help of a legal aid attorney, the cases show how such suits can hang over people’s lives for decades. Two of them asked ProPublica not to use their last names out of fear it would displease their employers.

Capital One, asked about the cases, said, “Our policy is to work with any customer who needs help and is impacted by COVID-19.”

Capital One sued Robert in 2007 for about $1,900. He is HIV positive and fell behind because of health issues, he said, and has been in and out of work over the years. For almost a decade, he said, he didn’t hear from Capital One. But last fall, soon after Robert began a new job, he received notice telling him to arrange payment on the debt or he would be at risk of garnishment.

Capital One sued Grace, a social worker in Queens, in 2013 after she lost her job and fell behind on her payments. Like Robert, she said she hadn’t heard from Capital One for years. In February, she received a letter from the marshal warning her that her pay would be garnished if she did not make other arrangements to pay off her debt of $2,800.

When the virus hit and the courts largely shut down, she assumed it was a problem that could wait. “I was just trying to get by,” she said. After the garnishment started, she searched online for help and found her way to Shin, the legal aid lawyer. The money has since been returned, but Grace knows the seizures could start again when the courts reopen.

Given Lugo’s hectic days and nights working at the hospital, it wasn’t until mid-April, when 500 New Yorkers were still dying every day from the virus, that he discovered $168 missing from his latest paycheck. Although he was sued in 2018, he didn’t find out about the suit until his wages began to be garnished last year, he said. One reason is that the debt is not his, he said.

In a legal filing, with the help of a legal aid attorney, he argued that his now-deceased father likely stole his identity to take out the card. A process server falsely claimed to have served his mother with notice of the suit, he said.

The filing stopped the garnishments last year, but in early March, he missed a court hearing because it conflicted with a parent-teacher conference at his child’s school, he said. He thought the hearing would be rescheduled, but unbeknownst to him, it triggered a new garnishment.

“Being that the courts were closed, I couldn’t understand how they could just start taking out money again without letting me know,” he said.

Eventually, again with help from a legal aid attorney, he was able to stop the garnishment and get a new court date, currently set for August.

After the virus hit in March, Capital One largely suspended filing any new debt collection lawsuits. But other big debt collectors did not, including Encore Capital, the nation’s largest debt buyer. ProPublica reviewed online court filings in eight states where courts had largely stopped hearing new cases and found that Encore still filed over 1,600 lawsuits in April.

Encore reported collecting $1.3 billion in old debt in the U.S. last year and was looking forward to another good year when March came.

Encore CEO Ashish Masih told analysts last month that the company is still optimistic. Widespread unemployment and the courts closing hurt the company’s near term prospects, but Masih said this would only cause a “delay, not a permanent loss” in what the company hoped to collect in 2020. Eventually, he said, “the court processes will start working,” and “we hope to recoup about 90% of collections over time.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Encore said that according to its company policy, “We’ve suspended collections for any consumer who lets us know they’ve been directly impacted by COVID-19.”

Across the country, courts are taking steps to resuming full function. In Arkansas, where the virus did not initially hit hard, but has been spreading faster lately, the state supreme court announced in early May that all courts could reopen to hearing any type of case starting May 18. How exactly to do this is up to local courts, and solutions range from video hearings to in-person hearings with a limited number of people in the courtroom and temperature checks before entering.

Wage garnishments in the state never stopped, said Susan Purtle, an attorney with Legal Aid of Arkansas, which serves almost half the state. That’s partly due to the large number of meat processing plants there, she said. “Those clients have continued to work,” she said, and so had wages to take.

But recently, she said, calls about new suits have been coming in. Typically, she’s seeing court hearings scheduled for July or August. Once they begin again, collectors will resume winning judgments that can be used to collect on the debtors who still have jobs. For the ones who don’t, the companies will wait until they do.

Ellis Simani contributed reporting.

Debt Collectors Have Made a Fortune This Year. Now They’re Coming for More.

After a pause for the pandemic, debt buyers are back in the courts, suing debtors by the thousands.

by Paul Kiel and Jeff Ernsthausen

Earlier this year, the pandemic swept across the country, killing 100,000 Americans by the spring, shuttering businesses and schools, and forcing people into their homes. It was a great time to be a debt collector.

