Friday, December 18, 2020

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WILL SOON BE PRESIDENT UNDER THE KAMALA HARRIS REGENCY - ISN'T IT TIME WE BAN LAWYERS FROM HIGHER OFFICE?

OPERATION OBOMB: Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their bankster paymasters plan coup.

Barack Obama was famous not wanting to leave office when his term was done and well known for projecting a sense of entitlement to power.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/lawyer-barack-obama-and-his-attack-dog.html

Biden positions, after doing nothing, save for the end, at best, to help Biden's presidential campaign, suggesting that the hollow-victory Biden administration is just a placeholder for the return of an Obama third term.  It's a sign that Obama éminence grise is more than a little active, behind the scenes as she always is.

“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”

Kamala Harris: The big buildup begins

Is it time for Joe Biden to start hiring a food taster?

Seems the buildup is out there for Kamala Harris to become the Democrats' next president.

Take the word of professional bloviator, Tom Friedman, President Obama's past and maybe present golf buddy, who wrote a particularly ridiculous New York Times column, headlined:

Kamala Harris Deserves a More Important Job

In this column, he lays out the proposal that Harris become Biden's rural ambassador, winning back the rural vote for the Democrats, as if she were the perfect fit:

Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the start-up gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.

President Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team.

Too smart? This person who couldn't get into a top tier university even with a dad who taught at Stanford? Who flunked the California bar? Who giggled like this when asked if she was a socialist? 'Smart' isn't the word that comes to mind.

Friedman then goes on to propose her for something she is likely to flunk out at even more than mere academics -- making her the Biden rural czar. 

Harris, recall, washed out bigtime in Iowa, a state with a significant rural population. She grumbled about moving to and living in Iowa as she pursued votes during the Democrat primaries, but nobody jumped on. Rural voters there read her as a phony and went instead for either Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, or Biden. Fatcat donors weren't impressed either. Harris dropped out of the presidential race shortly after that, failing to win a single delegate. She was viewed as a phony elsewhere, too.

But Friedman thinks she'd be just dandy for winning back rural voters lost by Democrats, whom he notes, a small chunk of are not white. Biden who claims roots in Scranton, could not do it, but Harris, who grew up in Berkeley, California and Canada, and has never lived on a farm, would somehow be perfect.

Friedman says she could start by bringing them broadband, on the logic that her big-name Silicon Valley political donors make her tech-savvy. Writing code, it seems, is something that rubs off, just by taking Silicon Valley money, which certainly explains why Joe Biden thinks coal miners can do it as a fallback after he shut down the mines. Harris knows nothing about tech nor code, her background, in fact, is as a prosecutor, putting small fry in prison for petty marijuana offenses and not letting them out when their terms were done, something that won't wear well among the rural powerless.Harris as the new rural czar? He must be joking.

The bottom line here, if Friedman's not slyly trying to set Harris up for failure, is that he's gotten a flying start in trying to build her up. It's a little early for this,but here we are.

We see this Harris-buildup a lot in various other things, too. The sudden media concern for Harris's rival, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and her failing faculties, a long story in the making, is likely the press doing the bidding of Harris, who no doubt would like some political payback on her fellow senator who refused to support her and condescendingly dismissed her as a parvenu outsider. I blogged about that here. And don't think she's not capable of it -- she planted negative stories on her potential rivals in the press for Biden's veep slot to knock them out, and seems to have known in advance about the Jussie Smollett hoax. Much earlier in her career, she slept her way to the top.

But the signs of a buildup are everywhere in the press, wherever she is found, lots of boring drivel on all her historic 'firsts' but also very specific talk about succession.

Take this CNN puff piece on Harris, claiming that Harris was "studying up" like an earnest student, something she always was not, on the vice presidency of Joe Biden:

That dynamic was clear this week when Harris was asked on ABC what the "definition of success" would be when she looks back on her four years as vice president.

"Joe Biden's success," Harris quickly said.

What a suckup, a fact visible to everyone but CNN.
 
But more to the point, there's talk about her next job, something she's said to have always been about:
 
Beyond loyalty, there will also be another unmistakable dynamic at play between Biden and Harris: succession. Those close to Harris know that almost anything she does over the next four years will be viewed as possible positioning for another presidential bid, a fact that could test her relationship with longtime Biden aides if they perceive she is putting her future aspirations ahead of the current administration.
 
