|
Part 1
|
We begin with the vote late on Tuesday in the Senate overturning a CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that now means consumers who have been defrauded by banks and financial institutions will now be forced into arbitration where the record shows consumers only win 9% of the time and are often counter-sued and end up owing the banks that defrauded them an average of $7,725. Amanda Werner, the arbitration campaign manager at Americans for Financial Reform and Public Citizen, whose appearance dressed as Monopoly Man at a recent Senate hearing on fraud and negligence by Wells Fargo and Equifax went viral on the Internet, joins us to discuss how Republican critics of Trump, Senators Flake, Corker and McCain voted with Trump against the American consumer in a tie-breaking vote decided by Vice President Pence. Now that the parasitic payday lenders are lining up to challenge rules that prevent them from fleecing consumers more than they already do, we assess what this means for the future of the CFPB which has returned $12 billion to defrauded consumers while being under unrelenting attack by Republicans from day one.
|
 |
|
Part 2
|
Then we speak with Sam Quinones, a former LA Times reporter who now writes for The New York Times and Los Angeles Magazine and is the author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic”. He joins us to discuss the low expectations for Trump’s announcement Thursday to address the opioid crisis without anyone heading Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and how much the opioid epidemic is ravaging communities who voted for Trump in part because of the despair associated with their sense of a society falling apart from within.
|
 |
