Consumer Law & Policy Blog

Am. Banker: Trump vs. Cordray: The Battle Ahead

Here (free content). The entire article is worth a read, but here are some highlights:

J.W. Verret, an associate law professor at George Mason University School of Law, listed some reasons why he thinks Cordray could be removed for cause: allegations of employee discrimination and retaliation at the CFPB, and a settlement with auto lender Ally Financial that some allege was a false claim.

Others see that as a stretch.

"I don't think there is anything that Director Cordray has done that would constitute cause," [co-blogger Public Citizen's Scott] Nelson said. "Cause doesn't mean you disagree with a person's policies; cause is considered to mean malfeasance."

* * *

"It's important for people who are fighting for consumers to clearly draw the lines that Trump has said he sides with regular Americans against special interests," said Paul Bland, the executive director at the public interest law firm Public Justice.

* * *

[As for the CFPB's pending motion for an en banc hearing in the PHH case, that case] could potentially be decided by 11 judges: four appointed by President Obama, four by former President George W. Bush and three by former President Bill Clinton.

* * *

."The banks are convinced Trump is totally in their pocket, but I think Trump has surprised many of us and is not as predictable a figure as George W. Bush," said Deepak Gupta, the founding principal of Gupta Wessler and a former CFPB senior litigation counsel. "I hold out optimism that legislation does not go through and there is a realistic path for the D.C. Circuit to act just in time for Cordray to leave just before his term expires in 2018."

Am. Banker: CFPB on Collision Course with Trump's Justice Department

Here.  Excerpt:

* * * Title X of the Dodd-Frank Act * * * gives the agency explicit authority to pursue its own litigation up to and including the Circuit Court level. But when it comes to the Supreme Court, the law says the CFPB must first file a written request to the U.S. Attorney General within a specified timeframe and that the "Attorney General concurs with such request or fails to take action within 60 days of the request."

But Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Trump's pick for attorney general, could conceivably withhold such concurrence. That would mean the Trump administration effectively blocks the CFPB's decision to appeal to the Supreme Court.

This leaves CFPB with relatively few scenarios to prevail in the PHH v CFPB case. The agency has requested an en banc rehearing of the matter before all sitting justices on the D.C Circuit, and if either that request for rehearing is denied or is granted and the panel upholds the earlier ruling, the Justice Department could prevent the CFPB from appealing the case further. * * *

But if the CFPB prevails en banc, * * * presumably PHH would appeal to the Supreme Court * * * if the high court did grant cert and heard the case, Ohio State University law professor Peter Shane said, the court would likely assign an amicus defendant to stand in the government's place if it decides it does not want to defend its side of the case.

RICO suit filed by law firm against lawyers who regularly file class-action objections

The law firm Edelson PC has filed a RICO suit against a bunch of lawyers and law firms that regularly represent objectors to class-action settlements. The complaint, filed in federal district court in Chicago, is worth a look. Basically, it alleges that the defendant lawyers and law firms are using frivolous objections (and frivolous appeals from trial-court approvals of class-action settlements) to extort money that would otherwise go to deserving class members and their lawyers.

Looking for Clues About Trump on Consumer Protection? Trump's Transportation Sec'y Choice Served on Wells Board, Paid $1.2M While Wells Created Phony Accounts

Here, from CNN Money. 

Progressive Magazine Tackles Arbitration Clauses

Here. Excerpt:

On Monday, September 12, Fultz was summoned to a meeting with the human resources manager at her company, EGS Customer Care. She was given a form and told she needed to sign it. The form, titled “Agreement to Arbitrate,” bore the name of EGS’s parent company, Alorica. It pledged employees to resolve all workplace claims and disputes through arbitration and not “class action, collective action, and representative action procedures.” 

Fultz says she asked to see a lawyer and was denied. Instead, she was given thirty minutes to sign or else be deemed to have voluntarily resigned. What happened next highlights both the casual contempt companies like Alorica have for the rights of their workers and the extraordinary courage of Jennifer Fultz, who took a stand on principle rooted in her own family’s experience. * * *

* * * Jennifer Fultz * * * left work that day escorted by police, with a box of belongings the company had retrieved from her desk. She was fired and lost her health insurance. Her former employer initially fought her efforts to obtain unemployment benefits. She went from living paycheck to paycheck to struggling day by day.