In August, Encore Capital, the largest debt buyer in the country, announced that it had doubled its previous record for earnings in a quarter. It primarily had the CARES Act to thank: The bill delivered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stimulus checks and bulked-up unemployment benefits to Americans, while easing pressures on them by halting foreclosures, evictions and student loan payments. There was no ban on collections of old credit card bills, Encore’s specialty.

At the same time, the pandemic compelled households to cut spending. Finding themselves with enough money to settle old debts, people responded to collectors’ calls and letters. Debt-buying executives couldn’t help marveling at their good fortune. All this created “a perfect storm from a cash perspective,” the CEO of Portfolio Recovery Associates, Encore’s main competitor, told Wall Street analysts.

After its record second quarter, analysts expect Encore to blow past $200 million in profit this year and reward stockholders with 40% earnings growth compared with last year. Portfolio Recovery is set for similar growth. The share prices of both have soared off their early April lows.

Investors didn’t even show much concern when, in early September, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Encore, saying that it had broken the terms of a consent agreement struck in 2015. The agency had previously charged the company with “pressuring consumers with false statements and churning out lawsuits using robo-signed court documents,” as it said at the time. (In a statement, Encore said the CFPB’s recent suit was unnecessary because it had fixed the alleged problems “years ago.”)

In recent months, the only real bad news for debt buyers was that local courts across the country temporarily shut down. Debt collection lawsuits provide a key source of revenue for the companies, a way to extract payment from consumers, typically low-income, who don’t offer it up.

But now even that hiccup is over. After a bit of a lull in the spring, Encore and other debt buyers are back at it, filing suits by the thousands every week, according to ProPublica’s analysis of state court filings.

In August alone, Encore filed about 1,000 suits in Indiana and over 2,000 suits in the metro Atlanta area. Other debt buyers jumped back in as well. In Chicago, Portfolio Recovery filed over 3,000 suits in July, while LVNV, a major debt buyer privately owned by Sherman Financial Group, filed over 2,700 suits in Maryland in August. For all these companies, ProPublica found, the volume was well above the number they’d filed before the coronavirus arrived, in January or February of this year. No national numbers on suits exist.

In statements, the companies said they have been actively working with consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic and only sue as a last resort on a small portion of accounts.

Elizabeth A. Kersey, a spokesperson for Portfolio Recovery, said the company’s hardship program “allows for the suspension of collection efforts for ninety (90) days upon notification of a hardship event.” The company is currently not seeking new orders to seize debtors’ wages or bank account funds, she said.

Ryan Bell, an Encore executive, said, “We have consistently and proactively communicated to consumers the various relief options we’ve put in place in response to COVID-19, including temporarily stopping collections.” The company said it had stopped seeking orders to garnish bank accounts. It is, however, seizing wages.

Sherman Financial did not respond to requests for comment.

If Congress is unable to pass any further stimulus , unemployment is likely to remain high. In that scenario, debt buying companies and the banks that sell defaulted accounts to them expect more Americans to fall behind on their credit card bills over the coming months.

Even that scenario turns out to be rosy for the debt buyers. While good times can mean that Encore collects on more debt than it expected, bad times typically bring a glut of people suffering under loans they cannot repay. The result is that Encore can scoop up the raw materials for its profit machine — defaulted accounts — more cheaply. Or as Encore CEO Ashish Masih put it to Wall Street: The company is “particularly excited about the prospects for increased supply in the future.”

In recent years, Encore has bought around 2 million to 3 million U.S. accounts per year, according to public filings. Last year, on average, the company paid 8.6 cents on the dollar for each account. For a typical debt of $3,142, Encore paid $271.

To earn a profit on that investment, Encore and other debt buyers pursue debtors in near perpetuity. Encore is still collecting tens of millions of dollars each year from debts it bought in 2009 or earlier. The key to that persistence is the courts.

Since the early 2000s, debt buyers have flooded local courts nationwide with suits. The companies regularly account for more than a quarter of all debt collection cases in a given jurisdiction, according to ProPublica’s review of collection filings over several states.

That disproportionate presence has been particularly apparent in recent months, as the banks themselves have mostly opted to suspend filing new suits. In normal times, Capital One files far more lawsuits than other banks, in numbers similar to those filed by Encore and Portfolio Recovery. But since March, although Capital One continued to seize pay via garnishments secured before COVID-19 struck, it has largely stopped filing new suits.

ProPublica did find one exception among the major banks that commonly file a significant number of suits: Citigroup, which resumed filing suits at its normal levels in July. The bank, for instance, filed over 200 suits in Oklahoma in August, more than it had filed there in January and February combined.

