Wells Fargo Scandal Is Reminder: We Can't Afford Trump And GOP
"Even as Republicans were striking poses of outrage during Tuesday's Senate hearing over Wells Fargo's abuses of customers, they were pushing for measures that would terminate the federal government's ability to root out bank abuses - like the ones discovered at Wells Fargo. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was instrumental to exposing the way that Wells Fargo employees opened unauthorized accounts under customer names in order to meet the company's impossible-to-meet sales goals. The CFPB discovered "that employees opened roughly 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers," according to the agency's press release, and "employees applied for roughly 565,000 credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers." Under the authority of the Dodd-Frank bill, the agency is fining the bank $100 million. But Republicans want to kneecap the agency, even though in its five-year existence it has returned nearly $12 billion to victims of the financial industry's malfeasance."