(HT: Gregory Gauthier)

 

Michael Hiltzik on what he calls the Carrier "sham"

Here. An excerpt:

To begin with, rather than facing punishment from President Trump, Carrier will garner a $7-million state tax break from Indiana over 10 years to keep 730 jobs in town, with no guarantee the jobs will even last that long. That’s a minuscule benefit for a company with a profit of $7.6 billion on sales of $56 billion last year. It’s more telling that Carrier’s parent, United Technology, gets 10% of its revenue from U.S. government contracts, so it knows it pays to keep on the good side of an incoming president. Yet for all that, it seems that Trump got rooked by United Technologies. Even though the company is giving in on plans to move 730 jobs to Mexico — at least for now — it’s sticking to its plan to move 553 other Carrier union and management jobs south of the border. Nor is UT abandoning plans to shut down a plant manufacturing electronic controls in Huntington, Ind., just 100 miles from the Carrier factory, at the cost of another 700 jobs.

Watch this video on the safety, cyber-security, and privacy of self-driving (and partially self-driving) vehicles

Click here or on the embedded video below to watch Prof. Christopher Yoo and federal transportation policy journalist Stephanie Beasley discuss the safety, cyber-security, and privacy of self-driving and other automated vehicles. Though there are few completely self-driving cars on the road, many cars today have some autonomous features and so pose some of the same safety, cyber-security, and privacy challenges as the fully self-driving car of the future. 

 

Michigan Court of Appeals Again Protects Online Anonymity, Again Without Adopting Fully Protective Standard

by Paul Alan Levy

The Michigan Court of Appeals issued a decision today on the standards for deciding whether a plaintiff claiming to have been wronged by anonymous (or pseudonymous) online speech may compel the host of that speech to provide information that could aid the plaintiff in identifying the speaker so that process could be served and the case could move forward.  Previous decisions of the Michigan Court of Appeals have woven a complicated skein of cases, and those of us who advocate protections for online speech were hoping that the court hearing Sarkar v Doe, a case involving anonymous comments providing peer review of scientific research, might consolidate the cases around a single standard and move Michigan in the direction of the consensus Dendrite / Cahill standard that a dozen states have now adopted.  We got the former, but not yet the latter.  (Public Citizen submitted an amicus brief in the appeal).

Toy companies listening in on your children's conversations?

The Consumerist has this disturbing story:

According to a coalition of consumer-interest organizations, the makers of two “smart” kids toys — the My Friend Cayla doll and the i-Que Intelligent Robot — are allegedly violating laws in the U.S. and overseas by collecting this sort of voice data without obtaining consent.

In a complaint [PDF] filed this morning with the Federal Trade Commission, the coalition — made up of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and our colleagues at Consumers Union — argue that Genesis Toys, a company that manufactures interactive and robotic toys, and Nuance Communications, which supplies the voice-parsing services for these toys, are running afoul of rules that protect children’s privacy and prohibiting unfair and deceptive practices.

...

Researchers studied the way the toys work, the complaint continues, and it turns out that they send audio files to a third party: Nuance Communication’s servers at the company’s headquarters in Massachusetts.

The full article is here.

The price of airline tickets

Folks interested in my post earlier today about United's decision effectively to charge for using the overhead bin may also be interested in this: Until the late 1970's, the federal Civil Aeronautics Board pretty much set the routes and rates for commercial airlines and often directed the airlines how, if at all, to charge for amenities.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, however, basically left that stuff to the airlines, with exceptions (of course). The law appears to have worked as intended to bring down airfares (though it may have had negative effects for some people, including leaving some rural areas unserved or underserved by commercial airlines).

Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, found in 2011 that, despite a recent uptick, air fares have dropped dramatically (adjusted for inflation). He also found that those hated fees -- for baggage and so forth -- are just a small part of what consumers pay. (I wonder what has happened since 2011.) Check out this graph: