Tuesday, December 15, 2020

JOE BIDEN - YES, I'M A BANKSTERS' RENT BOY - ALWAYS HAVE BEEN - SO, GET OVER IT - BANKS RULE THE WORLD AND STRANGLE THE PROFITS THAT GO INTO MY POCKETS

 YOU CAN'T SEPARATE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THESE FILTHY PARASITE LAWYER POLITICIANS FROM THE THEIR PAYMASTER BANKSTERS!

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.

Get Our Top Investigations

Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Email address

 This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“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.

Read More

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.

 

 


LAWYER OBAMA - LAWYER BIDEN AND LAWYER ERIC HOLDER, THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOYS' CRONIES JP MORGAN SCREW CONSUMERS OUT OF MILLIONS - But isn't that all they've ever done?!?

YOU CAN'T SEPARATE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THESE FILTHY PARASITE LAWYER POLITICIANS FROM THE THEIR PAYMASTER BANKSTERS!

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.

Get Our Top Investigations

Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Email address

 This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“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.

Read More

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.

 

 


THE MANY SCARY LIVES OF SUSAN RICE - The narrative of her long career in “public service” is punctuated on virtually every line by dishonesty, deception, poor judgment, and a total absence of wisdom. In short, she represents a perfect fit for a Biden administration.

This Is Susan Rice

Meet Joe Biden’s choice to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council.


On December 11, Joe Biden named Susan Rice to lead his White House Domestic Policy Council. Rice’s consistent track record of dishonesty, prevarication, and poor judgment stretches back decades.

By the time she graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history in 1986, Rice was already a committed leftist with a heart and mind full of racial grievance. That year, she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were “taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective,” “their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.” “The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,” Rice elaborated. “The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’” Published by the Black Student Fund -- an advocacy group for which Rice interned -- A History Deferred served as a guide for elementary- and secondary-school teachers who aspired to teach “Black Studies” from an Afrocentric perspective.

In 1985 Rice was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1988 and a Ph.D. in the same discipline two years later.

Praising the Dictator Robert Mugabe

While at Oxford in 1990, Rice wrote a 426-page dissertation praising, as “a model and a masterpiece in the evolution of international peacekeeping,” the 1979-80 British peacekeeping operation that had led to the political ascendancy of Zimbabwe's bloodthirsty Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe. In her dissertation, Rice lauded Mugabe as a “pragmatic, intelligent, sensible, gentle, balanced man” who possessed considerable “patience and restraint.”

Politicizing the Rwandan Genocide

Rice served on the Bill Clinton administration’s National Security Council from 1993-97, and as Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997-2001.

During the Rwandan genocide of mid-1994 -- in which some 800,000 people were massacred in a 100-day period -- Rice was a key player in the Clinton administration's decision not to intervene in a peacekeeping role, so as to avoid becoming embroiled in a politically risky endeavor where no strategic U.S. interests were in play. (Classified documents prove conclusively that Rice and her fellow Clinton administration officials were -- contrary to claims they made soon after the period of mass slaughter in Rwanda -- fully aware of how extensive the Rwandan carnage was.)

In a related measure, Rice persuaded the administration to purge the State Department's and CIA's Rwanda-related memos of such terms as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” “If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November congressional election?” she wondered aloud. Then-lieutenant colonel Tony Marley would later recall that he and his colleagues at the State Department “could believe that people would wonder that, but not that they would actually voice it.”

Rejecting Sudan’s Offer to Turn Bin Laden over to the U.S.

In 1996-98, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan’s offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was living there at the time, over to U.S. authorities. Rice reasoned that because Sudan had a poor human-rights record, the U.S. should have no dealings with that nation's government -- not even to obtain custody of the al Qaeda leader or to receive intelligence information on terrorists from Sudanese authorities. She viewed such intelligence as inherently untrustworthy. As then-U.S. Ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, later explained:

“Sudan’s policy shift sparked a debate at the State Department, where foreign service officers believed the United States should reengage Khartoum. By the end of summer 1997, [those officers] persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. Two individuals, however, disagreed. NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary of State for African affairs."

Rice and Clarke persuaded Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright vis-a-vis Sudan. And when Sudan tried again to share intelligence on bin Laden in a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams, Rice still wanted nothing to do with Sudan and killed any possibility of a deal.

