Tag: consumer protections

How a GOLIATH Act Could Restore Consumer Rights

The following article by Joe Valenti was posted on the Center for American Progress website April 20, 2018:

Amanda Werner, dressed as Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags, sits behind Richard Smith, left, former CEO of Equifax, during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on the company’s security breach, October 4, 2017. Credit: Getty/CQ Roll Call/Tom Williams

A year ago this month, David Dao, a then-69-year-old doctor, was forcibly removed by police from an overbooked United Airlines flight in Chicago. Graphic video footage of his severe injuries prompted an immediate backlash against the airline, changes to airline procedures across the industry regarding oversold flights, and an eventual settlement for Dao. In 2017, partly in response to customer complaints, the airline industry as a whole kicked the lowest rate of passengers off flights since 1995. Yet a single incident, even one as severe as what Dao endured, may not effectively change corporate policy; everyday incidents don’t always go viral and lead to relief. To that end, consumers rely on federal regulators to protect them from mistreatment by major companies that are only getting bigger and less accountable. Continue reading “How a GOLIATH Act Could Restore Consumer Rights”

‘Populist’ Trump Punks His Credulous Fans (Again)

The following article by Joe Conason was posted on the National Memo website February 3, 2017:

After signing, President Donald Trump holds up an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010 Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform at the White House, February 3, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

There was never any reason to think that Donald Trump’s stump-speech assaults on Wall Street banks and hedge funds were even momentarily sincere — but millions of working and middle-class voters loved his ‘populist’ rhetoric.  

Emerging from that gold-plated jet, Trump would roar about cracking down on the financial vultures who had fattened while everyone else suffered, as his fans cheered.

 He wouldn’t let those paper-shuffling crooks escape their share of taxes any more. He was paying for the campaign from his own massive fortune, so he would owe allegiance to nobody but the American people. He excoriated Hillary Clinton, who had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, warning that the Democrat would dance to Wall Street’s tune.  He even aired a television commercial, late in the campaign, that vowed to free the country from the “globalist” designs of Goldman chair Lloyd Blankfein and investor George Soros. Continue reading “‘Populist’ Trump Punks His Credulous Fans (Again)”

Here’s what’s at stake as Trump moves to unravel Dodd-Frank

The following article by James Rufus Koren was posted on the L.A. Times website February 3, 2017:

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act is named after former Democratic Sens. Christopher J. Dodd, left, and Barney Frank, shown in 2010. (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump signed an executive order Friday that calls for his administration to review the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, with an eye toward revising or eliminating parts of the 2010 law.

An administration official told reporters that the law “in many respects was a piece of massive government overreach” and that some of the rules within the law, passed in the wake of last decade’s financial crisis, “may have even been unconstitutional.” Continue reading “Here’s what’s at stake as Trump moves to unravel Dodd-Frank”