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Trump appointees protect banks overcharging student customers

Many colleges encourage their students to open accounts at certain banks. What the students don’t know is the colleges are being paid for this. The banks then charge the students 3 to 4 times the normal monthly account fees in some cases. It’s a lucrative setup for everyone but the students.

There’s a federal agency that’s supposed to protect consumers like them. It was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and created during President Obama’s administration. Republicans hate this agency, and Trump tried to eviscerate it by putting a partisan hack in charge of it.

Here’s how the Trump administration is **not** protecting student bank customers:

“For months, the Trump administration hid a report showing that banks charged high fees to college students who opened accounts and held debit cards …. The report, which was done by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was only released publicly only last week after consumer advocacy groups submitted freedom of information requests for the document. A copy was sent from the agency to the Department of Education in February.

“Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had accused agency heads of burying the report when he quit in protest earlier this year. ‘When new evidence came to light showing the nation’s largest banks were ripping off students on campuses across the country by saddling them with legally dubious account fees, bureau leadership suppressed the publication of a report prepared by bureau staff,’ Frotman wrote in his resignation letter.”
(Quoted from CNN; read their story here.) Note from this it isn’t just the CFPB who’s protecting greedy bankers preying on unwitting students; Trump’s education department hid this report, too.
Trump’s education secretary is Betsy DeVos, the antithesis of a consumer-friendly politician. She grew up in one predatory business family and married into another one. Her brother, Erik Prince, made millions from taxpayers by supplying mercenaries during the Iraq War through his notorious company known as Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi, a strange name for a gunfighter rental company). DeVos married into the billionaire DeVos family, co-founders of the Amway pyramid marketing company.
This writer grew up in a Republican community, so naturally started out in life as a Republican, because that’s what everyone I knew was. I switched to the Democrats in college because I quickly figured out which party helped struggling students, and which party took advantage of them. The Democrats supported things like Pell grants, student loan programs, a decent minimum wage, education benefits for veterans, consumer protection laws, and so on. Republicans want to privatize everything so businessmen can profit from it, keep wages low, and prevent students from voting. So it’s not surprising that a GOP administration is helping greedy bankers rip off students. The GOP is known as the “party of the rich” for a reason, and if you’re not rich yourself, you vote for them at your peril.
Photo: Mugshots of Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince, sister and brother

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Posted 11 Dec 2018 by Roger Rabbit in Donald Trump, Politics

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