The War on Net Neutrality

The FCC declares war on a free and open internet, the years-long conservative crusade to burn down the CFPB, and the latest on the #TrumpTaxScam. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Deregulation is the word of the month, thanks to the Trump administration. Rebecca talks with Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine about the FCC’s plans to end net neutrality, which she’s calling “the free speech fight of our generation.” Next, with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the spotlight following Trump’s installation of budget director Mick Mulvaney as its acting director, investigative reporter Gary Rivlin joins with a run-down of the years-long, dark-money fueled GOP crusade to burn down the agency. But first, as Republican Senators resumed their efforts Friday morning to ram through their partisan tax bill without a single democratic vote, Rebecca and Jeremy spoke with Seth Hanlon to get the latest on the bill — with all eyes on Maine Senator Susan Collins.

This week’s guests:

• Seth Hanlon, Senior Fellow for Federal Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation
• Gary Rivlin, Investigative Reporter and Investigative Fund Fellow at The Nation Institute

For more on this week’s topics:

• Sen. Susan Collins’s DC office number: (202) 224–2523
• For more on the FCC’s plans to end neutrality, read this article in The Nation, and get involved with Fight for the Future’scampaign to protect internet fairness (the vote is set for Dec. 7)
• Read Gary Rivlin’s investigative reporting on the dark money crusade against what he’s termed the “bureau of resistance”

This program aired on December 1st, 2017

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Deregulation is the word of the month thanks to the Trump administration. I talk with Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine about the FCC’s blow to net neutrality, plus investigative reporter Gary Rivlin joins to discuss the GOP’s crusade to burn down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But first, as Republican senators resume their efforts Friday morning to ram through their partisan tax bill without a single Democratic vote or a single hearing, Jeremy Slevin and I spoke with Seth Hanlon, one of CAP’s tax gurus to get the latest on the bill with all eyes on Maine Senator Susan Collins. Let’s take a listen.

As we are sitting down to tape about the GOP tax scam and the latest there in what you can do to kill the bill and we’ll get to that in a second, news has just broken of Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. This is the latest shoe to drop in the latest Russia investigation and it now appears he is actually going to testify against Trump, so that seems like what everyone is going to focus on today. [INAUDIBLE] Seth Hanlon who I have in studio with me today to talk about tax but we really can’t afford to be distracted right now at a critical, critical moment so Jeremy Slevin, also here too I always fail to acknowledge you. Let’s talk about what we need to be focused on today. Seth, what’s the latest on the tax bill and what do we know?

SETH HANLON: Absolutely, so I think this tax bill and of course it’s not just a tax bill it is a tax and a health care repeal bill. And it’s a horrible bill, it’s one of the worst bills we’ve ever seen in our lives.

VALLAS: And most unpopular in the history of bill making.

HANLON: Yeah, it is a hated, reviled and corrupt bill. And it is on the brink of passage in the Senate today. Today, so just hours from now they’re going to be voting on it in the Senate, like this afternoon or this evening. And it comes down essentially to one vote, I mean which is Susan Collins, Senator Susan Collins of Maine. And they probably have almost 50 votes, I don’t think they completed this. Like this is not a done deal yet. They’ve been saying they have the 50 votes, Susan Collins keeps saying she still speaks for herself and she’s not said which way she’s going to vote.

VALLAS: So Trump has said the bill keeps getting better and better. He’s been tweeting that now it’s even better for Americans, for the middle class. He’s still kind of holding fast to that same narrative he’s been using throughout this entire tax fight. What is he referring to and is the bill getting better, and really for whom?

HANLON: So the bill is getting better and better for Donald Trump and worse and worse for the American people. So overnight, so first of all this bill was already a humongous and enormous boondoggle and windfall that is going to line the pockets of the President of the United States and his family. There are enormous tax cuts for Donald Trump in this bill. And everyone knows it, he lies, he continuously lies about it. Overnight they made those tax cuts even bigger for Donald Trump. And they snuck in a special provision in the bill that expands what’s known as the pass-through loophole, some people call it the Trump loophole, that is a special tax break for wealthy business owners like Donald Trump himself. And what they did is they made that loophole even more generous for him. And so just, we’re calculating, this is rough because obviously we haven’t seen Trump’s tax returns, he’s been hiding them. So we don’t know exactly what his income or what his tax status is. But based on our rough estimates from what we know, just the change overnight is going to line Donald Trump’s pockets every year by almost $2 million.

VALLAS: That’s unbelievable.