In a statement, Citi spokesperson Jennifer Bombardier said the bank has a special assistance program for customers impacted by COVID-19 and that it is not seeking to garnish the bank accounts of customers it has sued. The bank also did not sell charged-off accounts to debt buyers “for up to 120 days” in the states “most impacted by COVID-19,” she said.

Encore sued Nicole Campbell of Brooklyn, New York, in July. Her first task was to figure out what to do. The suit was over $3,023.76 in debt she incurred years ago with CareCredit, a card offered by Synchrony Bank to people who need to cover medical costs, such as dentistry and eyecare. She knew she should answer the complaint by going to the courthouse, but she was wary of going there during the pandemic and wasn’t even sure whether it was open.

Even attorneys have difficulty finding their way. “Courts have been returning to full operation, but there’s so much confusion as to what’s happening,” said Susan Shin, legal director of the New Economy Project in New York City. “It’s hard to know what to advise people on what to do with their case.”

With help from an attorney with the New Economy Project, Campbell responded to the suit by mail. She’s not sure what to expect next but said she doesn’t have much time to worry about it. She cares for three boys, 5, 11 and 14, on her own and has to figure out how to get them to school on the city’s part-time schedule while helping them with online lessons when they’re home. She juggles this with her own job as a customer service rep: That also has a rotating, part-time schedule in order to minimize the number of people in the office.

“It’s crazy to me they’re filing all this during this time when there’s so much going on,” she said.

Such collection suits are most common among workers with income under $40,000 per year and particularly common in mostly Black neighborhoods. The suits routinely result in judgments, which in turn usually result in attempts at garnishment, according to a ProPublica analysis of Missouri court filings. Past studies have put the number of workers who have their wages garnished each year at around 4 million. In most states, plaintiffs can seize up to a quarter of a worker’s take-home pay or clean out their bank account.

In recent years, when state legislatures have moved to protect more funds from garnishment, Encore has been there to oppose the measures. In 2018, a Connecticut bill proposed to automatically protect up to $1,000 in a bank account. An Encore executive, Sonia Gibson, argued against it, writing in a letter, “Since the average amount we collect through bank garnishments is typically around $700, an automatic exemption of $1,000 would leave us unable to use bank garnishments.” The bill died.

Last year in California, Encore joined with other debt buyers to combat a similar bill that aimed to protect around $1,700.

“It was a really huge fight,” said Ted Mermin, head of the California Low-Income Consumer Coalition and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “And you’ve got to think, ‘Why?’ Who on earth thinks it’s a good idea to take someone’s last dollar? The only people who would do this are debt collectors who have no ongoing relationship with someone.” The bill narrowly passed and became law.

In Washington state, lawmakers last year sought to protect more workers from wage garnishment. Under federal law, earnings above $217.50 in a week are eligible to be seized, a level that has remained the same since 2009 because it’s tied to the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The Washington bill, which ultimately passed, aimed to tie the exemption to the state’s much higher minimum wage, which this year is $13.50 an hour. In 2020, about $472.50 in weekly take-home pay would be protected. That was much too high for Encore. Gibson argued in a letter that people earning that much shouldn’t be “completely exempt from garnishment.”

As an alternative to automatic protections, Encore generally argues that consumers should have to file exemptions in court to demonstrate they really can’t afford to have their money taken. Consumer advocates say that such exemptions, which often exist in state laws, are rarely invoked by debtors because they either don’t know about them or don’t understand the process.

On paper, Randall Ward would seem to be well-insulated from garnishment. He lives in the small town of Marianna, Florida, and state law protects the wages of anyone deemed the “head of household,” which is defined as someone who earns more than half the household’s income and has dependents. Since Ward helps care for his 20-year-old son with Down syndrome and a granddaughter, his pay from his job as a manager at a Waffle House is eligible for protection.

But when Encore, after having won a judgment against Ward the previous year, sought to garnish his wages this past February, Ward didn’t understand that he qualified for the “head of household” exemption. So, starting in March, Encore began taking a quarter of Ward’s take-home pay. The size of the debt, a Citibank card that had ballooned to $5,220 with interest and court costs, meant that Ward, even with what he’s proud to call a “good job,” was in for many lean months.

The only way to make ends meet, he said, was to cancel health insurance for himself, his son and his wife, “because I could not pay the bills if I didn’t do it.”

