The Daily Populous Tuesday December 3rd, 2024 morning edition
Authored by currentaffairs.org and submitted by metacyan

Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen recently went on the Joe Rogan podcast, where he made a totally false claim about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Calling the CFPB “Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency” that she “gets to control” and which does “whatever it wants,” Andreessen said the CFPB’s job is to “terrorize financial institutions.” Asked by Rogan for an example, Andreessen said the agency pressures banks to close the accounts of conservatives. This “debanking,” Andreessen says, is a tactic of the Biden administration to target “political enemies.”

Rogan, who is credulous and does little research on the topics discussed on his program, is shocked. “Holy shit!” he says. (He had a similar reaction when a guest told him Atlantis was real.) Andreessen says that dozens of company founders are being debanked simply because they have “the wrong politics.” And this is part of why, he claims, technology company CEOs have been forced to support Trump: in order to get away from what Andreessen calls “the eye of Sauron.”

There’s just one problem: there’s no evidence that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pressures banks to “debank” people for their politics. In fact, the CFPB has actively opposed the practice. (It’s true that banks sometimes close people’s accounts without giving them reasons, although often this is because they are engaged in businesses, such as the risky, fraud-ridden crypto industry, that the bank doesn’t want to be associated with. There’s no evidence it occurs because Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB are trying to target political enemies. Nor even that Elizabeth Warren “controls” the CFPB, which she helped create in 2011 but has never run. Jason Mikula of Fintech Business Weekly goes further into Andreessen’s many errors and distortions here.) Andreessen’s accusation about the agency is entirely fictitious. Confronted with the evidence that he was wrong, Andreessen commented, “I am delighted if that is true. I will say I have never seen or heard any whiff of that.” Yeah, well, probably because neither you nor Joe Rogan bothers to do any research before spouting off to an audience of millions!

But as the saying goes, a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth has got its pants on. Soon, fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy had tweeted out Andreessen’s rant, saying it was “fascism” by the “deep state” and proves we need to “SHUT IT DOWN.” Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, chimed in, saying that we needed to “delete CFPB.”

Musk and Ramaswamy have been assigned by Donald Trump to head up a project called the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” named after a dumb meme that Musk is obsessed with. It’s not an actual government department, but an independent committee without legal authority to do much. Musk and Ramaswamy have promised to make drastic cuts to government spending, tearing up regulations, and potentially eliminating whole agencies. If Ramaswamy follows through on what he promised during his presidential campaign, over a million people’s jobs could be under threat.

On social media, Musk, Ramaswamy, and the official “DOGE” account on X promote the usual stories about out-of-control government spending, in order to convince people that they’re simply engaged in an effort to reduce waste, save taxpayer dollars, and ensure the government is doing its job. This includes those kinds of infamous “silly” scientific studies that are often actually useful but easy to spin as ridiculous (e.g., the “shrimp on a treadmill” study). But the CFPB story shows that something far more sinister is going on here. Remember, Andreessen, Rogan, Musk, and Ramaswamy are each fabulously wealthy. They are in the top .1 percent (Musk himself is literally the 0.00000001 percent, because he’s wealthier than everyone else in the world). Together, they have fabricated and laundered a story about the federal government’s consumer watchdog agency in order to justify destroying it.

But that agency, as I’ve written before, is dedicated to protecting ordinary consumers like you and me from the predations of the rich and unscrupulous, i.e., people like Marc Andreessen. What does the CFPB do? It investigates companies that have engaged in deceptive, abusive, and unfair practices, ensuring they treat their customers fairly. What kinds of practices? Well, have a look at their website, where they list all of their enforcement actions. CFPB victories include getting banks to get rid of or reduce overdraft fees, and pursuing Wells Fargo for “misapplied payments, wrongful foreclosures, and incorrect fees and interest charges,” resulting in billions of dollars being returned to customers. The associate director of the National Consumer Law Center has said that the CFP “has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace. Overall it has had a tremendous impact on making it more fair and transparent.”

This is the work that Andreessen calls “terrorizing” financial institutions. Why does Andreessen think that making sure companies don’t deceive their customers is “terrorizing” them? Well, because certain members of the ruling class think that any kind of regulation of their conduct is a form of oppression. Andreessen himself may have felt personally “terrorized” when the CFBP came after one of the companies he invested in. His venture capital firm was a major backer of a company called LendUp, which the CFPB targeted after it misled its customers, promising that “by repaying loans on time and taking free courses offered through its website, consumers would move up the ‘LendUp Ladder’ and, in turn, receive lower interest rates on future loans and access to larger loan amounts.” Customers climbed the “ladder” but didn’t receive the new favorable terms. The CFPB eventually shuttered “LendUp” for “repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers.” So: the CFPB is keeping billionaires like Andreessen from profiting from companies that defraud you. But if he told you the truth, you might not share the view that the CFPB is merely a bloated, useless piece of bureaucratic waste. You might instead think it was an example of the government looking out for your interests against those of corporate predators. (Note: right-wing billionaires aren’t the only ones spreading false narratives about burdensome regulation. As we recently showed, similar lies can come from Democratic elected officials.)

As Jake Johnson reports for Common Dreams, Musk, too, will benefit personally from the destruction of the CFPB. He is specifically seeking to turn X (Twitter) into a payment processor, precisely the kind of business the CFPB monitors to ensure it isn’t mistreating consumers. So while Andreessen and Musk want you to think the CFPB is targeting people like you, it’s in fact targeting people like them when they overcharge and mislead people like you.

This is the most dangerous aspect of the “DOGE” project: that it will be a huge fraud perpetrated on the public, in which important public services are gutted in the name of eliminating waste. Musk is the richest man in the world and believes that ordinary Americans need to learn to live within their means, which will necessitate “temporary hardship” (for ordinary people, of course, not himself). None of that hardship is likely to fall on him, nor is it likely that his lucrative government contracts will be terminated in the name of “efficiency.”

We don’t yet know whether the DOGE is going to be a whole lot of nothing (many of Elon Musk’s grand promises are simply abandoned when it becomes clear that they are impossible). Perhaps the federal government will look much the same post-Elon as it did pre-Elon. But we might also see the selling off of valuable public assets at bargain prices, the killing of regulatory agencies that protect us, and underfunding of public services, which ironically will reduce their efficiency. In fact, we may well see the implementation of the privatization playbook identified by Noam Chomsky: “defund what you want to privatize… defund [the services,] then they don't work and people get angry and they want a change. You say okay, privatize them and then they get worse.” That’s what we may well see with the U.S. Postal Service, and it is what over a decade of Conservative governance has done to the National Health Service in Britain: it has ruined the efficiency of the organization, thereby creating justifications for privatizing it (because government doesn’t work!) I do not trust Elon Musk to bring “efficiency” to government. What I do trust him to do is wreck whatever he touches and find ways to further enrich himself.

theheadofkhartoum627 on December 3rd, 2024 at 00:29 UTC »

“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich”

KapahuluBiz on December 3rd, 2024 at 00:13 UTC »

This really highlights the sick greed of the billionaires. In modern American society, the billionaires are already the winners. They have enough money to own homes around the world, to buy a fleet of the finest modes of transport, and to exert enormous influence over our politics and culture. They can control teams of people, and they're never at a loss to find others who will do their bidding, whatever it is that they want. Yet despite their control over just about everything and everyone in their realm, they STILL seek to take more. Their lust for power over people and the very levers of society is helping to break this country apart.

Silly-Scene6524 on December 2nd, 2024 at 23:56 UTC »

And the idiots fell for it thanks to right wing media.