Posts tagged with 'Chris Dodd'
Weekly Audit: After Health Care, the Economy
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Now that health care reform has finally been enacted, a host of critical economic issues are taking center stage, including financial reform, unemployment and deeply rooted economic inequality. But it’s important to note that with its health care vote, the U.S. House of Representatives actually approved a very important, and often overlooked financial reform: Student lending.
Pedro de la Torre III of Campus Progress explains the current student loan nightmare in an interview with The American Prospect’s Rebecca Delaney. For years, the U.S. government has paid massive subsidies to some of the worst-run companies in the country.
Thanks a lot, Sallie Mae
As de la Torre notes, instead of directly making loans to students, the government spent years funneling money to firms like Sallie Mae to actually make the loans. When things went sour, taxpayers covered the lender’s losses from student loans that ultimately went bad.
Taxpayers were also footing the bill for the loans and taking on the risk, while private companies and their executives enjoyed the benefits. The executives made quite a haul. In 2008 alone, Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord took home an astonishing $46 million. Even among CEOs, that’s a princely sum—more than double what Halliburton CEO David Lesar made the same year. All of that money could have financed a lot of college educations.
Fortunately, the student loan landscape is almost certain to change as a result of the health care vote. The House bill included a provision to end student loan subsidies and boost funding for direct grants from the government to students.
Since the student loan reform and health care were both eligible for reconciliation in the Senate (meaning only 51 votes are needed for passage instead of the 60 to clear a filibuster), House Democrats decided to move on both at the same time. It’s a significant reform, and one that will soon become law with President Barack Obama’s signature.
What would an overhaul of the consumer finance industry entail?
The student loan system is just one aspect of the consumer finance industry that needs a major overhaul. On mortgages, credit cards, overdrafts, and payday loans, the banking status quo is one of outright predation. As Heather McGhee of Demos explains to The Nation’s Christopher Hayes, there’s a reason why federal agencies do a lousy job regulating consumer banking abuses.
Right now there is no agency responsible for consumer protection alone. Every regulator also focuses on making sure banks don’t fail, which generally means that regulators support anything that increases short-term profits. Egregiously predatory practices generally lead to big short-term gains in banking.
A new consumer financial protection bureau
Last week, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) introduced a bill that would create a new bureau of consumer financial protection, with no constraints from bank profitability. It’s a step in the right direction, but as McGhee notes, there are plenty of problems with Dodd’s proposal. Most problematically, the bill gives existing agencies a veto power over any new consumer protection rules. That’s a terrible loophole. Existing regulators have actively opposed consumer protections in the past, and there is every reason to expect that practice to continue.
Rapid tax refunds scam the poor
It’s late March, which means tax season is getting into full swing. All over the country, mascots from Liberty Tax are spilling into the streets wearing goofy costumes, trying to win your business. But millions of Americans don’t realize that Liberty, along with H&R Block, Jackson-Hewitt and hundreds of smaller businesses are engaged in a monstrous scam disguised as a complicated accounting service.
As Alexander Zaitchik emphasizes for AlterNet, these tax preparers have used deceptive advertising and slick salesmanship to con people into taking out “refund anticipation loans,” also known as “rapid refunds” and a handful of other pleasant euphemisms. It’s a simple gimmick: H&R Block does your taxes, and then presents you with your tax refund, right away, no waiting. But the check you receive is not actually your tax refund—it’s your tax refund minus a truckload of fees that you didn’t realize were being deducted. This is the tax-time equivalent of payday lending.
When the government sends in your actual, larger tax refund one-to-two weeks later, you won’t see it—it goes straight to H&R Block’s bank partner. Those banks are making big money taking from your tax returns. Here’s Zaitchik:
“In 2008, more than eight million Americans spent nearly a billion dollars paying interest and fees on RALs—often based on misleading or incomplete information—swelling the profits of tax preparers and their partner banks.”
The one break low-income people get under the U.S. tax code is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the nation’s largest anti-poverty program. Only about 16% of taxpayers qualify for the EITC, but as Zaitchik notes, nearly two-thirds of the people who take out refund anticipation loans receive the credit. Tax preparers are making a concerted effort to prey on the poor, making the EITC program more expensive and less efficient for all taxpayers—not just those who go to H&R Block or Liberty Tax.