Then the virus forced his restaurant to close for several weeks and his pay stopped altogether. The family was without income as he waited for his unemployment claim to go through. When, finally, he could go back to work, the garnishments returned. Encore has said in public statements that it looks to work with consumers, especially those who’ve been impacted by COVID-19. Ward said that was not his experience.

“They’re just ruthless about it,” he said. “I would hate to see that happen to anybody.”

Encore declined to comment on individual accounts.

Collection suits can have a lasting negative effect on consumers. A recent study by economists from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and the University of California, San Diego, focused on debtors who, after being sued, agreed to pay in order to avoid garnishment. The settlements left consumers worse off: They were more likely to fall behind on other debts or end up in foreclosure or bankruptcy, the study found. The main reason was that paying up on one debt had drained those consumers’ cash buffer and that left them vulnerable to falling behind on others.

Even in good economic times, low-income consumers live on the edge, so the CARES Act aid was particularly helpful to them. According to a Federal Reserve survey, the temporary $600 boost to weekly unemployment insurance benefits actually resulted in higher pay for about 40% of those who received them. On top of that came the $1,200 stimulus checks ($2,400 for married couples) with an additional $500 for each child.

In July, the Fed found households with income under $40,000 a year had significantly more savings than normal: Whereas last year just 39% said they would have covered an unexpected $400 expense with cash, this summer, 48% said they would.

Debt collectors were a clear beneficiary of those extra funds. According to a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while most people used the stimulus payments to buy food and other essentials, about 25% used at least some of the money to pay down debts.

But Felipe Severino, a Tuck School of Business professor and one of the authors of the paper on debt collection settlements, said there may be negative long-term consequences for households who used the extra money to settle older debts. The companies say they do not charge interest on the old, charged-off debts they collect so the debts are not growing.

“I would argue it’s not a very good use of their money,” he said. With less of a safety net, those households are more likely to find themselves behind on their bills again.

Furthermore, he said, stimulative government aid like the CARES Act is meant to be “spent and magnify across the economy” in the near term by, for instance, leading to increased purchases at local businesses. That doesn’t happen when the money goes to debt collectors.

The flood of government aid, along with the sudden contraction in spending due to COVID-19, has led to an unpredictable economy, one where unemployment has shot up without the usual tide of delinquencies, bankruptcies and foreclosures. But now, banks are predicting that tide to finally arrive in the coming months.

In July, Capital One reported a loss for the quarter despite delinquencies actually going down. The reason was the bank set aside $2.9 billion as a provision for future credit losses, a kind of safety net for the future.

Encore did not appear to need such precautions. “Our liquidity puts us in a strong position to capture the substantial purchasing opportunity, which we believe is sure to follow,” Masih, the CEO, told analysts.

The best-case scenario is that she’s a progressive who repeatedly violated her own principles so that she could promote her career. In the worst-case scenario, she’s just another corrupt, rotten, regressive prosecutor.

JESSER HOROWITZ

Unethical conduct plagues legal career of Kamala Harris

By JESSER HOROWITZ

Posted on February 27, 2019 in Opinions

On Jan. 2019, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris declared her candidacy for President of the United States of America to great fanfare.

She earned quick praise and frequent comparison to former President Barack Obama. A recent Democratic Party straw poll by the Daily Kos ranked her in the top tier of Presidential candidates, with 27 percent of respondents voicing their support for her candidacy. So far, she has pitched herself to the American people as a strong progressive with a particular passion for criminal justice reform.

Harris has a reasonable chance at winning the Democratic Party nomination. She’s charismatic, smart and very likely to bridge the growing divide within the party between the progressive left and the centrists. If she wins the nomination, she might even defeat Donald Trump in the general election. I understand why some voters in the party have decided to rally around her: She’s a promising alternative for Democrats who want someone progressive like Bernie Sanders but better than he is at speaking to identity politics.

However, I would like to encourage my fellow Democrats to approach Senator Harris with a healthy dose of skepticism. As a prosecutor and California State Attorney General, Harris has engaged in blatantly unethical behavior for her profession and embraced positions that actively hurt her constituents. While this does not necessarily have to be a red line for everyone—and it certainly will not prevent me from voting for her should she win the Democratic nomination—our party should hold Harris’ feet to the fire here. Even more concerning than her past positions is that she refuses to own up to them, portraying herself as a long-time, progressive criminal justice reform activist.