...and...
 
A key aspect of these concerns is the specter of Biden not running for reelection in 2024, thereby opening up a Democratic free-for-all in the final years of his first term. Biden, looking to avoid becoming a lame duck before he takes office, has said nothing about running for reelection in four years.
But by picking Harris, Biden has elevated his onetime rival to a remarkably powerful position should he not run in four years. And aside from his decision to nominate Pete Buttigieg as transportation secretary, Biden's Cabinet picks have not elevated any potential competitors to a prospective Harris campaign.
Biden loyalists are expected to be defensive of the suggestion that Harris is positioning herself for a run in four years.
"I think their relationship will be great," said someone who has worked with Harris. "I think it remains to be seen whether top staff will want her to be a top adviser."
So the Biden people don't trust her, which is about par, given that Biden was muscled into taking her as his veep both by his own folly, and by the political muscle of the California political machine, which assured that she would stay loyal.
 
Oh, and CNN's court eunuchs throw this bit of born-to-rule flattery to Harris, too:
 
Being second-in-command will be a new role for Harris, who ever since she was district attorney of San Francisco in 2004 has been the top person in all offices she's held.
 

She's getting lots of flattering press of this kind now -- proposals for bigger jobs, slams of rivals, and plans for succession, wrapped in sugar-coated puffery, even though she has yet to have served as vice president for a day. The only thing that can be concluded is that 'it has started' - the press's road to a Kamala presidency. The one consolation about this press buildup now at Joe's expense is that it didn't work in Iowa, and who knows, it might not work in the rest of America. But for sure they are trying -- a buildup for a new Washington starlet is building. 

 

Photo Illustration by Monica Showalter with use of screen shot from MSNBC via shareable YouTube, processed with FotoSketcher, and a Pixabay public domain image.


Oblivious Biden

What kind of man must Joe Biden be to accept being illegitimately put into the Oval Office?
 
We’ve all seen the clips.  Nearly every recent Joe Biden public appearance has been an embarrassment.  The media called his garbled statements 'gaffes,' as if they were innocent, harmless mistakes, but many have suggested far worse age-related cognitive failures.  We experienced embarrassment with him, and pitied a man clearly past his prime.  What seemed most prominent about Joe Biden, other than his mental decline, was his obsession with one singular goal -- to be president of the United States. 
 
He first ran for president in the 1988 presidential election.  He didn’t last until the first primary, being forced to drop out when caught in multiple lies about his background, his upbringing, his academic record, and for plagiarizing other politicians.  Twenty years later, he ran again in the 2008 presidential election, but dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses, with less than 1% of the vote.  He was later chosen as Barack Obama’s running mate.  
 
After eight years of office there, and four years out, he announced his run in the 2020 presidential election, where his plagiarism problem came up again as some of his policy positions were lifted verbatim from other organizations.  The blame was immediately deflected to his staff, and the scandal seemed not to touch him.
 
For most politicians, such scandals end careers, but Joe Biden outlasted the scandals, and remained in office for more than four decades, really only rising above the noise on three occasions.  
 
The first was as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where he conducted what Thomas called “a high tech lynching” of a black man who dared to be a conservative.  Thomas was still confirmed, though, and remains on the court today.  
 
The second time was as Barack Obama’s vice president, where little was heard from him, but much has since surfaced about family conflicts of interest during that period, including illicit family business relationships with several adversary foreign countries.  
 
Third, and finally, is the present day.  While the election is still contested, and more evidence of widespread Democrat fraud surfaces daily, Biden speaks and behaves as if he were the clear and universally accepted victor. 
 
Looking back, one may ask, ‘Why didn’t Biden run in 2016 as the heir-apparent after eight years as vice president?’  He claims it was due to the death of his son, but here's the far more likely answer:  Because Obama lacked confidence in him.  
 
Obama said of Hillary, in 2016:  "I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."  
 
When Biden announced his 2020 run, Obama reportedly told him, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.”  
 
During the campaign, Obama said of Biden, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”  In reference to a connection to the Democrat electorate, Obama said, “And you know who really doesn’t have it?  Joe Biden.”  
 
Obama’s own Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wrote in his 2014 memoir, while Obama and Biden were still in office, that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”  
 
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, wrote, "...in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
 
The picture is getting clearer as to the kind of man Joe Biden is, from those who worked closest with him.  
 