Bin Laden subsequently moved his terrorist operations to Afghanistan, from where he would go on to mastermind the murderous 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Lying about Unpreparedness for the Embassy Attacks in Africa

Rice's actions in the wake of two terrorist attacks against American interests in 1998 are highly noteworthy as well. In the spring of that year, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, sent an urgent letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for additional security at the embassy, in light of growing terrorist threats and a warning that she (Bushnell) herself was the target of an assassination plot. The State Department denied this request, as well as a number of previous ones, on grounds that beefed-up security measures would be too costly. A few months later, on August 7, 1998, Islamic terrorists simultaneously blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with car bombs, killing more than 200 people. Within 24 hours, Rice appeared on PBS as a Clinton administration spokesperson and falsely claimed that the administration had “maintain[ed] a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times.” In addition, she stated that there had been “no telephone warning or call of any sort like that, that might have alerted either embassy just prior to the blast.”

Disastrous “Peace” Mediation in Africa

In May 1998, Rice was dispatched to mediate a peace plan between the warring African nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea. According to Columbia University professor Peter Rosenblum: “Rice announced the terms of a plan agreed to by Ethiopia, suggesting that Eritrea would have to accept it, before [Eritrean President] Isaias had given his approval. He responded angrily, rejecting the plan and heaping abuse on Rice. Soon afterward, Ethiopia bombed the capital of Eritrea, and Eritrea dropped cluster bombs on Ethiopia.” As Bret Stephens later wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “An estimated 100,000 people would perish in the war that Ms. Rice so ineptly failed to end.”

Disastrous “Peace” Plan in Sierra Leone

Fred Fleitz of National Review Online discusses how “Rice also played a central role in an absurd and deadly peace plan in Sierra Leone that released a psychotic rebel leader named Foday Sankoh from prison and made him Sierra Leone’s vice president under the Lome Agreement of 1999.” As Fleitz elaborates: "Sankoh’s rebel group, the RUF, which had a reputation for mass rapes and amputations, was given amnesty for all crimes. The agreement resulted in a catastrophe because Sankoh immediately began to reorganize his rebel force after he was released from prison and his fighters resumed killing and maiming civilians. The RUF refused to allow a U.N. peacekeeping force into rebel-held areas and took 500 peacekeepers hostage. The Clinton administration was afraid to resolve the disaster, so the U.N. turned to the United Kingdom, the former colonial power. British troops routed the RUF and arrested Sankoh.”

Relationship with Rwandan President

After leaving the Clinton administration in 2001, Rice became managing director at Intellibridge, a D.C.-based strategic-analysis firm where one of her clients was Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda.

Joining the Obama Administration

In 2005 Rice co-authored an academic article which postulated that terrorism was “a threat borne of both oppression and deprivation.” This perspective made her a perfect fit for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration after the 2008 presidential election. Thus, on December 1, 2008, President-elect Obama nominated Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, making her the first African American woman ever to hold that post. Moreover, Obama upgraded the position to that of a cabinet-level post.

Reasoning (contrary to much strong evidence) from the premise that poverty breeds terrorism, Rice and the Obama administration wanted U.S. taxpayers to fund nearly $100 billion per year of new-development-aid programs under the auspices of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Project -- a massive wealth-redistribution initiative designed to transfer money from the world's developed states to its poor states, many of them in Africa.

Anti-Israel Orientation

In February 2011, Rice stated: “For more than four decades, [Israeli settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for peace … [and] violate[d] international commitments.” During testimony she gave two months later, Rice reiterated that sentiment, asserting that “Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate.”

Shielding the Rwandan Government from International Censure for Its Role in Fomenting Violence in Congo

National Review Online writer Jim Geraghty has pointed out that in 2012, Rice, who was “in an official position shaping U.S. policy on Africa,” once “again faced criticism [that] she had softened the U.S. response to mass killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and [to Rwandan president Paul] Kagame’s support of violent rebel forces.” Against the backdrop of the fact that Kagame and Rice had a close personal relationship, Geraghty quotes a December 2012 New York Times piece that said:

“Specifically, these critics — who include officials of human rights organizations and United Nations diplomats — say the administration has not put enough pressure on Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, to end his support for the rebel movement whose recent capture of the strategic city of Goma in Congo set off a national crisis in a country that has already lost more than three million people in more than a decade of fighting. Rwanda’s support is seen as vital to the rebel group, known as M23.

