Banksters Gone Wild

Muskrats Kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

If you were a very tiny man, a barely-there wisp with a soul full of grievance that you expiate by commencing in-office meetings with invocations to God, and if the Leader of the Free World gave you a position of immense power, what is the very first thing you would do?

Go to church and thank your supernatural overlord? Take the kids you share with your ex to dinner in Georgetown? Slam down a celebratory Scotch with Steve Bannon?

Russell Vought is that wispy Little Man. And his first order of business as Director of the Office of Management and Budget was demolishing protections for financial service consumers.

If you’ve never heard of this man, don’t feel bad. He’s been floating around Washington for a very long time, barely visible, like a transparent sea worm. (More about him later in this week’s edition of Freak of the Week.)

He’s a conspicuously sanctimonious right-wing tool, the author of parts of Project 2025. And last week he was confirmed to his enormously powerful position over the strenuous but ultimately ineffectual objections of Senate Democrats.

The OMB director is the President’s budget-maker and budget-enforcer, empowered to ensure the myriad agencies are spending money in line with the President’s goals.

If you had that job, would your to-do list maybe start with the biggest and most corruption-eaten budget in American (and maybe human) history, the $900 billion Defense budget?

No.

Vought’s first order of business was to dismantle a small agency with a truly noble purpose: to protect financial service consumers from predatory lenders, credit card grifters, mortgage sharks, and other financial miscreants.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2011 out of an omnibus piece of legislation that Congress hammered out to try to head off another financial disaster like the 2008-9 crash and the Great Recession.

In case you’ve forgotten about that crisis: A grand house-of-cards financial industry scam involving predatory lending practices and subprime mortgages created a housing bubble that burst, nearly sinking the global financial system. The US government then came to the rescue with $700 billion in taxpayer money. Banksters made out like thieves. But John Q Public was, excuse my French, fucked: Nearly nine million Americans lost their jobs and at least 10 million lost their homes. Within four years, 46.5 million Americans were living in poverty.

The Dodd-Frank Bill of 2010 made numerous tweaks in regulatory law applied to Wall Street, with the aim of preventing another out-of-control, unregulated get-rich-quick scheme (which crypto looks to be becoming, more on that sometime soon). But its most effective act - as evidenced by the subsequent outpouring of bankster fury and Republican efforts to undo it - was creating the CFPB.

The CFPB was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who proposed it in 2007 when she was still a law professor at Harvard. Her role in the creation partially explains her position as a caricature of socialist evil, thanks to the far right. Bernie, but also a witch.

Since its creation, the agency has been effective. It extracted $20 billion in financial relief for U.S. consumers in the form of canceled debts, compensation, and reduced loans. Last year, the Bureau limited credit card late fees to eight dollars. The rule was blocked by a judge, but in a shocking move from the rightist U.S. Supreme Court, they overruled that. Last month, the bureau sued Capital One Bank for allegedly misleading consumers about its offerings for high-interest savings accounts — and “cheating” customers out of more than $2 billion in lost interest payments.

According to its own website, which is in the process of being “disappeared” (we can start using that as a verb, like in Soviet Russia, can’t we?), CFPB lists some of its successes. Its rules are saving consumers $6.1 billion a year in bank fees. The agency recovered $363 million from 39 public enforcement actions that involved harm to service members and veterans. Almost 23 million Americans have had at least one medical collection removed from their credit reports, almost 7 million consumer complaints were sent to companies for response, and 63 million Americans have used the database for answers to hundreds of common financial questions.

The total destruction of the agency has been a wet dream of Wall Street, the banksters, and every two-bit payday loan hustler since it opened its doors in 2011. As recently as October, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon promised a “knife fight” with the agency for its rule making it easier for consumers to switch banks.

Bankster henchmen in Washington have tried again and again to kill it. In 2017, during one of the countless Republican moves to kill it, Georgia Congressman Barry Loudermilk whined that the agency’s public complaint page unfairly destroyed reputations. As of this writing, the Complaints page is still online, with almost eight million complaints. It might be worth checking out before it goes the way of all the government climate and health data that Muskrats and MAGA are deleting. (Its nearly eight million complaints are searchable by name: Americans logged 51,000 complaints against Bank of America and Chase, 43,000 complaints against Citibank, and 17,000 complaints against Paypal.)

Like Obamacare, Republicans have relentlessly attacked the CFPB, as have the beneficiaries of high credit card fees and other schemes, in court and in Congress. Trump’s first CFPB director Mick Mulvaney fired the entire board in 2017.

On Friday, Vought announced he is acting director of the CFPB. Over the weekend Musk’s baby Nazis got access to the agency’s computers. He told employees to stay home this week and to stop working on regulations and other projects. Vought has moved to cut off the agency’s funding, much of which comes from civil money penalties deposited into the CFPB’s victims relief fund which provides compensation to consumers who have been harmed by violations of federal consumer financial protection law.

Once again, the world’s richest man stands to personally benefit: Reporters are finding that, as with USAID, the Musk fix was in. Even before Vought was on board, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped the agency an advisory addendum specifically ordering the CFPB not to initiate supervisory actions over any “nondepository” institutions.

Just a coincidence, surely, but those supervisory actions would have applied to a new Musk project. Less than two weeks ago, Musk’s X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced the creation of an “Everything app,” including an “X Money Account” in which financial services firms will partner with Musk and offer debit cards to X users. Visa is reportedly X Money’s first partner.

Musk’s Money Account aims to operate like behemoth non-deposit financial services Apple and Google Pay. The CFPB only put those services under its regulatory umbrella in November 2024. The safeguards were intended to protect people’s privacy, remedy errors, and combat fraud.

Vought’s action now shields Elon Musk’s latest venture from scrutiny, allowing him to launch his new payment platform and treat users any way he wants without any oversight from the CFPB.

So now the world’s richest man has all your personal data and stores your money… What could possibly go wrong? We might never know since a very tiny man named Russell Vought has shut down the one agency that might protect us.

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