But there’s more. 
 
In 1972, only weeks after Biden’s first election to the Senate, Neilia and Naomi Biden were tragically killed in a collision with a tractor trailer.  His sons, Beau and Hunter, were both seriously injured and hospitalized.  Neilia was Joe Biden’s first wife, and Naomi his 13-month old daughter.  During a public appearance in 2007, Biden told his audience, “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons …”  He had also told the story in 2001.
 
The truck driver was Curtis C. Dunn, and he was not drunk.  In 2008, Delaware Superior Court Judge, Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the police investigation as chief prosecutor, recalled that Mrs. Biden drove into the path of Dunn’s tractor-trailer, and he did all he could to avoid hitting the car, including overturning his truck and trailer.  Following the collision, Dunn ran to the car and was the first to render aid.  He remained traumatized by the accident, and the media’s repeated retelling of it, for 27 years, until his death in 1999.
 
In 2008, Dunn’s daughter, Pamela Hamill, said she had had enough of Joe Biden’s lies about her father, and demanded an apology.  “I just burst into tears,” Hamill said.  “The story already is tragic enough.  Why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was drunk?  My family is outraged.”  
 
Hamill told Politico in 2019 that Biden did apologize in 2009, a full ten years too late for the man he had wrongfully and repeatedly publicly humiliated.
 
In 1977, Joe married Jill after her first marriage had broken up.  They met on a blind date in 1975.  That’s the romantic story they tell, but her first husband, Bill Stevenson, tells it differently.  He says he and Jill had helped on Biden’s first campaign in 1972, and that he first suspected they were having an affair in 1974.  "Then one of her best friends told me she thought Joe and Jill were getting a little too close.  I was surprised that she came to me.”  Soon afterward, he discovered the truth.  Today, Stevenson says, “Joe Biden stole Jill from me.”
 
It’s clear Joe Biden is not the type whose intelligence, competence, or mastery of even a single topic has ever been a point of envy.  Those he worked with have not thought highly of him, and the few times he has risen into the spotlight, he has failed to accomplish anything of note on his own accord.  Without the coattails of another, namely Barack Obama, Joe Biden would have vanished from public life over a decade ago.  Had it not been for other Democrats sabotaging Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primary, Biden would have certainly fallen away early.  If he hadn’t sold his soul to the socialist and progressive wings of their fractured party to get support, the Democrats couldn’t have manufactured enough votes to save him.
 
There is one certainty about Joe Biden, and Barack Obama capitalized upon it.  So did China.  So did Ukraine.  So did Iraq.  So did Kazakhstan, and others.  One thing he has proven time and time again is that he’s for sale.  He will take the position and use his elected powers to implement the policy most beneficial to Joe Biden and his family.  Remember the flip-flopping fracking fiasco?  He is a piece of moldable flesh, a useful idiot, who will do what he’s told and paid to do.  His positions change as his handlers change.  He is wholly void of any core beliefs, a single bank of knowledge he could be considered an expert in, the ability to think for himself, or any recognizable moral principles.  His Catholic faith does not even conform to the Catholic Church teachings.
 
The question is not whether Joe Biden is a liar, it is whether he is a compulsive liar (sees his lies as clearly untrue, but cannot stop himself from telling them; lies out of habit), or a pathological liar (sometimes believe their own lies; plan their lies in advance).  He’s also a serial liar (lies repeatedly over time).  But whatever type, he is undoubtedly a liar.  Proof:  hereherehereherehereherehereherehere, and here.  That’s more than enough.
 
So back to the original question: What kind of man must Joe Biden be to accept being illegitimately put into the Oval Office?  From his speech on Monday, after the Electoral College vote, I must reiterate everything above, and add one more word:  Oblivious.
 
Donald N. Finley is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel.

Both the Left and Right Have a Biden Problem

Joe Biden will never be my president, period. This election was stolen for him even if he is the only one who does not know it. He is a despicable man who has been one of the most divisive politicians of the last half century. He is a kleptocratic pederast and rapist (forced digital penetration is rape -- ask Tara Reade). In a more just world, he would receive nothing but scorn.

Americans know this election was stolen. And just in case we did not realize how little respect they have for us, Democrats boasted continuously of their millenarian machinations as they absconded with the election for all to see.