More action needed on jobs
Beyond finance, the U.S. economy has a serious jobs problem. Last week, Congress approved an $18 billion jobs package that is simply far too small to make a serious dent in the nearly double-digit unemployment rate. As Art Levine explains for Working In These Times, the package will create 250,000 jobs at best. That number shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone watching the U.S. economy, which has shed about 7 million jobs since the recession began.
There are much stronger options available than the $18 million bill the Senate approved. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has introduced a bill in the House that would quickly save or create one million jobs, and the House has already passed a separate $154 billion jobs package that would prevent 900,000 lay-offs. If the Senate moved on either one, the result would be a major economic boost.
The link between poor economies and poor health
All of these problems—unemployment, student loan scamming, refund anticipation loan sharking and other forms of financial predation—reinforce economic inequality in the United States, which is at levels unseen since before the Great Depression. That inequality is ultimately actively damaging to public health, as epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson explains in an interview with Brooke Jarvis for Yes! Magazine. Rampant economic inequality in the United States is literally making us sick.
“We looked at life expectancy, mental illness, teen birthrates, violence, the percent of populations in prison, and drug use,” Wilkinson says. “They were all not just a little bit worse, but much worse, in more unequal countries.”
With health care finally finished, Congress and the administration have an opportunity to make serious headway on the economy. They’ve got plenty of work to do.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: Doomsday for the CFPA?
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
Just when the Democrats need to be tougher than ever on financial reform, Senate Banking Committee Chair Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), seems to have given up completely and put the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) at risk.
Last fall, Dodd called the Federal Reserve’s regulatory efforts an “abysmal failure.” And yet, on March 1, he proposed housing a consumer protection agency within the Fed instead of establishing the CFPA as its own independent entity. This drastic change in strategy has left many Democrats shaking their heads. WTF, Senator Dodd?
A change in focus
As Andy Kroll reports for Mother Jones:
“Dodd appears to have switched his focus from out-reforming the White House to out-compromising just about everyone. As the Senate banking committee prepares to release a draft of a comprehensive reform bill as early as this week, Dodd has repeatedly conceded to his Republican counterparts on key issues, almost guaranteeing that the Senate’s measure will be far more lenient on the banking industry than the legislation the House passed in December… Dodd’s willingness to appease Republicans like Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the main GOP negotiating partner, and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the banking committee’s ranking member, has disappointed Dodd’s fellow Democrats and reform advocates who urge a tougher crackdown.” (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Dodd and Dorgan to Retire
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Two Democratic senators unexpectedly announced their retirements on Tuesday. Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) announced that they would not seek reelection when their terms expire in 2010. Hopefully, health care reform will already have passed by then, but the departure of these senators will have implications for health care policy.
As far as the Democratic majority in the Senate is concerned, the two probably cancel each other out. As a relatively conservative 30-year incumbent, Dorgan was thought to be the only Democrat who could win a seat in conservative North Dakota. Dodd, on the other hand, is deeply unpopular for his role in the financial crisis, but hails from a deep blue state, so it should be easy to replace him with another Democrat. In fact, as Eric Kleefeld reports for Talking Points Memo, Dodd’s announcement improves the Democrats’ chances of holding that seat. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Time to Shake Off the Bank Lobby
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Immigration, Live From Main Street, Syndicated Reporting Project, Uncategorized
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger
While the national economy struggles under the weight of a massive bank bailout effort, the banking lobby’s ability to influence public policy is more problematic than ever. The too-big-to-fail bankers may be dependent on U.S. taxpayers for their survival, but corporate lobbyists still have members of Congress, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve asking the banks’ permission to bring the Big Finance behemoths under control. The relationship between Wall Street and the government is so out of whack that it’s difficult to distinguish the political players from the panhandlers.
In Mother Jones, Daniel Schulman and Jonathan Stein detail the ease with which important congressional staff switch careers and move into the banking sector. In recent years, dozens of key staffers for powerful Senators have left the political arena to work for as lobbyists for the financial sector, and policy gurus from both sides of the aisle are jumping ship for lucrative careers as influence peddlers on Wall Street.