I want to clarify that I have no inherent issues with a prosecutor being elected to the presidency. We need prosecutors; we need people who serve the public good rather than represent the interests of paying clients. However, if your job requires you to make decisions that could potentially ruin people’s lives, the ethical standards should be higher, not lower. If you, like Kamala Harris, decide you want to run for President of the United States, it becomes imperative that the public thoroughly and mercilessly scrutinizes every facet of your political career.

In 2015, law enforcement caught Robert Murray, a prosecutor in Kern County, committing one of the most egregious offenses a prosecutor could perpetrate. Specifically, he falsified a confession transcript that connected the defendant with a far worse crime than that with what he had actually been charged. When the defense demanded a copy of the original tape recording, Murray admitted to his crime but said that it was merely a harmless joke. The judge disagreed. He stated that the court refuses to tolerate such outrageous conduct and dismissed the indictment on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct (Observer, “California Prosecutor Falsified Transcript of Confession,” 03.04.2015).

How does this incident involve Senator Harris? At the time, she was the Attorney General of California. In that capacity, she appealed the indictment. According to Sidney Powell of The Observer, this was the third time she had appealed a prosecutorial misconduct dismissal in less than three months. As of March 2015, Murray was still allowed to work as a prosecutor (Observer, “California Prosecutor Falsified Transcript of Confession,” 03.04.2015).

As Attorney General, Harris has a history of fighting to keep men she knew were innocent in prison and of hiding cases of significant illegal activity conducted by law enforcement. In 1999, Daniel Larsen was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison for possession of a concealed weapon. There had been nine witnesses who could testify that Larsen was not guilty, but the court called none of them at the trial because of his incompetent and now disbarred attorney. With the help of the Innocence Project, he was able to prove his innocence, and the court overturned his conviction in 2009.

How does this involve Senator Harris? She challenged his release not because she believed he was guilty—she did not dispute his innocence—but because he hadn’t presented proof of his innocence quickly enough. And so, she fought to keep a man she definitely knew was innocent behind bars for life (NBCLosAngeles, “After 13 Years in Prison, Man Found Innocent of Crime Freed,” 3.20.2013).

In another incident, law enforcement discovered that Deborah Madden had purposely sabotaged the drug results of multiple cases as a technician at a San Francisco crime lab. But even though the highest levels of the district attorney’s office knew about Madden’s unreliability as a drug expert, Kamala Harris and her office hid this information from defense attorneys. Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo ultimately ruled that Harris’ office had violated defendants’ rights through this act of prosecutorial misconduct, calling into question the convictions of nearly 40 defendants (SFGate, “Judge rips Harris’ office for hiding problems,” 05.21.2010).

However, perhaps Harris’ most egregious example of immoral conduct happened in 2014. A federal judge ordered that all non-violent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole in California in an action against constitutional prison crowding. Kamala Harris, then the Attorney General of California, disagreed with the decision. She argued in court that by releasing these inmates early, prisons would lose “an important labor pool” (Los Angeles Times, “Federal judges order California to expand prison releases,” 11.14.2014). Despite pitching herself as a lifelong champion for criminal justice reform, Harris had advocated that the need to keep nonviolent offenders as slaves outweighs their constitutional rights. How would the Democratic Party call itself progressive if members threw their support behind someone with such an atrocious record on civil rights issues?

Even worse, Harris has yet to apologize for her actions and in fact has refused to even acknowledge them (Reason.com, “Kamala Harris Hopes You’ll Forget Her Record as a Drug Warrior and Draconian Prosecutor,” 01.31.2019). At a town hall, she responded to a question calling her out on her past actions by answering “I’ve been consistent my whole career,” and then explained how the record supports her claim that she has been progressive on prison reform (CNN Twitter, “I’ve been consistent my whole career,” 01.28.2019).

I won’t delve into her argument because, in my view, it’s irrelevant. When you actively cover up police misconduct, try to keep a man who you know is innocent in prison and refuse to release nonviolent offenders because you need their involuntary labor, you don’t get to reframe your narrative.

Kamala Harris is not owed an audience. She is not entitled to one simply because she wants to be president. We should not give her the benefit of the doubt, because she refuses to even acknowledge her wrongdoings. We don’t have the right to forgive her; that right belongs to all the people she’s wronged over the course of her long career.

