America is now just like any Third-World Banana Republic -- complete with impunity for big companies, who can do anything they want to you

More from Public Justice's Paul Bland about the shameful Congressional vote to let criminal corporations bar ripped-off consumers from joining together to hold them accountable:

A nice story that sets forth how arbitration clauses that ban class actions mean that consumers don’t go to arbitration (click to hear)

The reporter had asked “gee, will this vote be a boon to the arbitration industry?”  And I was glad to see that after seeing and hearing the data, she reported that no, what the vote will mean is that consumer cases will simply disappear.   While the story is brief, it’s a very strong one that shows why the CFPB Rule was important and why the Senate vote was harmful to consumers.
 
https://www.marketplace.org/2017/10/25/business/how-restriction-class-action-lawsuits-affects-arbitration-industry
 

As the saying goes, "No matter how cynical you get, you just can't keep up"

 Paul Bland of Public Justice writes:

Late last night, 50 Senators joined Vice President Mike Pence to kill one of the most important advances in consumer rights in years.
 
By casting the tie-breaking vote to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's arbitration rule - which allowed consumers to band together to sue banks, financial institutions and credit card companies - Pence showed just how much power Wall Street has amassed on Capitol Hill and on Pennsylvania Avenue. It also unmasked the alarmingly cozy relationship between GOP leaders and the bank executives who defrauded millions of consumers and exposed their most important information to Equifax hackers.

As I told one reporter this morning, "This was the Wells Fargo Immunity Act."
(click text just above for full story)

Senate Grants Immunity to Financial Industry Rip-Offs, Scams and Abuses

Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen

Oct. 24, 2017

Contact: Angela Bradbery, abradbery@citizen.org, c. (202) 503-6768
Don Owens, dowens@citizen.org, c. (202) 617-5371
David Rosen, drosen@citizen.org, (202) 588-7742

Note: The U.S. Senate tonight voted to overturn to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s arbitration rule.

Voting to allow banks and other financial institutions to rip off customers with impunity is a savage attack on American consumers. By voting to overturn the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) arbitration rule, Republicans in Congress are ensuring that predatory banks, payday lenders, credit card companies and other bad actors in the financial industry can steal from Main Street Americans.

As Public Citizen repeatedly has documented, the financial industry spends hundreds of millions every year on lobbying and campaign contributions to get their way in Congress. The Congressional Review Act resolution overturning the arbitration rule is a shameless payback to these interests at the expense of regular Americans.

If President Donald Trump wants to remain true to his promise to defeat cronyism, he should veto this resolution. But we’re not holding our breath, given that he has staffed his Cabinet and White House with Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street refugees.

NCLC Report Finds Discretionary Pricing and Racial Disparities in Auto Add-on Products Sold by Car Dealers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: OCTOBER 11, 2017 

Contacts: John Van Alst (jvanalst@nclc.org) or Jan Kruse (jkruse@nclc.org); (617-542-8010)

A Groundbreaking First Look, Based Upon a National Data Set, Reveals What Dealers Pay for Add-ons and What They Charge Customers; Advocates Urge Federal and State Action

Download the report, 19 charts, and tips for consumers at: http://bit.ly/2kmubox 
[Also available at link below]

BOSTON – Most consumers would be surprised to learn how car dealers prey on them with sucker pricing of add-on products, such as service contracts and window etching, which can add thousands of dollars to the price of a car. For example, one customer in Kentucky who paid $299 for window etching never knew that another customer at the same dealership paid $1 for the same product. But now, for the first time, NCLC unlocks the door on this hidden market in Auto Add-Ons Add Up: How Dealer Discretion Drives Excessive, Arbitrary, and Discriminatory Pricing, an analysis of a national data set of three million add-on products sold from September 2009 through June 2015.

Key findings: add-ons lead to unreasonably high and inconsistent pricing, and Hispanics pay higher prices than non-Hispanic customers for the same product.

”Our analysis demonstrates the negative consequences of opaque and inconsistent pricing of auto add-on products and the urgent need to bring transparency and consistency to this market,” said John W. Van Alst, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Working Cars for Working Families Project and the report’s primary author. “Our findings also reveal the troubling practice of dealers charging Hispanic customers more for the same product.”

Key Findings

• Add-on products are sold at prices far higher than dealer costs and marked up much more than similar products. For example, the average markup for service contracts was 83 percent and for window etching 325 percent, while independent auto insurance agents’ commissions average 11- to-18 percent.
• Dealers are inconsistent in the pricing of add-on products, with even individual dealerships charging some consumers many times more than other consumers for the same product with the same dealer cost. For example, during May 2013 one dealer in Michigan charged customers from $349 to $5,000 for the same window etching product, while the dealer’s cost was $50 (chart 6).
• This inconstant pricing for the same add-on products leads to pricing discrimination, with Hispanics charged higher markups than non-Hispanics. For example, the average percentage markup for a service contract was higher for Hispanics than non-Hispanics in 44 states. While demographics and sample sizes limited the number of states where differences were statistically significant, there were14 states for which the differences in both percentage and absolute markups were statistically significant. In each of those 14 states, Hispanics were marked up more on a percentage basis, and in all but one state. Hispanics were marked up more on an absolute basis. These states were: Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, Florida (percentage only), Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, Connecticut, Missouri, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and Texas (chart 13).
• Companies that provide car financing play an important role in allowing excessive and discriminatory markups of add-on products. About 80 percent of car buyers obtain financing at the dealership. Potential creditors give dealers conditions about what sort of transactions they will accept. In order to get more business from dealers, some creditors allow higher markups for add-on products. For example, in Ohio, Ally Bank financed just 10 percent of GAP insurance where the dealer cost was $150 to $250 (chart 18) but it financed 74 percent of these same deals where the customer price exceeded $900 (chart 19).

