At this point it's beginning to feel like we're on the cusp of learning that every last member of the Team Garbage Fire administration was chosen for their positions specifically because they were crooked. Not a one of us could truly claim to be surprised if, at some point in the next year or so, some newspaper broke the story that multiple members of the Trump administration had been taking overt bribes in exchange for legislative or regulatory favors.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Mick Mulvaney repeatedly pressed the agency to back off lending regulations as financial industry donors were bankrolling his congressional bids, according to government documents obtained by International Business Times. Some of the letters signed by Mulvaney that pressured the agency came within weeks of him raking in campaign contributions from payday lending industry donors who were urging the CFPB to stand down.
This is, mind you, still in the range of generally legal bribery as we practice it here in America. Mulvaney got campaign donations, cash payments designed to further his political career, from industry donors seeking favorable treatment for their businesses; immediately after cashing those checks Mick Mulvaney went to work pressuring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ease off regulations that would hurt those specific donors. The "generally legal" veneer over that is that everyone involved is supposed to pretend that these two events are unrelated, and that Mick Mulvaney would have discovered a sudden, intense interest in very specific federal consumer protection regulations whether or not he had previously been handed personal checks from individuals seeking the nullification of those exact regulations.
This is a story we tell ourselves in order to justify what is, at this point, the buying and selling of congressmen, governors, and other top elected officials by whichever corporate executives are willing to pay the most cash to advance each official's advancement to their next elected office—after which those same elected officials get highly paid "lobbying" jobs or "executive" jobs in the suites of the industries that they did the best work for, which is also not considered corrupt for the sole reason that all the people collecting that money are quite eager to appear on television and tell the rest of us that it's not.
What can we say? If the South American drug cartels had ever bothered to send spokesmen up to gladhand on the Sunday shows, cocaine would still be in our soft drinks right now.
Three months after the agency proposed the rule, Mulvaney and eleven other lawmakers wrote a letter to the agency asserting that the rule “has the potential to severely restrict access to credit that millions of Americans rely on” and arguing that “in an effort to keep unscrupulous actors out or the industry the CFPB will simultaneously be harming the very consumers it is trying to protect.”
In the three weeks leading up to the letter, Mulvaney received $18,500 in campaign contributions from payday lenders’ political action committees and executives — including $4,000 from Advance America’s PAC, $2,700 from the Advance America’s CEO J.P. O’Shaughnessy, $2,700 from LoanMax owner Rod Aycox and $2,000 from the Amscot CEO Ian MacKechnie.
Just days after Mulvaney and his cosigners sent their letter to the CFPB, O’Shaughnessy and MacKechnie echoed the lawmakers criticism in their own letters that they sent to the agency.
What are the odds that the lawmaker and the check-writers would both seize on the same talking points to defend the check-writers' industry. How shocking, and so forth.
After taking industry money to parrot industry talking points, Mick Mulvaney has now been placed in charge of the consumer agency seeking to rein in industry excesses. This is not an accident; this is exactly what our political system has been reengineered to produce. But it still feels like we are on the cusp of learning that, in fact, all of these people are getting considerably more cash from would-be influencers than is currently being reported. One of these jackasses is going to get caught with a mattress full of money or, like Paul Manafort, bizarre spending habits at the local rug store.
Selling out the American public for a mere $18,500 worth of donations is, if anything, the less plausible theory.