For that reason, I ask you not to vote for Kamala Harris in the primary, no matter how attractive a candidate she is or how well she explains away her inconsistent career. It’s possible that her past really won’t have much of an impact on how she’ll be as president, but why should we wait and see? The best-case scenario is that she’s a progressive who repeatedly violated her own principles so that she could promote her career. In the worst-case scenario, she’s just another corrupt, rotten, regressive prosecutor.

BLOG EDITOR: STEVE MNUCHIN IS KNOWN AS THE ‘FORECLOSURE KING’.

She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)

Harris’s office never pursued the matter.

In her 2016 senate bid, Harris was the only Democratic candidate for Senate to whom Mnuchin donated money. He was joined by at least one other OneWest investor, billionaire George Soros.

AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA KAMALA HARRIS ANNOUNCED THAT NEARLY HALF OF ALL MURDERS IN MEXIFORNIA ARE NOW BY MEX GANGS. THAT DIDN’T END HER AMNESTY.

KAMALA ALSO HAS SERVED DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S CRIMINAL BANKSTER PAYMASTER WELLS FARGO, THE VERY BANKSTERS THAT CAUSED THE MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND WALKED OFF WITH BILLIONS IN NO STRINGS BAILOUTS SO THEY COULD BUY THEIR COMPETITORS. KAMALA HARRIS MADE SURE NO WELLS FARGO EXEC OR OTHERWISE WENT TO PRISON FOR THEIR ECONOMIC CRIMES. WELLS FARGO HAS BEEN VERY GENEROUS TO KAMALA HARRIS AS SHE HAS AND WILL SERVE HER PAYMASTERS AS WELL AS DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTERS REGIME DID.

Wasn’t Kamala Harris the one who put tons of blacks into jail for excessive sentences when she was a prosecutor in California?

Harris sees that, which is why she's jumping at the chance. Ever since her days as Willie Brown's mistress, sleeping her way to the top in politics, she's known a good opportunity when she's seen one.

LIKE OBAMA – BIDEN, KAMALA HARRIS WILL SERVE THE BANKSTER CLASS AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S RICH

Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers — ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families.

Kamala #HeelsUpHarris ascends to the top of the Biden VP list: What could go wrong?

By Monica Showalter

The trends on Twitter are in and Kamala Harris has risen to the top of Joe Biden's heap for vice presidential picks.

Kamala Harris is trending today. Is it because people remember she laughed about locking up poor parents for their children's truancy? Or is it because she tried to cancel Joe Biden a few months ago based on his segregationist ties..? #VA10 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-initiative_n_5c50b08ee4b0f43e410bcbc4 …

She's black, and she's female, which is Biden's criterion for picking a vice president. And unless he wants to go Norbit with Stacey Abrams, Harris might just be all he's got, given how he's boxed himself in.

Given how Biden is showing greater signs of senility than ever, they might as well even declare her the real president if, heaven forbid, Biden should win.

She's not #HeelsUpHarris, as Twitter's great kahuna, James Woods, nicknamed her, for nothing.

Problem one, for Joe, at least: She's phony, and it's not just her phony Twitter followers.

Harris, recall, is the one who tried to pander to black voters and guilt-minded whites to the effect that she, in all her Berkeley, California and Canadian upbringing, had suffered through her upbringing in the midst of some kind of Klan country. Her yearbook photos from her high school showed otherwise.

Being half east Indian, she's not typically black, though she'd have you think she was. Here's how she acquired that "credential":

Kamala Harris wanted to go to a black school. That’s what black folks called Howard University in the early 1980s when Harris was a teenager considering her future.

Harris, she would say later, was seeking an experience wholly different from what she had long known. She’d attended majority-white schools her entire life — from elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., to high school in Montreal. Her parents’ professional lives and their personal story were bound up in majority-white institutions. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, was teaching at Stanford University. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, had done her graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where the couple had met and fallen in love. And Harris’s younger sister would eventually enroll at Stanford.

And here's what she did thereafter, according to Politico's Michael Kruse:

Harris, now 54, often has talked about the importance of having "a seat at the table," of being an insider instead of an outsider. And she learned that skill in this crowded, incestuous, famously challenging political proving ground, where she worked to score spots at the some of the city's most sought-after tables. In the mid- to late '90s and into the aughts, the correspondents who kept tabs on the comings and goings of the area's A-listers noted where Harris was and what she was doing and who she was with. As she advanced professionally, jumping from Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of columns, one of the "Pretty Thangs." She was a "rising star." She was "rather perfect." And she mingled with "spiffy and powerful friends" who were her contemporaries as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun, but it wasn't unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society activity with political utility.