These excessive markups on add-on products set in place a chain of negative consequences for the entire auto market. The expensive add-ons increase the price of cars and also increase the loan to value (LTV) ratio for cars. This increases the amount that consumers finance without providing any real increase to the value of the car, resulting in more negative equity and higher default rates.

"The National Consumer Law Center findings are incredibly troubling,” said Marisabel Torres, senior policy analyst at UnidosUs. “The fact that Latino consumers were charged in excess for unnecessary add-ons in the car buying process demonstrates a need for increased oversight in this sector of the market. It is entirely unacceptable that corporations use race and ethnicity as a factor in determining what they charge customers for the same product. We urge state and federal authorities to further investigate and bring enforcement actions against those found to be engaging in these discriminatory practices."

Key Recommendations

• Dealers should be required to post the available add-ons and their prices on each car in the lot, along with the price of the car. To prevent the dealer from reintroducing non-transparency by offering discounts to some customers but not others, the prices for the add-on products must be non-negotiable.
• To root out pricing discrimination, the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act regulations should be amended to require documentation of the customer by race or national origin for non-mortgage credit transactions, as is currently required for home mortgage transactions. If discrimination remains hidden, it will not be possible to end it.
• State and federal enforcement authorities should investigate discrimination in pricing of add-on products and bring enforcement actions against a dealer if discrimination is shown. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and state attorneys general all have authority in this area.

“These predatory practices bury consumers deep in debt before they even leave the lot, and trap people in older, less-safe, higher-polluting vehicles,” said Rosemary Shahan, president of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety. “For the amount of money millions of consumers are being charged for worthless add-ons, they could buy a much newer, safer, more fuel-efficient car. For the sake of consumers, their families, their communities, and the environment, state attorneys general, as well as the CFPB, FTC, and Federal Reserve need to step up their game and put a stop to the discrimination and abuse.”

2017-10-11_nclc_report-auto-add-on.pdf
File Size:	678 kb
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CarMax sells cars under recall without repairing the problem, report warns

Over one-in-four cars sold by CarMax were found to have safety defects

When shoppers search for used vehicles on CarMax.com, they are greeted with a sleek website, the promise of a “Carmax Quality” certification on the entire inventory, and upfront pricing -- no haggling necessary or allowed.

It’s the exact opposite of what a shopper gets when they visit a run-down used car lot. But a new study suggests that the quality of CarMax Quality Certified cars is about the same as vehicles at that used car lot, and the company’s “no-haggle” policy means that consumers could be paying more for a car with open recalls and safety issues, according to a coalition of consumer safety groups. 

Make sure you check for open recalls on ANY used car you are thinking of buying, BEFORE you buy:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls

Full report downloadable below

carmax_cars-found_masspirg_report_-sept28-2017.pdf
File Size:	2250 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Forced arbitration seems to be significantly more lucrative for Wells Fargo than other financial institutions. As one might suspect based on the CFPB data, Wells Fargo was awarded more money in arbitration than it was ordered to pay consumers between 2009 and the first half of 2017, despite creating 3.5 million fraudulent accounts during that same period. The average consumer that arbitrated with Wells Fargo was ordered to pay the bank nearly $11,000.10
A mean of $10,826 was awarded to the bank across all publicly available claims.

In contrast, the CFPB study found that class action lawsuits return at least $440 million, after deducting all attorneys’ fees and court costs, to 6.8 million consumers in an average year.11 Thus, banning consumer class actions lets financial institutions keep hundreds of millions of dollars that would otherwise go back to harmed consumers—and there is little doubt that Wells Fargo has harmed huge numbers of consumers in recent years.

Opponents of the CFPB’s arbitration rule additionally claim that allowing consumers to join together in court will increase consumer costs and decrease available credit. Most recently, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) claimed restoring consumers’ right to join together in court could cause interest rates to rise as much as 25 percent.12

However, examining the OCC’s study, it appears the agency merely duplicated the conclusion reached by the CFPB and based its 25 percent estimate solely on results it admits are “statistically insignificant at the 95 percent (and 90 percent) confidence level.”13 In its 2015 study, the CFPB considered this same data and accurately assessed that there was no “statistically significant evidence of an increase in prices among those companies that dropped their arbitration clauses.”14