“I wasn’t sent here to safeguard and protect profit,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a video from the hearing circulated by Americans for Financial Reform, “I was sent here to safeguard and protect people.”
“This lobbyist is about the purest walking-and-talking evidence you could imagine of why money matters in Washington,” Linda Jun, senior policy counsel for Americans for Financial Reform
Today, private equity and hedge fund managers take advantage of gaps in regulations to make billions of dollars by looting real-world businesses and engaging in abusive practices without any accountability. They also pay taxes at a lower rate than teachers and firefighters. The undersigned organizations support the Stop Wall Street Looting Act (S.2155 / HR 3848 ). This legislation would eliminate tax, securities and bankruptcy law carve-outs that allow these Wall Street titans to make billions at the expense of workers, communities and pensions.
We urge Congress to stand up for working people and for communities, patients and consumers, and enact the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.
Advocates reacted with outrage to a new proposal from two federal bank regulators that could make it easier for payday and other high-cost lenders to use banks as a fig leaf so that online lenders can offer predatory loans at interest rates that are prohibited under state law.
The survey found that voters across party lines both disapprove of common approaches of private equity firms in taking over and running existing businesses. They also approve of measures to increase accountability, close loopholes, and protect workers, investors and the viability of target firms.
Voters support continued reform of Wall Street, and that conviction extends to the private equity industry, according to a new poll by Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting. Majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans, oppose the predatory tactics of private equity industry, and support legislative proposals aimed at correcting its abuses.
AFR and partners sent a letter in support of the Small Business Lending Fairness Act, which protects small businesses from predatory lenders by ensuring their ability to defend their businesses in the justice system by codifying the ban on confessions of judgments in consumer and small business loans.
AFR and partners sent a letter in support of the package of debt collection bills to strengthen consumer protections for debt collection through broadening the FDCPA’s protections by expanding and clarifying the definition of debt and placing needed limits on collection efforts.
Americans for Financial Reform today applauded the introduction ofthe Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act of 2019, legislation that would extend the 36 percent APR interest rate cap on payday and car-title lenders in the Military Lending Act (MLA) to cover all Americans.