Arising every day at the crack of 9 A.M., after Jill Ed. D (the “Ed” stands for Education, not the medical condition.) assists him with his morning ablutions and toiletry, Joe looks in the mirror and sees not just any president, he sees the President. The rest of us, meanwhile, see a man picked by Obama as his vice president because Joe had a reputation as an amiable simpleton and therefore, would be no threat to Barry politically. He knew Biden’s mouth was a yawning chasm of logorrheic gibberish, but Barry knew he could control him by giving him places to collude with and loot from, like China and Ukraine.

Yet, the Democrats never accounted for Joe being a most dangerous of morons: the moron who does not know he is a moron. Their intention was to let him be president for a while, not thinking he would actually believe he was in control.

The left is now faced with Joe Biden, President Select, an addlepated buffoon standing on home plate in an adult diaper absolutely convinced Americans believe he hit a home run.

Biden thinks he is supposed to be in charge, when in reality he should change his name to Xiden to acknowledge the real boss. Believing it is his prerogative, he is checking off the identity politics boxes with retreads from the Clinton and Obama administrations, when the left thought they would get appointees who were more radical.

What’s a criminal political party to do? They were hoping that after his inauguration, they could infect him with COVID and blame his demise on Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. If the blame does not stick, they can say Trump was right and Biden was too old, cognizant of the fact that in 2024 Trump will be the age Illegitimate Joe is now. Either way, the plan is to ruin his chances in 2024. It is why they are shutting the nation down again. They need the virus to be ascendent for their plot to work.

The world then would get President Harris. I shudder at the thought of the damage she would do to this country.

C’mon man. Here’s the deal, folks: on day one, day one, we get Biden the idiot. If the left figures out how to get rid of Joe, we get President Harris. A woman whose first job was literally a “job” for Willy Brown.

Harris is a piece of work and considerably to the left of Biden (afflicted as he is with the inability to tell his left from his right). The destruction she would wreak upon the nation would be appalling and perhaps irreversible. Her Green Raw Deal alone would cost the nation tens of trillions of dollars and millions of jobs.

The same could be said for Joe, who after all, has claimed to support the same policies that Kamala Harris supports. But she is in control of her faculties and would be much more effective than a doddering fool like Biden.

Those of us on the right should get right with God and pray that Joe keeps the mask on, hires a food taster, and washes his hands regularly while always putting down the lid when he flushes, because we are praying he lives for at least the next two years when we can give the Democrats a shellacking in the midterms like we did to Barry. I look forward to Biden suffering one humiliation after another. He is, after all, a horrible person. And c’mon man, he has literally no accomplishments in almost 50 years of public service. It is not like he is going to get smarter and pick up the task of running the country now. His incompetence is legendary, and he should be every bit as effective as president as he has been at everything else.

The best-case scenario for the nation and the world would be Joe running for reelection against Trump in 2024. But we will probably have to make do with Harris as their candidate -- hopefully running as Joe’s VP seeking the presidency. When she ran against Biden in the primaries, she fought for and received 1% support. Enough said.

Please follow the author on Twitter @williamlgensert

JPMorgan Chase Bank Wrongly Charged 170,000 Customers Overdraft Fees. Federal Regulators Refused to Penalize It.

Documents and records show that bank examiners have avoided penalizing at least six banks that incorrectly charged overdraft and related fees to hundreds of thousands of customers.

by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum

 

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.

Federal bank examiners considered levying fines and sanctions when JPMorgan Chase informed them last year that faulty overdraft charges caused by a software glitch had impacted roughly 170,000 customers.

But the bank urged the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, its chief regulator, to take less severe action, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

Rather than openly penalizing Chase, the nation’s largest bank, OCC officials decided to issue a quiet reprimand — a supervisory letter — that would go into the bank’s file and stay out of public view, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.

The agency’s deputy chief counsel, Bao Nguyen, approved the supervisory letter in June and accepted Chase’s explanation of the incident and its promise to repay its customers, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.

Since 2017, when President Donald Trump took office, the OCC has found at least six banks wrongly charged overdrafts and related fees, but in each case, the agency quietly rebuked the bank rather than pushing for fines and public penalties, the investigation by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum shows.

In several instances, front-line examiners who wanted the bank to be fined were overruled by OCC officials. The previously unreported cases show how the OCC under Trump quietly held back from punishing banks for abuses, while the administration sought more broadly to loosen banking rules and other consumer financial protections.

