Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Public Citizen Is Fighting to Return Access to the Courts to American Consumers
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2016
The ink was barely dry on a proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to restore the rights of banking customers to take their grievances into a court of law instead of a system of forced arbitration, when House Republicans threw together a hearing yesterday to scaremonger over make-believe evils of the proposal. The hearing was convened by the Republican-controlled Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee and not-so-subtly titled “Examining the CFPB’s Proposed Rulemaking on Arbitration: Is it in the Public Interest and for the Protection of Consumers?”
The American Law Litigation Daily called the hearing “seriously lopsided.” ValueWalk called it “skewed.” We’re calling it brazenly rigged.
Paul Bland, Executive Director of the Nonprofit, Public Justice
In decades of watching Senate and House hearings, we have never seen a more unlevel playing field. Out of the four witnesses called to testify, three were hand-picked to parrot the position of the banks with one lonely witness on hand to counter their repeated misstatements of fact. Watching that one lone witness, Paul Bland, Executive Director of the nonprofit organization, Public Justice, attempt to provide balance to the proceeding was akin to watching bullies on the playground hurling dumb epithets at the straight-A kid in their class.
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