Democrat run slush funds under attack at consumer agency

Paul Sperry:

President Trump’s executive orders slashing onerous Obama-era regulations on industry have been credited with kick-starting the sluggish economy and rocket-boosting the stock market. But there’s one mountain of red tape that’s eluded his machete — the Obama-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Until now.
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Industry analysts say unduly harsh regulations and unreasonable penalties have driven thousands of banks out of business, denying many areas access to credit. To appease CFPB’s army of regulators, they say, some banks for the first time have had to hire more compliance officers than loan officers — and they, in turn, have to pass those compliance costs on to customers in the form of higher fees and finance charges.
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They say CFPB is a Democrat shop with an anti-business agenda that goes well beyond protecting consumers and includes closing the “wealth gap” and administering “economic justice,” as Cordray has been fond of saying. It hires almost exclusively Democrats and “rejects Republican job applicants,” according to former CFPB enforcement attorney Ronald Rubin. Federal election data show 100 percent of political donations made by CFPB employees during the 2016 election were given to Democratic candidates.

It’s no surprise then that the agency has:

• Bounced business owners and industry reps from secret meetings it’s held with Democrat operatives, radical civil-rights activists, trial lawyers and other “community advisers,” according to a report by the House Financial Services Committee.
• Retained GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns, for more than $40 million, making the Democrat shop the sole recipient of CFPB’s advertising expenditure, Rubin says.
• Met behind closed doors to craft financial regulatory policy with notorious bank shakedown groups who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money to gin up housing and lending discrimination complaints, which in turn are fed back to CFPB, according to Investor’s Business Daily and Judicial Watch.
• Funneled a large portion of the more than $5 billion in penalties collected from defendants to community organizers aligned with Democrats — “a slush fund by another name,” said a consultant who worked with CFPB on its Civil Penalty Fund and requested anonymity.

What’s more, CFPB has secretly assembled giant consumer databases that raise individual privacy as well as corporate liability concerns. One sweeps up personal credit card information and another compiles data on as many as 230 million mortgage applicants focusing on “race” and “ethnicity.” Yet another database of consumer complaints contains more than 900,000 grievances against named financial companies without any vetting to determine their merit, points out Alan Kaplinsky, lead regulatory compliance attorney at Ballard Spahr LLP.
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There is more.

This monstrosity is part of the Dodd-Frank response to the financial crisis of 2008.  Its main goal appears to be to cover up the Democrats responsibility for creating the crisis by forcing banks to make loans to people who were not creditworthy.  The Democrats in control were poised to repeat that error by making lenders ignore creditworthiness of minority own businesses.  Dodd-Frank should be repealed and this agency should be abolished as part of an effort to root out Democrat corruption.