Brian Brooks, a former bank executive, has led the OCC on a temporary basis since May; last month, the president nominated Brooks to a full, five-year term.

Brooks and his predecessor at the OCC, Joseph Otting, both helped run OneWest Bank, a lender that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin founded in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis.

Banks found to have charged excessive overdraft fees and other faulty charges include Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chase, American Express and U.S. Bank and large regional lenders such as Zions Bank, Union Bank and First Horizon.

An OCC spokesman said the agency would not comment on the specific instances cited in this story because such matters are confidential. The OCC has a range of tools to police bank misconduct, the spokesman said.

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“It is frequently the case that deficiencies can be corrected much more quickly — including correcting harm to customers — by using supervisory tools,” said spokesman Bryan Hubbard, referring to confidential sanctions. “Most importantly, the absence of a public penalty does not indicate a lack of action.”

A bank might be cited first with a confidential sanction and later punished openly, Hubbard said. “Our actions may or may not be complete.”

Big banks collect over $11 billion in overdraft-related fees each year, according to a report from the Center for Responsible Lending, which found in a study that punitive bank fees often hit vulnerable customers the hardest.

Overdraft policies vary by bank but the typical fee is $35, and a customer can accrue additional penalties multiple times a day, CRL reported. Banks could simply decline a charge if a customer lacked the funds, but instead lenders promote “overdraft protection” as a convenience that comes at a cost. For customers whose accounts often hover near zero, that convenience is just another snare in a financial trap, said Rebecca Borné, a CRL lawyer who worked on the study.

“Imagine you struggled to buy groceries over the weekend and you wake up Monday to $100 in overdraft fees,” Borné said. “That happens to people who can least afford to pay.”

Chase had promised some online customers that they would get an alert before their accounts went negative, but the bank told the OCC that did not happen as roughly 170,000 accounts dwindled to zero, according to industry and regulatory officials. Chase charges $34 for an overdraft and allows three such charges a day on an account with insufficient funds. A customer could be charged as much as $102 per day.

Chase, which operates nearly 5,000 locations nationwide, reported the faulty auto alerts to the OCC as required, but the problem had stayed out of public view until now.

“We found that some customers were not receiving some account alerts due to a systems issue in 2018,” Chase spokesman Michael Fusco said. “We have fixed the issue, proactively notified and reimbursed affected customers.”

Chase had roughly 52 million active digital customers at the end of last year, according to securities filings, and that figure has grown by millions each year over the last several years.

In interviews, several bank branch employees working in different parts of the country said Chase could have easily underestimated the number of customers who were impacted, based on the number of complaints they heard.

Chase insists its remediation work was reliable. “We completed a thorough review of all accounts and identified the impacted customers,” said Fusco.

Under the agreement between Chase and the OCC, the bank agreed to refund customers that it believes were wrongly charged, but with no outside, independent check on the work, officials said.

The Chase matter shows how faulty overdraft policies can take hold at a bank and weigh on customers.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has in recent years pushed the bank’s online presence and a corporate mantra “Mobile first, digital everything.” Chase encourages consumers to find a screen and open their own Total Checking accounts.

With a few clicks, a new Chase customer can choose to receive an account alert for everything from low balances to suspicious transactions. Customers who rely on online banking might rarely have cause to visit a Chase branch.

But customers did come knocking when their auto alerts failed and they were hit with surprise overdrafts and other penalties, said current and former employees interviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

Chase customers had complained about faulty auto alerts for more than 12 months when the bank brought the issue to the OCC late last year, according to regulatory officials and agency paperwork.

Chase insisted that the error was just a coding hiccup and that the fix was manageable, but some OCC officials believed the bank still deserved punishment since so many customers were hurt.

To some front-line examiners, the faulty alert program amounted to an “unfair and deceptive” practice that could draw a public penalty under the law.

The question of what to do next fell to Nguyen.

Nguyen joined the OCC in June 2018 as a deputy to Otting, then Trump’s OCC chief, and Nguyen had a large role in managing one of Otting’s top priorities: rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend in poor neighborhoods.

Otting presented the new CRA in May and stepped down a day later. The CRA rewrite will make it easier for banks to pull back from serving poor neighborhoods, according to several consumer-advocacy groups that are challenging the move in court.