“But according to rights organizations and diplomats at the United Nations, Ms. Rice has been at the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame in particular, from international censure, even as several United Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr. Kagame’s door. Aides to Ms. Rice acknowledge that she is close to Mr. Kagame and that Mr. Kagame’s government was her client when she worked at Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington.”

Rice's False Assessment of the Deadly September 11, 2012 Terror Attack Against a U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi, Libya

On September 11, 2012, Islamist protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, where they destroyed the American flag and replaced it with a black Islamist flag that read, “There is one God, Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet.” The protesters said they were angry over an obscure YouTube film -- known alternately as Innocence of Muslims or Muhammad, Prophet of the Muslims -- which was critical of the Prophet Muhammad and had been produced recently in the U.S.

Later on September 11, 2012, a large group of heavily armed Islamic terrorists attacked a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya with much greater violence. In the process, they killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, 52-year-old Chris Stevens, and three other Americans. For nearly two weeks, Rice and the rest of the Obama administration consistently characterized what had occurred in Benghazi not as an act of terrorism, but as a spontaneous, unplanned uprising that evolved unexpectedly from what had begun as a low-level protest against the aforementioned YouTube video. In reality, however, within mere hours after the incident, U.S. intelligence agencies had already gained more than enough evidence to conclude unequivocally that the attack on the mission was a planned terrorist incident, and that the video had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Rice made big headlines on September 16, 2012, when she appeared on five separate Sunday television news programs where she claimed, falsely, that according to the “best information at present,” the deadly attack in Benghazi was not a premeditated assault but rather a “spontaneous reaction” to “a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.” For example, she told Bob Schieffer on CBS's Face the Nation: “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Post-Benghazi

On December 13, 2012, Rice -- having sparked much public controversy with her false statements regarding Benghazi -- withdrew herself from consideration for the post of Secretary of State (to replace the outgoing Hillary Clinton). In a letter to President Obama, Rice said that her nomination process (before the U.S. Senate) “would be lengthy, disruptive and costly -- to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities,” and that “the tradeoff is simply not worth it to our country.”

In June 2013, President Obama appointed Rice as his top national security adviser -- a post that did not require Senate confirmation. As author and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters wrote at the time: “Bringing Rice into the Executive Branch’s innermost circle rewards her for being a good soldier in taking the fall on Benghazi, and it makes it virtually impossible for Congress to subpoena her for a grilling, thanks to our government’s separation of powers. Sharp move, Mr. President.”

Rice Praises the Traitorous American Soldier Bo Bergdahl

Rice sparked additional controversy when she spoke out in support of a May 31, 2014 deal in which President Obama freed five senior Taliban commanders and high-value terrorists who had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, in exchange for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American Army soldier who had deserted the military in 2009 and spent the next five years with the Taliban. (Eight other American soldiers were subsequently killed in the process of trying to find and recover Bergdahl.) Just before his 2009 desertion, Bergdahl had emailed this message to his father: “I am ashamed to be an American.... The horror that is America is disgusting.” On June 1, 2014, Susan Rice told CNN that Bergdahl had served the U.S. with “honor and distinction.”

Rice's False Statement About Turkey's Assistance in the U.S. Fight Against ISIS

In an October 12, 2014 interview on Meet the Press, Rice responded to a question about Turkey’s obvious lack of cooperation in the U.S. fight against the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) terrorist group which had recently overrun vast swaths of Syria and Iraq with a brutal campaign of mass slaughter, crucifixions, beheadings, rapes, and enslavement. Said Rice:

“[F]irst of all, the Turks have, this just in the last several days, made a commitment that they will in the first instance allow the United States and our partners to use Turkish bases and territory to train -- hold on, let me explain this carefully -- to train the moderate Syrian opposition forces. So that is a new commitment. They have now joined Saudi Arabia in giving the go-head for that important contribution. In addition, they have said that their facilities inside of Turkey can be used by the coalition forces, American and otherwise, to engage in activities inside of Iraq and Syria. That’s a new commitment, and one that we very much welcome.”

But Rice's assertion was a lie. The Turkish government swiftly responded to her claims by declaring that no decision had been reached regarding the use of its military bases by the U.S. to engage in activities inside of Iraq and Syria. According to the Turkish prime minister's office, Turkey had agreed only to the training of supposedly “moderate” Syrian rebels on Turkish soil.

