“Monopoly Man became the Internet crush of the day on Wednesday, after upstaging former Equifax CEO Richard Smith at a Senate hearing on the company’s massive data breach. The board game character, whose name is Rich Uncle Pennybags, was brought to life by Amanda Werner, an arbitration campaign manager for Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform, groups that advocate for consumer rights and protections.”
“[E]xecutives for both Wells Fargo and Equifax… will testify in Senate committees next week. Both companies have used arbitration clauses in an attempt to deny consumers access to the courts… ‘This rush toward a vote in the Senate is a cynical attempt to roll back an important consumer protection before anyone gets straight answers from Equifax and Wells Fargo about the damage they’ve done to the financial lives of millions of Americans,’ said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.”
“A cadre of attorneys and policy advisers from the Obama administration is teaming up to do what they say Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seems incapable of doing: protecting students. ‘Rather than collaborating to get more relief to students who’ve fallen prey to industry scams, and to prevent future abuses, DeVos has chosen to make oversight more difficult and accountability harder to come by,’ said Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at the progressive Americans for Financial Reform.”
“No other piece of Dodd-Frank “mattered to Goldman quite like the Volcker Rule, which would protect banks’ solvency by limiting their freedom to make speculative trades with their own money. Unless Goldman could initiate what [AFR Policy Director Marcus] Stanley called the ‘complexity two-step’ — win a carve-out so a new rule wouldn’t interfere with legitimate business and then use that carve-out to render a rule toothless — Volcker would slam the door shut on the entire direction in which Blankfein and Cohn had taken Goldman.”
“The regulation, issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on July 10 and scheduled to go into effect in mid-January, came under attack by Republicans in Congress ‘before the ink was even dry,’ says Amanda Werner of Americans for Financial Reform, which is fighting to retain the rule… Consumer privacy advocates hope that the Equifax debacle will remind senators of the importance of the rule. ‘We need to look at how consumers are going to be able to hold these firms accountable,’ Werner says.”
“At least one Republican has already defected—and Crapo can only afford to lose one more… Amanda Werner, campaign manager at the consumer group Americans for Financial Reform and the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen, said ‘it is pretty appalling that Equifax would exploit consumers need for identify theft protection in the wake of this crisis they created in order to avoid accountability.’”