When the Chase matter reached Nguyen’s desk, he agreed that the bank had been deceptive, but he ruled that no penalty was warranted, according to regulatory paperwork.

For one thing, Chase had stepped forward to admit the problem. Regulators can give banks credit for policing themselves, and Nguyen decided that would hold true in the Chase matter, regulatory officials said.

Nguyen did agree to record the incident in the supervisory letter added to the bank’s confidential file. Nguyen declined to comment and referred questions to the OCC.

Supervisory letters are one of the mildest rebukes that the OCC can issue, and critics say the letters have negligible impact.

After Wells Fargo admitted in 2016 that its employees created fake accounts to hit skyhigh sales goals, the OCC found that it had been issuing supervisory letters for seven years warning the bank about its sales practices.

Lawyers from the OCC and Chase worked together to write the final language of the supervisory letter in which the bank insisted that it did nothing wrong, according to regulatory officials.

Notably, said the officials, the OCC handled the matter itself and without help from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency created to ensure that financial firms do not mistreat ordinary customers.

“It would not have gone down well if the OCC did not involve us in a consumer matter,” said Richard Cordray, the first CFPB director who served President Barack Obama.

Cordray said that he would not second-guess any regulator’s decision about sanctions without knowing the facts, but that the Trump administration had clearly shown it was not eager to sanction bank wrongdoing.

“These are different times and different leaders,” he said, “but the OCC and CFPB used to take aggressive action together when we saw consumers being hurt.”

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

Dubious disclosures and lax enforcement are part of many overdraft abuses, said Borné of the CRL, and they were a problem in the incidents handled by the OCC. American Express, the credit card giant, also offers short-term loans that are supposed to be repaid in regular monthly installments. Customers pay interest on the loan, of course, but American Express never explained that customers who missed a payment could also be charged interest on late fees and bounced checks, the OCC concluded. That was unfair and deceptive, OCC examiners determined in recent months, but the agency’s chiefs decided to hand the bank a quiet reprimand rather than a public sanction.

“Due to a technical error, some personal loan customers were incorrectly charged,” American Express said in a statement. The firm said it will now notify customers and issue credits for undue fees. American Express declined to say how many customers were affected but said the charges were generally less than $1 each.

Seven years ago, U.S. Bank unveiled a novel credit card program that the bank said could reduce costs for many customers. FlexControl Essentials promised to let customers first pay off everyday purchases — like gasoline and groceries — which the bank said could lower the monthly bill.

But customers of U.S. Bank, the nation’s fifth-largest lender, were baffled by the Byzantine system used to determine what was an “everyday” purchase and how much money they actually owed, according to several current and former bank employees.

U.S. Bank knew FlexControl Essentials was balky, and the bank spent five years trying to improve it before retiring the offer in 2018, the year the OCC took notice, according to bank and regulatory officials.

Within the OCC, some officials thought FlexControl Essentials was more than just a credit card program gone awry — it was a consumer abuse. For several weeks in early 2018, OCC lawyers debated next steps and whether they should dig deeper into how many customers might have been hurt, according to enforcement paperwork and two officials involved.

By the summer of 2018, though, the OCC decided to let the bank quietly scrap the program without paying a fine or facing a public sanction, according to regulatory sources.

In a statement, U.S. Bank declined to comment on the FlexControl Essentials program except to say it was retired in 2018. “Customers continue to have great flexibility with our products and we appreciate their continued support,” the bank said.

Three years before Chase grappled with errors in the auto alert program, the bank had to face a separate problem that was costing customers.

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The Pandemic Hasn’t Stopped This School District From Suing Parents Over Unpaid Textbook Fees

When the pandemic started, several school districts in Indiana halted the long-standing practice. But one district has filed nearly 300 lawsuits against parents, and others also have returned to court.

Banks are expected to clear checks within a “reasonable period of time,” which in many instances means two days. But under the rules, the wait can stretch for a week or more. Ultimately, banks not only decide when to clear a check but whether to clear it at all and how much a check is even worth.

That was the issue in 2017 when bank examiners found flaws in Chase’s handling of checks that had stray markings, sloppy handwriting or were otherwise deemed illegible. Banks can take extra time to examine those checks and ultimately even decide what the checks are worth.