Turning a Blind Eye to Russian Cyber Attacks

In their 2018 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, investigative reporters David Corn and Michael Isikoff report that in June 2016, Michael Daniel, the director of cybersecurity for the Obama White House, was alarmed to learn that Russian actors had successfully infiltrated critical election infrastructure in a number of U.S. states. According to Business Insider: “Obama administration officials did not believe the Russians had the technological savvy to manipulate the vote count. Rather, they were more concerned hackers could alter voter rolls, registration files, or other processes that could sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election as a whole.”

As evidence of this Russian cyberactivity came to light, Mr. Daniel and Celeste Wallander, the National Security Council's leading Russia analyst, pushed for the Obama administration to retaliate decisively – e.g., by: (a) conducting NSA-backed cyberattacks targeting the Russian intelligence community and Russia-linked actors; (b) leaking classified intelligence revealing the financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his family members; or (c) announcing a joint U.S.-NATO “cyber exercise” designed to show Russia that America and its Western allies were capable of responding forcefully to its illicit activities. But when Rice learned of these ideas, she told Daniel: “Don't get ahead of us,” adding that the U.S. cyber response team should “knock it off” and take no action. Said Business Insider in March 2018:

“The staffers on Daniel's cyber response team were baffled when he informed them that they had been told to stand down. When they asked the cybersecurity director why they weren't taking action, Daniel reportedly told them [that] Rice and the homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, were concerned that then-President Barack Obama would be 'boxed in' if news of their deliberations leaked to the press.... The White House's internal struggle over how to address Russia's election meddling has been well documented. Last year, The Washington Post reported that when they were faced with the question of how best to respond to Russia's meddling, one senior official told the outlet, 'I feel like we sort of choked.'”

Rice's Role in "Unmasking" Trump-Affiliated Individuals in Intelligence Reports

In the course of conducting intelligence operations on terrorist organizations or other foreign entities, American national security agents often collect information on “U.S. persons” – a term of art referring to United States citizens and lawful permanent residents – who are not under surveillance themselves. The intelligence community refers to such occurrences as examples of “incidental collection.” In incidentally collected communications, the name of the person whose conversations have been intercepted is supposed to be redacted or “masked” – i.e., replaced with a generic identifier – unless the information is thought to have value as foreign intelligence. Masking is carried out to protect individuals who may get inadvertently caught up in an electronic dragnet, from being falsely accused of crimes or of otherwise improper behavior.

Conversely, the “unmasking” of a “U.S. person” – i.e., the identification of such an individual by name – is an extraordinarily powerful tool that requires review at the highest levels of government. Only the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA are authorized to unmask U.S. persons, and then only for reasons of national security. And if these agencies do unmask someone, his or her identity may only released to the few intelligence officials (about 20 or so) who are authorized to make an unmasking request. In short, the practice of unmasking is not in itself illegal, but the leaking of an unmasked person's identity to anyone other than the aforementioned small group of intelligence officials, is.

In 2016, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice made multiple unmasking requests, so that she and her political allies could compile a list of names of incoming Donald Trump campaign officials who had been incidentally monitored during intelligence surveillance of foreign governments. The names of these Trump associates, which included some of his family members, had been redacted in the intelligence reports, but Rice requested that they be unmasked. Their names were then disseminated to the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan, and Rice’s former deputy, Ben Rhodes.

When then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-California) announced, during a March 2017 press conference, that the identities of U.S. citizens had been leaked by Obama officials for partisan political purposes, Rice professed ignorance: “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

The following month, however, Rice's story began to change. On April 4, for instance, she tweeted that she had simply meant that she did not know “what reports Nunes was referring to.” Later that month, she said that she had never done anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” which she had received.

In April 2017 as well, a blockbuster Bloomberg News report indicated that Rice had requested or directed that the identities of a number of individuals involved with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign be “unmasked” in raw intelligence reports that would then be widely distributed throughout the federal government and its intelligence agencies – a massive and unprecedented violation of standard policy.

Regarding Rice's actions, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who believed that Rice's actions constituted a "monumental abuse of power," wrote in April 2017:

“The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.... [W]e’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

“That won’t wash. In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA.... There would have been no _intelligence _need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an _intelligence need_based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.”

