Tag: Sleaze

  • Give him money and he might talk to you

    Unabashed corruption:

    Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

    “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

    That’s a rewording of Bill Clinton’s corrupt take that money shouldn’t buy you influence but it should buy you access.

    [Mulvaney] has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

    Well the vulnerable don’t give him money, because they don’t have it to give, so fuck them, yeah?

    In his remarks, Mr. Mulvaney also announced a series of moves intended to reduce the bureau’s power. The agency was championed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Cordray, who served as the bureau’s director from its inception until last year.

    Such moves include cutting public access to the bureau’s database of consumer complaints, which the agency had used to help guide its investigations.

    …

    The consumer bureau was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Law as a way to prevent banks and other financial companies from preying on vulnerable consumers. But the bureau has become a target of Republican lawmakers, who complain that it has unchecked power and is too aggressive in trying to punish financial firms.

    “Too aggressive” for what? “Too aggressive” to turn a blind eye when financial firms and banks take on mountains of reckless debt until the economy collapses in a heap of rubble? They want that to happen again?

    Sure they do, as long as some money whizzes walk away with billions.

  • Patently

    It’s entirely completely and utterly coincidental that Scott Pruitt got a sweet deal on a condo from a lobbyist and it just so happened that at the very same time the lobbyists client got a sweet deal from the EPA. There is NO CONNECTION WHATEVER and it’s very rude to say otherwise. People have such awful corrupt minds, you know? Seeing a connection where there is none.

    The Environmental Protection Agency signed off last March on a Canadian energy company’s pipeline-expansion plan at the same time that the E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt, was renting a condominium linked to the energy company’s powerful Washington lobbying firm.

    Both the E.P.A. and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between the agency’s action and the condo rental, for which Mr. Pruitt was paying $50 a night.

    “Any attempt to draw that link is patently false,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pruitt, said in a written statement.

    Patently, PATENTLY. It’s crystal clear and totally obvious that there is no link. How? It just is, god damn it!

    The March 2017 action by the E.P.A. on the pipeline project — in the form of a letter telling the State Department that the E.P.A. had no serious environmental objections — meant that the project, an expansion of the Alberta Clipper line, had cleared a significant hurdle. The expansion, a project of Enbridge Inc., a Calgary-based energy company, would allow hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil a day to flow through this pipeline to the United States from Canadian tar sands.

    The signoff by the E.P.A. came even though the agency, at the end of the Obama administration, had moved to fine Enbridge $61 million in connection with a 2010 pipeline episode that sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and other waterways. The fine was the second-largest in the history of the Clean Water Act, behind the penalty imposed after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Now to be fair, it is true, and even patently true, that it’s wholly consistent with Trumpist ideology that the Trump EPA would say “sure go right ahead with your expanded pipeline!” even though the company had already sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Michigan rivers and waterways. It is true that Trump and his gang make a point of not giving a flying fuck about things like polluted rivers when there’s a buck to be made. It is true that Pruitt’s EPA probably would have approved that project even if Pruitt had spent his DC nights on a bench in Lafayette Park. But the fact remains that there are rules against accepting favors from people who are in a position to need and request a favor in return.