This is what fair and effective regulation of commerce is supposed to look like:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- In its first public enforcement action, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced it is fining Capital One Bank for pressuring and misleading two million customers into buying additional products when they opened their credit card accounts.
The bank will refund roughly $140 million to customers and pay an additional $25 million penalty to the CFPB for using deceptive marketing tactics, the government's consumer watchdog said Wednesday.
Capital One (COF, Fortune 500) will also pay the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency a $35 million penalty and refund an additional $10 million to customers for unfair billing practices. The two actions combined bring the bank's total payout to $210 million.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/18/pf/capital-one-refund/index.htm
The CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) is the entity championed by Elizabeth Warren and was a direct response to decades of fraudulent banking practices, predatory lending activities, and market manipulation of varying products such as credit cards, student loans, mortgages, payday lenders, banks and financial services outfits, etc.
In other words - it was put in place to protect the average American consumer from unethical business practices of the kind that this country has seen destroy the global economy this past decade.
And do you know who it was that fought the establishment of the CFPB tooth and nail to the point that President Obama had to perform a recess appointment of it's director (currently Richard Cordray) in order for the agency to get off the ground and begin the work of protecting consumers? Yes - the Republican party, the bankers, the financial services and mortgage industries, and the TeaBagger congress critters. All of which leads this interested observer to the foregone conclusion that the GOP truly does not give a fuck about whether or not the average American is getting screwed over financially by the banksters and credit card companies and mortgage industries. They simply JUST DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU!
And while the GOP has been the main obstacle to the efforts of controlling the avaricious greed of the banksters, there are some Democrats (of the Blue Dog kind) who frequently side with the GOP in protecting the rights of the banksters against the rights of the consumers. Those Democrats are just as goddamn bad as the Republicans are and need to be run out of office as well. More than anything, once people realize that these politicians don't give a fuck about them, that's the time to unite and demand aggressive and permanent campaign finance reform in our electoral process. Remove corporate money from politics, require full disclosure on all political donations, limits on individual donations, and institute public financing of national elections. That and stiffer penalties for the criminal activities which we have seen decimate America's economy and bring our massive economic engine to a sputtering halt.
Enough of treating the money-changers and the wealthiest of the wealthy in this country as if they were aristocracy. Ask Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI how that "aristocracy" crap worked out for them. That should be the warning shot message sent across the bow of the ruling elites in this country - and the sooner the better.
----TFG
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