Rice Lies About Syria's Chemical Weapons

In a January 16, 2017 interview with NPR, Rice boasted that the Obama administration had successfully eliminated the threat of Syrian chemical weapons: “We were able to find a solution that didn't necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished…. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”

But less than three months later, on April 4, 2017, the Syrian government carried out a deadly chemical-weapons attack against the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province.

Rice's Controversial Email to Herself

On the afternoon of January 21, 2017 – fifteen minutes after newly elected President Donald Trump had been sworn into office, and thus, fifteen minutes after Rice's tenure as national-security adviser had ended – Rice wrote an email to herself which stated:

“On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.

“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities 'by the book.' The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.

“From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. […]

“The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”

Regarding Rice's email, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in National Review:

“[I]t’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.... [F]or at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier [January 5], at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done 'by the book.' […] An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done.”

Rice Says That North Korea Should Be Accepted As a Nuclear Power

In August 2017, Rice said that President Donald Trump should accept North Korea as a nuclear power, despite the fact that North Korean President Kim Jong Un was repeatedly threatening to launch nuclear missiles into American cities. “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,” Rice wrote in a New York Times op-ed wherein she criticized Trump's recent warning that any nuclear provocation by North Korea would be met with military “fire and fury.” 

Exploiting the Coronavirus Crisis As a Justification to Push for Vote-by-Mail and "a More Equitable Society"

In April 2020, as the coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic was wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and American life, Rice said in an interview with CNN:

“This is a moment not only of crisis, but inherent in that crisis is opportunity. And we need to take steps to broaden our social safety net to ensure that the most vulnerable have the healthcare, have the education, have the housing that they need.

“But in the immediate term, because many of those things are going to take time and being ambitious, I recommend two critical steps that Congress could take in the next legislation that it passes. One is to ensure that every American has the ability to vote safely in our November election.... [W]e have a real challenge to ensure that voters are able to access the ballot by mail, by longer periods of early voting, by safer polling stations, and that is the job of congress to ensure.

“And secondly, Congress can make a down payment on this effort to build a more equitable society by … creating something called a health force which can begin by employing unemployed Americans, students and the like to be contact tracers….”

Rice Condemns President Trump's Call for Patriotic Education & Speaks of a "Living" Constitution

During a September 2020 broadcast of CNN’s OutFront, host Erin Burnett said: “[President Trump] just said something else today, signed an executive order creating the quote ‘1776 commission.’ And the goal of it, and I want to quote, from the order is to ‘restore patriotic education to our schools,’ as if that education has been gone. He went after The New York Times for its quote, ‘1619 project,’ which aims to reframe this nation’s history with a greater focus on slavery.... What is your response to the president?” Rice replied:

“This was one of the most astonishing speeches I’ve heard him give. He talks about patriotic education. I thought I was listening to Mao Zedong running communist China. We don’t have the education where the dear leader tells the people what they must learn. We open students’ minds. We give them facts. We teach them how to analyze. We teach them civics and the foundations of the Constitution. When you study the Constitution, which it appears Donald Trump hasn’t, you understand it is a living document that has evolved. He heralded today the signing of the Constitution in 1787 as a great day, it was. I love the Constitution. I’ve sworn an oath to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In 1787, you and I, Erin, and all women in our country couldn’t participate in the democracy. We had no vote. If you were African-American and a male, the constitution of 1787 said you are worth 3/5 of a human being. So, to celebrate that and deny the realities of our history, positive and negative, and to wipe out the history of slavery in this country and to call the teaching of it un-American is the most communist, retro, crazy thing I’ve heard out of Donald Trump’s mouth in a while.”

This, in summary, is Susan Rice, Joe Biden’s pick to lead his White House Domestic Policy Council. The narrative of her long career in “public service” is punctuated on virtually every line by dishonesty, deception, poor judgment, and a total absence of wisdom. In short, she represents a perfect fit for a Biden administration.

Shadow of Benghazi Hangs Over the Obama Loyalist Picked to Be Biden’s Domestic Policy Adviser

Pollak: Joe Biden Names Susan Rice to WH Despite Record of Lying, Failure

JOEL B. POLLAK

Former Vice President Joe Biden named Susan Rice to lead his White House Domestic Policy Council on Friday, despite her long history of failure and her record of lying to the American people.