OCC examiners found that Chase customers were sometimes shortchanged and some agency officials wanted to openly sanction the bank, according to regulatory officials. In the end, Chase was allowed to push the issue aside with no penalty by the end of 2017.

In a statement, Chase said that the bank identified the problem itself in 2017 and then “worked quickly to resolve it and have since credited all impacted customers.”

Taken together with the faulty auto alerts program from this year, Chase was twice found to have wrongly charged customers but faced no public penalty.

Banks ultimately control the sequence of deposits and withdrawals in a way that can boost corporate profits. A bank customer who exceeds their balance in the morning and replenishes the account by sundown might still incur an overdrawn account fee.

Another customer who overdraws an account with one costly purchase — a sofa — might be charged a fee for that item plus all the other miscellaneous purchases they made that day from a gas fill-up to a cup of coffee.

Bank regulators allow some maneuvers as long as they are disclosed to the customer, but at least three banks in recent years were deemed to have wrongly snared customers in how they added and subtracted money from an account, according to regulatory and industry officials.

One offender was Zions Bank, the largest lender in Utah, which tucked three separate, fee-generating schemes into murky disclosures, according to OCC officials who tracked the matter for more than a year.

Zions Bank customers who pushed their accounts into negative territory with a single purchase were charged a $32 penalty for that one buy and then the same fee for every other purchase made that day, examiners found.

Zions Bank customers also could get charged many overdraft fees for being just a few bucks short, examiners agreed. The third abuse was that Zions Bank charged a daily overdraft penalty on top of individual purchase penalties, regulatory officials said.

At the heart of every Zions Bank infraction was faulty disclosures and that customers did not know they had a right to opt out of any overdraft program — a step that might mean more rejected charges for the customer but also fewer surprise fees, according to the enforcement officials.

The OCC determined that Zions Bank ran afoul of a 2010 banking rule that explicitly required banks to get customer consent before enrolling them in overdraft protection, according to two regulatory officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

In a statement, Zions Bank said it always abides by the law requiring a customer “opt in” for overdraft protection.

“Zions Bank is committed to maintaining the highest standards of fair and transparent customer services,” the bank said in a statement.

The Zions Bank abuses matched tactics at Union Bank, a leading lender in the west, according to industry and regulatory officials familiar with the matter. Union Bank was charging customers overdraft fees despite the customer having a positive balance at the end of the day, according to the officials. The problem had been going on for years when it came to the attention of bank examiners in 2017, but rather than sanction the bank publicly, the OCC filed a supervisory letter, according to regulatory sources.

A spokesman for Union Bank declined to comment for this story.

First Horizon, a leading lender in the south, came to the OCC last year to report problems with its own overdraft program, according to industry and regulatory officials.

The bank had wrongly charged customers overdraft fees when they went into the red for a few hours but ended the day with a positive balance, according to enforcement officials, and that practice ran contrary to the bank’s marketing and disclosure documents.

By the time the problem was detected, it had gone on for at least two years, although the bank promised to make customers whole, according to regulatory and industry officials.

The OCC opted not to punish the bank publicly and instead issued a private reprimand, regulatory officials said.

In a statement, First Horizon acknowledged the issue and said it tapped an outside consultant to manage customer refunds.

“The issue was corrected and our impacted customers were notified and refunded,” the bank said in a statement.

Do you have access to information about bank regulation and enforcement that should be public? Email Patrick Rucker at patrickmrucker@protonmail.com. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

Correction, Dec. 14, 2020: This story originally misspelled the name of a Center for Responsible Lending lawyer. She is Rebecca Borné, not Bourné.

 

JOE BIDEN’S BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS OLIGARCHY.... Is old Joe finished performing his ‘populist’ gig? 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/tucker-carlson-biden-oligarchy-and.html 

What matters, Joe Biden wants you to know is that this is a democracy, always has been, always will be and by electing Biden and the small secretive group of billionaires who choreograph his every move, this country has become even more democratic, small seat, democratic, of course. And that’s reassuring to hear honestly because some of us were starting to get other impressions, non-democratic ones.

