NO ONE HAS SERVED CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO AND BANK OF AMERICA MORE THAN SEN DIANNE FEINSTEIN. THEY ARE HER SECOND LARGEST BRIBESTERS NEXT TO ONLY THE CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE OF PACIFIC, GAS & ELECTRIC. FEINSTEIN VOTE FOR ANY AND ALL BAILOUTS AND ALL TOO BIG TO JAIL BILLS!
The Senate Is Coming for Your Credit Card
The following content is sponsored by the Electronic Payments Coalition.
It’s hard to write legislation that would make every average American worse off. It’s even harder to pass. But that’s precisely what the number two Senate Democrat Dick Durbin (D-IL) aims to do with his new credit card routing legislation.
In what’s become a white whale for one of the most senior members of the Democratic Party, Sen. Durbin recently reintroduced legislation that would expand Dodd-Frank debit card routing mandates to credit cards. It’s been on his wish list for over a decade, and while it might not sound like a big deal, a closer look reveals that Durbin’s whale would sink America’s Main Street faster than an orca on a Spanish fishing boat.
The bill in question would redirect revenue away from credit card fraud protection, consumer rewards programs, and community bank funding and put it right into the pocket of big box retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. (I’ll give you three guesses as to whose lobbying for the bill).
It’s why some are calling this bill the Big Box Bait and Switch.
The revenue for these programs comes from the interchange transactions on purchases one makes with a credit card (usually 1-2 percent). Currently, a consumer chooses what network they want to use by the card they select — if you pay with a Visa, the merchant has to use Visa’s network. But this bill would strip consumers of that right and give merchants the power to put a purchase through networks that don’t offer perks to cut costs.
It’s safe to say that consumers will suffer a significant loss if the bill is passed.
Not only would you be more likely to experience fraud, but you’d be on the hook for it. Local banks that issue the cards pay for fraudulent purchases through interchange funding. That goes away if the network processing the payment is some dinky operation not connected to the card issuer. Additionally, consumers would lose out on reward points and cash back — all so big box stores can pad their already ludicrous profits.
It’s essential to call out big box stores because they’re the ones who benefit from this bad policy long-term. Ultimately, this bill would hurt everyone on Main Street.
At first, small businesses might find cheaper options; but before too long, they’ll start to feel the pain as well. Consumers will spend less without incentives to use credit cards, and that’s going to mean a drop in revenue, which, if you can’t stomach a 1-2 percent transaction fee, is going to be way worse. With the local banks that fund small businesses also getting hit financially, it will mean less capital to fund Main Street America, increasing consumer reliance on big box stores.
It’s why seemingly every group representing local banks and credit unions has come out in opposition to the bill, and why those who care about small businesses know that this bill is a Big Box Bait and Switch.
And yet somehow, Republican lawmakers have signed on to join him.
Sen. Durbin has convinced Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and J.D. Vance (R-OH) of the lie that this bill helps all businesses. But as listed above, this obviously isn’t true. Hopefully, these senators come to their senses before it’s too late.
THE HISTORY OF THESE TWO CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES HAS NEVER BEEN DIFFERENT. THEY LOOT, POCKET THE PLUNDER, PAY A PALTRY FINE, TUCK SOME INTO FIENSTEIN'S POCKETS, AND GO ON FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF ECONOMIC CRIME.
WE WANT THE FUKERS JAILED!
So did all the crooks fired from Wells Fargo get new jobs at Bank of America?
Not too long ago, Wells Fargo got its head handed to it by regulators, drawing a $3 billion fine for opening fake accounts in real customers' names, to beef up their bonuses as well as fool shareholders into thinking the business was growing, potentially driving up the stock price.
That's no partisan take -- that's just plain dishonesty.
The bank had to pay a $3 billion fine, at least one executive faced prison and a hefty personal fine of $17 million, and if anything, it was too little. A small fry bank that did this would rightly be shut down as some kind of criminal racket.
Still, the punishment should have gotten the other banks' attention. At a minimum, they could focus on not doing those things and saving their banks some humongous fines and jail times.
Not Bank of America, which based on news accounts, was pretty much doing the same thing even after Wells Fargo was raked over the coals.
According to Reuters:
July 11 (Reuters) - Bank of America (BAC.N) on Tuesday agreed to pay $250 million in fines and compensation to settle claims the bank systematically double-charged customers fees, withheld promised credit card perks, and opened accounts without customer authorization.