Rice has no experience in domestic policy. She has extensive experience in foreign policy, however — almost all of it bad.

In President Bill Clinton’s administration, Rice tried to keep the U.S. from intervening in the Rwandan genocide, and then tried to cover up the president’s inaction.

Moreover, as Breitbart News has previously noted, “Rice also defended the Clinton administration’s initial refusal to provide cheaper HIV/Aids drugs to Africa, and opposed efforts to work with the Sudanese government when it was prepared to hand over a terrorist named Osama bin Laden.”

She was a foreign policy adviser to then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) during his first presidential campaign, famously lying about the fact that her candidate had promised to meet with enemy leaders “without preconditions” (he did so during a 2007 debate). Obama elevated her to the position of UN Ambassador, where she compounded dishonesty with mismanagement.

As Breitbart News has noted:

Frequently absent from meetings, Rice also attacked Israel but tolerated Iran. She opposed scrutiny of human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but enthusiastically supported the UN Human Rights Council, a discredited club of dictators obsessively focused on condemning Israel. Her office enthusiastically complained to the council about supposed abuses in the U.S., such as Arizona’s immigration law.

In her role as UN Ambassador, Rice infamously led the Obama administration’s effort to cover up its failures during the Benghazi terror attack in September 12, blaming an obscure anti-Muslim YouTube video rather than Islamic terrorists.

That episode doomed her prospects to survive Senate confirmation, were Obama to have nominated her to be Secretary of State in his second term.

Instead, he made her National Security Advisor, where she presided over major failures, allowing Russia to seize Crimea and pursuing a flawed nuclear deal with Iran that encouraged the regime’s regional aggression.

On her way out of office in 2017, Rice was deeply involved in the Obama administration’s efforts to undermine the incoming Trump administration. She helped “unmask” the names of Trump aides in intelligence reports, and later lied about it.

She was present at a key Oval Office meeting in January 2017 when the investigation of incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was discussed (so, too, was Vice President Biden). Though the FBI knew by then that Flynn was innocent, the Obama administration allowed the inquiry to continue.

Rice later tried to cover up the Obama administration’s involvement by writing a memo on her last day in office in which she insisted that President Obama wanted everything done “by the book.”

On Friday, Biden promised that Rice would “elevate and turbocharge” the Domestic Policy Council, but he did not explain what qualifications, if any, she had for that specific role.

In accepting her appointment, Rice talked about her family background, and the achievements of her forebears. But she added: “Today, for far too many, the American dream has become an empty promise, a cruel mockery of lives held back by barriers, new and old.”

Why does someone with contempt for America want to govern it?

There is hardly anyone in America with a worse public record of failure, dishonesty, and conniving than Susan Rice. She has no place in the Biden administration — or any administration.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Susan Rice Departing Netflix Board to Join Biden Administration

HANNAH BLEAU

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice will formally leave her post on the Netflix board next month to join Joe Biden’s administration, with Netflix chairman and co-CEO Reed Hastings thanking Rice for her “service.”

“We are grateful to Susan Rice for her many contributions on our board and congratulate her on her return to public service,” Hastings said following reports of Biden selecting Rice to head the Domestic Policy Council.

Rice, who joined the Netflix board in 2018, will be leaving January 20, according to Deadline.

The former Obama administration official sparked suspicions in August after selling a sizeable portion of her Netflix shares as Biden continued his search for a running mate, though he ultimately chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). However, a representative at the time claimed that Rice’s move had “nothing to do” with Biden or his campaign.

“Ambassador Rice’s sale of a fraction of her Netflix stock has nothing to do with V.P. speculation,” Rice spokesperson Erin Pelton said in a statement. “She filed a stock plan pursuant to SEC regulations over three months ago.”

“She will coordinate the formulation and implementation of President-elect Biden’s domestic policy agenda to build back better,” Biden’s team stated, describing Rice as a “deeply experienced, talented negotiator.”

In a statement, the former vice president said his selection of Rice is aimed to bring “the highest level of experience, compassion, and integrity” to his administration.

Rice, as well as the Obamas, were among those who remained relatively silent in the thick of the controversy over Netflix’s Cuties, a French drama critics say is rife with the sexualization of pre-pubescent children.