After that, she became "cop Kamala" as the lefties say, or a pretty dirty prosecutor, both in San Francisco and as California's attorney general. She always put the needs of the Democratic establishment above the people she said she was "helping." Here's something from an item I wrote about earlier:

So here's a new one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree at RealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the second presidential debate:

"So in my background as attorney general of California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and will never be able to buy another," Harris said in late July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.

Here's what really happened:

In fact, she and several other state attorneys general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California's portion of the settlement to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.

Although Harris initially spoke out against Brown's diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 — even after she left the attorney general's office and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her presidential bid this year.

She shook down some banks in the name of 'the people' and then went and used the money for something else. No wonder she's always been popular with the Democratic one-party blue-state establishment. I have a full blog on that here.

And being part of that establishment, she protected that establishment - such as a sex harrasser, Larry Wallace, who happened to be a top aide during her stint as California attorney general, and whose transgressions forced the state to shell out more than a million dollars in compensation to his victims while he was on the job.

Harris claimed she didn't know a thing about it. Establishment, see, protects its own. So much for #MeToo.

Here's another corrupt little manuever - she managed to obtain a Los Angeles Police Department Praetorian guard that followed her wherever she went across the state. Police for me, but not for thee. Not her first corruption rodeo.

How exactly is that kind of establishment record - sucking up to the rich, protecting Democratic operatives, using all matter of executive privilege, etc., going to win over Bernie Sanders supporters? If Joe Biden picks Harris, he can write them off, these are their hot-button issues.

Worse still is her record as a criminal prosecutor, the Tulsi Gabbard takedowns described - the very takedowns that sank Harris's presidential bid before she even got to the primaries. In Tulsi's words:

There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.

She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.

In an era of protests against police brutality in one-party blue cities, particularly from Black Lives Matter supporters, putting Harris on the ticket with Biden makes about as much sense as Republicans putting Mitt Romney at the top of the 2012 ticket in an age when Americans wanted to get rid of Obamacare. Romney, recall, launched his own version of the government takeover prior to President Obama's legacy program.

As a Republican, perhaps this is all good opposition research fodder for President Trump or Vice President Pence to hurl thunderbolts at in the upcoming presidential election. Maybe we should snicker.

But it just goes to show how hard up the Democrats are for untainted candidates who can manage some kind of connection to normal people. If Kamala Harris is the best Joe Biden has got, it's not happening.

YOU CAN’T SEPARATE THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FROM THEIR PLUNDERING BANKSTERS!

More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris

By Monica Showalter

As we've said more than once, Kamala Harris has an authenticity problem.

This characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:

Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological ambition, moral flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.

So here's a new one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the second presidential debate:

“So in my background as attorney general of California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.

Here's what really happened:

In fact, she and several other state attorneys general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California’s portion of the settlement to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.

Although Harris initially spoke out against Brown’s diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 – even after she left the attorney general’s office and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her presidential bid this year.

Which is pretty outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the people" and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the clients. Whoever got wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat priorities within the one-party state.

Sound like the kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank deal? Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's now painting herself to be.

Any more than she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw thousands of them in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney General, kept people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to fight fires, and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial misconduct that would have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little guy.

The mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.

One, she plays the old California political machine game (it probably happens in other crooked one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one purpose, a virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be released on, and political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending the same pile of cash on something thing else, something far less salable to the voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or fatten pensions. In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas tax is approved by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling bureaucrat and administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled into the state for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes to cover municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve bond measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school supplies for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union siphon-offs. Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big banks, shaking them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.

Two, she's still the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up, get-along-to-go-along, slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful Democrats like. Crabtree reports that Harris first protested the diversion of the funds, and then went silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard from more powerful Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career. An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won, the cash was collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of the little guys, and she went along.

Which pretty well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she should win the presidency. In winning the money and then allowing it to be diverted, she failed the little guys she now says she was serving. And with that, she shows she's never been about serving the people, she's about obeying the greater interests of the Democratic political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of her career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health care for can believe her.

“One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.”

In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)

The problem with Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did. RYAN COOPER

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