Pretty much the same way retired hedge fund operator, Tom Styer gets to tell you what to think about the weather, or how 78-year-old Mike Bloomberg decides which guns you can buy, or how George Soros can choose your prosecutors or how Tim Cook of Apple runs our trade policy, or how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook can keep America’s borders open just because he feels like it, but nobody says anything because his friend, fellow billionaire, Jeff Bezos owns Washington, D.C.’s hometown newspaper, and may soon buy CNN. TUCKER CARLSON


Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/how-many-parasite-lawyers-will-lawyer.html

"Along with Obama (LAWYER) Biden (LAWYER), Pelosi and Schumer (LAWYER) are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration."       PATRICIA McCARTHY 

Add the Banksters’ rent boy Eric Holder (LAWYER) and the up and coming Swamp Empress Kamala Harris (LAWYER, SO IS HER SHADY HUSBAND)…but keep counting….(LAWYER) Brian Deese, Obama-Biden’s loot-for-Wall Street guy.

Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors. 

BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS NEXT!

Biden administration will be committed to austerity and back-to-work campaign aimed at forcing workers to pay for the corporate bailout no matter how many lives are needlessly lost to the pandemic.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/joe-bidens-wall-street-cabinet-biden.html

The selection of Deese and Adeyemo—who both previously served in the Obama administration—exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, DC, which operates constantly, regardless of which party controls the White House.

It is a further signal to the financial oligarchy that a Biden administration will dispense with its rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy and continue funneling trillions into the stock markets. “By picking folks with deep ties to large asset managers,” Tyler Gellasch, executive director of investor trade group Healthy Markets Association, told the Journal, “the administration can help assuage financial executives’ concerns. It sends a clear signal to the industry to breathe easier: They can plan for stability without likely facing massive new regulatory or tax risks.”

JOE BIDEN GLOBALIST 

SERVING THEIR CRONY RICH - If Biden and Harris win, the country will devolve to a kingdom of state and regional duchies composed of often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs (ILLEGALS). CLARICE FELDMAN 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-globalist-grifter-servant-of.html

 

In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.


For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story.  Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries.  In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose.  Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increasedgl

Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.

Detailed by the New York Times, Biden’s list of transition team members includes former Wall Street employees and those with close ties to Wall Street. Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.

The Times reports:

Commerce Department: The review team is led by Geovette Washington of the University of Pittsburgh, who previously served as general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget. Other members include Anna Gomez, a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein; Arun Venkataraman, who works in government relations at Visa (and was director of policy at the Commerce Department under Mr. Obama); and Ellen Hughes-Cromwick of the think tank Third Way, who served as chief economist at Mr. Obama’s Commerce Department and held a similar role at Ford. [Emphasis added]

Treasury Department: The team is led by Don Graves, who heads corporate responsibility at KeyBank and previously worked as director of domestic and economic policy for Mr. Biden. Others include Nicole Isaac of LinkedIn and Marisa Lago, who works at the New York City Department of City Planning and previously oversaw global compliance at Citigroup. [Emphasis added]

Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators: The team is led by Gary Gensler, a top Wall Street regulator in the Obama administration who is now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team also includes Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, long a proponent of tougher rules for banks. [Emphasis added]

Gensler previously worked at Goldman Sachs and for failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As Breitbart News reported, giant tech conglomerates are also getting representation on Biden’s transition team.

Likewise, the Wall Street Journal noted a number of Wall Street-types who are seriously being considered for cabinet positions in a potential Biden administration:

Roger Ferguson, chief executive of retirement manager TIAA-CREF, is in the mix for a cabinet post, according to people familiar with the matter. And financial executives like Morgan Stanley executive Tom Nides and former hedge-fund manager and presidential candidate Tom Steyer publicly backed Mr. Biden and could emerge with influence, or jobs, in his administration. [Emphasis added]

Some who are active in the party or who held positions in past Democratic administrations— such as finance veteran Jeffrey Zients, co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s transition team, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jake Siewert, who served as press secretary in the Clinton White House and in the Treasury Department under President Obama — could join the new administration, Democratic fundraisers say. [Emphasis added]

Another Goldman executive who could head to Washington is Margaret Anadu, the 39-year-old head of Goldman Sachs’s urban-investment initiatives, whose name is said to have been floated for an economic policy position.
[Emphasis added]

On the campaign trail, President Trump warned that Biden was “the one that takes all the money from Wall Street” while his donors tended to be police officers, business owners, homemakers, truckers, construction workers, and drivers.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has attempted to push back against Biden’s potential for stacking an administration with Wall Street executives and those with deep ties to multinational corporations.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

 


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