Bank of America agreed to pay $100 million in restitution to harmed consumers and another $150 million in civil penalties after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said the bank violated a number of laws beginning in 2012.
Why the fine was just a fraction of what Wells Fargo got is enough to give one pause.
They were, after all, doing the same thing -- as if they'd hired all the crooks who get canned at Wells Fargo to carry on doing the same thing.
But more likely, they were cloaked in woke, and viewed that as its own armor to ensure that they would never be punished the way other banks were.
Sure, they're a big bank. But it's more than passing strange that they got off so lightly, like this was a Hunter Biden-typle deal.
Might that be because Bank of America has gotten significantly more "woke"?
It seems possible in light of the Hunter Biden deal -- but also because of other events in the news regarding the bank -- that they handed over customer data on gun purchases to the FBI without a subpoena, and without a legal process, as well as handed over bank data to the bureau to identify January 6 protestors. Maybe they got some brownie points for their devotion to the woke-ified government agencies.
What's more, they've been on the woke train for a long time, since at least the 2008 Obama election and financial meltdown of that era.
In 2021, Chris Rufo reported at City Journal that the bank had introduced a "woke at work" policy, brainwashing its employees into thinking America was a white supremacist society:
Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”
Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.
Can't get more wokesterly than that.
Oh, but they could, they could. The Washington Free Beacon reports that they were accused by an activist group of politicizing their actual banking, not just sucking up to the government's coercive organs:
A national ad campaign targeting Bank of America over its politicized business policies says the bank has gone "full woke," pointing to the bank's race-based home financing and decision to cut off loans to gun manufacturers and fossil fuel industries.
Consumers' Research, a consumer advocacy group, launched the "Bank of UnAmerica" campaign this week with nationwide TV ads, a Times Square billboard, and mobile advertisements in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Miami, and other cities.
The ads accuse Bank of America of "using a social score system straight out of China's playbook" by "building a system to track your carbon emissions and monitor your driving," "coming after your Second Amendment rights," and "favoring certain home buyers based on their race."
None of that sounds good for profits, which is their job to focus on.
They did have quite a big business in fines for bounced checks, which they got rid of a year ago, making it a more reasonable $10 per bad check or unexpected subscription debit. While bouncing checks is not good personal finance practice on the customer side, and in countries like France could get you thrown in jail, (last time I checked, which was awhile ago), excessive fees in the neighborhood of $35 x 2 = $70, for what are usually the poorest customers, is not good either and the bank's fines current included that practice. It actually became a money-making center for the bank, resembling battered cities like St. Louis which have made much of their city income off excessive traffic stops and fines in poor areas, prompting lots of bad will towards police.
Because who was most likely to be hit by the fees? That's right, the poor, the people with shaky, unpredictable incomes, the people most likely to get laid off. How many of those poor were actual minorities? Let's just say it was probably quite a few.
Which right there exposes the hypocrisy of the bank and its wokesterly virtue-signalling. The bulk of these bad business practices on the fee front most likely hit minority customers hardest. So, while they were virtue-signaling their racial grievance-mongering and indoctrinating their employees in the practice of wokedom, they were leaning hardest on minority customers who had the shakiest incomes to pad their profits. Presumably, the fake account-opening would have involved customers of higher incomes, but there may have been many minority customers in that group, too.
What an ugly picture that is.
Were they to have focused on sound business practices, making fees reasonably aligned to their costs, and focused instead on growing the business by making it more attractive to customers across the board, they might not ever have gotten into this situation. blunted
But the wokedom seems to have blunted the punishment they took now, which suggests to the rest of us that wokery is nothing more than a shield for avoiding punishment for elemental bad business practices.
In other words, the woke-industrial racket that the bank and much of the corporate world has embraced, is a racket in more ways than one, an incentivization for blunting the impact of punishment for bad practices going on.
Which really means the scrutiny should continue and be ongoing for how the feds take on banks with bad practices and whether wokery has exerted a corrupting influence on who gets punished.
As for Bank of America, out with it: How many minority customers did you stiff as you made all those pious virtue-signaling statements about America the hopelessly racially flawed place all full of white supremacists? The bank that smelt it, dealt it.
Image: Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 2.0
Maxine Waters Unfit to Chair House Financial Services Committee
Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.
With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.
Throughout her storied political career, Waters has been embroiled in numerous
controversies, including abusing her power to enrich family members, getting a communist dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.
Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.
Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.
It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.
Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.
In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.
Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?
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