“Financial firms seeking big bucks and favorable terms from Congress and the White House are deploying Capitol Hill aides turned lobbyists to win favorable treatment from the congressional lawmakers,” Schulman and Stein write. Many lawmakers, including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are refusing to disclose whether they’ve had contact with former staff who now work for Wall Street. Small surprise, then, that so many of the recent bailout packages have allowed failed bank CEOs to stay in power and saved their shareholders from bad investments in inept, even predatory, companies.
Sometimes these reinvented bank defenders are even former Senators. Susan Douglas of In These Times highlights the career of former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who is currently a lobbyist for UBS. The Swiss banking giant has been plagued by a seemingly endless stream of scandals over the past year, for everything from diamond smuggling to tax fraud. And Gramm helped push for looser predatory lending laws—including those pertaining to the now-decimated mortgage sector—while he on the UBS payroll.
This would be a shameful legacy for any former public servant, but for Gramm, Douglas notes, this behavior is particularly disgraceful: his two chief legislative “accomplishments” helped create and intensify the current financial crisis. Gramm co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which compounded the financial world’s too-big-to-fail problem by letting traditional commercial lenders like Bank of America and Citigroup buy up riskier, unregulated investment banks like Merrill Lynch. Gramm then pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 through in a midnight budget amendment, a tactic which made sure that “credit default swaps” were not subject to either securities regulations or gambling laws. Just eight years later, credit default swap gambling destroyed insurance giant AIG, to the dismay of taxpayers everywhere.
When lawmakers stop cowing to the bank lobby and start answering to their constituents, the result is a big boost for the entire economy. Last week, committees in both the House and Senate dealt the credit card industry a rare defeat by approving bills that crack down on abusive credit card billing practices. Even though Sen. Dodd insists keeping his lobbying contacts a mystery, he is capable of crafting responsible legislation. The bills were introduced by Dodd and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., but still face major uphill battles clearing the full House and Senate.
As Harry Hanbury details for the American News Project, conservative lawmakers and bank lobbyists are already hard at work watering down the legislative language to ensure that it will not actually curb any abuses if enacted. Take a look:
The bills would ban dozens of billing gimmicks that are as outrageous as they are common, including raising interest rates on credit card debt after it has been accumulated and hiking rates due to completely unrelated activity, like returning a library book late. The banking industry deploys a lot of clever words to mask the predation inherent in the tactics, and most common of all are the terms “price according to risk” and “risk-based pricing.” These phrases make it sound as if all the poor little credit card companies want to do is set interest rates at levels appropriate for a borrower’s credit profile. Of course, that’s not what’s actually happening: lenders are radically changing the terms of loan agreements for no other purpose than to gouge borrowers, and give borrowers no say in what happens.
It’s crazy that banks are legally permitted to raise interest rates on cardholders after they have charged debt to their credit card. If you pay full price for anything else—a shirt, a bag of groceries, a guitar—it would be laughable if the shop clerk demanded more money from you months later.
Banker apologists insist that banning these practices will restrict the flow of credit. But more credit cards will not fix a problem caused by massively over-indebted consumers. We need higher wages, not a fresh flood of predatory, high-interest debt.
But if taxpayers can win on credit cards, we can win on the bailout, too. Yes! Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder posted an open letter to President Barack Obama this week, citing half a dozen economic experts and urging him to change his bailout strategy before it’s too late. “Watching your appointees’ latest bank bailout makes me wonder if all your administration’s good work on health care, education, and jobs will be swept away by the extraordinary giveaway of trillions in taxpayer money to a group of powerful Wall Street operatives,” van Gelder writes.
And indeed, in other arenas of economic policy, the president has made significant steps in the right direction. While Obama’s proposed federal budget is less than perfect, it moves away from some of the worst trends of the past eight years. GritTV’s Laura Flanders details some of this progress in a roundtable discussion with Irasema Garza, President of Legal Momentum, former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, and New York City Coalition Against Hunger Director Joel Berg. By implementing robust job creation plans and a massive increase in anti-hunger and nutrition programs, Obama has signaled that the plight of those hardest hit by the recession cannot simply be ignored.
But these positive budget strides do not involve the banking lobby, which still maintains a stranglehold on any realm of U.S. public policy it can loot for a profit. Obama standing up to the financiers is not an improbable pipe dream, it’s a prerequisite for economic recovery and a necessary step toward rebuilding the integrity of our democracy.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.