propublica – Nuclear Monster

(content warning: the death penalty)

ProPublica’s Isaac Arnsdorf on how the murder factory at the combination White House/Justice Department that Trump and Barr are operating is hurrying through as many murders as it can before Biden takes over the murder factory and moves operations more exclusively overseas:

The Justice Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will make them harder for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes them, is uniquely irreversible.

This article goes into much more detail about what the government is using to kill, who is doing the murder for cash, and gives us details about the career staff that support the death penalty but as with all bad news lately, and if you’re like me and don’t get Trump’s emails you’ll find out this also serves to partially fulfill our national embarrassment’s ego and campaign.

The murders and other violence at the Capitol took over the news, and some Republicans may well be done with our national embarrassment over that and because there isn’t any functional process today that let them proceed with overturning the results of the election, but this kind of murder that is legally justified by a crooked set of Supreme Court Justices rushed through before a change in power is essential to the operation of the Republican party.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Now Protects Predatory Lenders

One of the few possibly good things to come out of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 was a government entity that existed solely to protect people from predatory businesses. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it’s new Trump-appointed leader, Mick Mulvaney is unsurprisingly, a real piece of shit.

ProPublica’s Paul Kiel:

Last week, it dropped a lawsuit against a group of payday lenders that charged interest rates that touched 950 percent. The companies were associated with a Native American tribe, a common dodge the industry has used because it allows lenders to evade state interest-rate caps.

[…]

But in an email to CFPB staff today, Mulvaney laid out what the bureau’s new approach should be. He had “no intent in shutting down the Bureau,” he wrote, but said that his leadership would contrast sharply with Cordray’s approach of aggressive enforcement. The CFPB worked for all taxpayers, he wrote, and that includes “those who take loans, and those who make them” and “bringing the full weight of the federal government down on the necks of the people we serve should be something that we do only reluctantly.” Going forward, he wrote, there would be “more formal rulemaking on which financial institutions can rely, and less regulation by enforcement.”

Mulvaney also received big campaign contributions from the predatory lending industry. Of course.

If this pisses you off, too, you might consider joining a local DSA chapter.