JEREMY SLEVIN: So, the whole argument for this bill was that give tax cuts to corporations and they claim some for the middle class but mostly for corporations, it will trickle down, grow the economy so we don’t have these huge deficits even thought we’re cutting taxes by trillions of dollars. What do we know about that argument today?

HANLON: Right. So of course we’ve always known that argument is false. I mean we’ve seen it play out in real life, we’ve seen it play out at the national level, we’ve seen it play out at the state level. And any serious economist has always said that tax cuts never pay for themselves. And so then just yesterday the nonpartisan office within congress that analyzes tax bills, so they are nonpartisan professional career economists analyzed the economic effects of the bill and they said that it’s going to increase deficits by more than a trillion dollars. So in other words, even after you accound for the economic effects that have been promised –

VALLAS: All the supposed economic growth that’s going to happen from these tax cuts.

SLEVIN: They made an argument, oh all this growth, even if you account for that supposed growth.

HANLON: Right, exactlyi. So even if you account for that supposed growth, it blows up the deficit by more than a trillion dollars over ten years.

VALLAS: So what’s the state of play at this point? You referenced Susan Collins being the vote this is all going to come down to. People who have followed politics throughout 2017 are very used to that being the state of play with bills that Republicans in the congress are trying to ram through without a single Democratic vote. I’m thinking of course about health care here, but there was a lot of attention being paid to Bob Corker and to other folks who might have been swing votes. Why is it all down to Collins?

HANLON: So I think where we are now is that Corker had tried to put in this kind of Rube-Goldberg trigger contraption that would like turn off certain tax cuts down the road if certain things weren’t met and it was a total mess and apparently the parliamentarian said you can’t even, this doesn’t even work under the, you can’t even bring this up in the Senate. So Corker is now looking like he’s going to vote against the bill and possibly Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona.

SLEVIN: So that’s two against and they can only afford to lose two.

HANLON: Right. So it’s 52 Republicans in the Senate so they can lose two and then it would be 50–50 because the Democrats are solidly against this. So ti would be 50–50 and then Pence would break the tie. So that’s what, that appears to be what the Republican plan is now. So of course to do that they have to hold all of the other 50, and just one of them can say no to this thing. Just one of them –

SLEVIN: [COUGHING] Susan Collins.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Very subtle Jeremy, very subtle.

HANLON: Just one of them can say no to this, just one of them can just, not even permanently say no to it but slow this process down. This insane process that has had no hearings, there’s no bill yet. There’s no final text of the bill yet, we are going to see the final text of the bill and senators are going to see the final text of the bill like hours or minutes before being forced to vote on it.

VALLAS: We are literally in a place where Republicans in congress writing the bill, still writing the bill while they are trying to force a vote on it because they haven’t, the yes and school, right exactly, I guess that’s why they have to vote yes, first rule in improv, always say yes. But so now back to Collins because I think this is really important. She has repeatedly and was obviously the savior votes on health care, said no, she didn’t want to see millions of Americans lose their health insurance. That’s exactly what this bill would do. How is she still possibly a yes and most importantly, what can people out there who want to try to raise their voices do to try to persuade her here?

HANLON: So just to answer the second question, I mean so it is imperative that in the next several hours today people make their voices heard and make sure Susan Collins hears their voice, her constituents. This bill is extremely unpopular in Maine especially. 22% of people support it.

VALLAS: Probably 22 people actually.

[LAUGHTER]

HANLON: Exactly. 53% oppose. A clear majority of Mainers oppose this bill. The bill is reviled in Maine.

[CROSSTALK]

SLEVIN: Corporate tax cuts poll something like 22% in Maine.

HANLON: Yes, less than that. So 80% of people in Maine don’t believe that corporate tax cuts will result in high wages for them, for workers. 80%.

SLEVIN: Right, which is the centerpiece of the bill and the central claim of the bill.

HANLON: Right so people need to make their voices heard today. SO and the way to do that is to light up Susan Collins’ phone line. I’m just going to give out the number, people should call and if you know people in Maine, if you have any friends and family in Maine, people, you need to reach out to them today and tell them to call or even show up in one of Susan Collins’ district offices.

VALLAS: And not just today but this morning.

SLEVIN: Or in DC if you’re in DC.

HANLON: So her DC number is 202–224–2523.

VALLAS: One more time, Seth.

HANLON: 202–224–2523.

VALLAS: What would on hypothetically say after placing those, well dialing those digits.

HANLON: So keep it short, all you need to do is register that you are counting on her to oppose this bill. That’s all you need to say.

VALLAS: Now of course — Oh go ahead, Jeremy.

SLEVIN: I’ll just say that I’m seeing on twitter that her voicemail is full and people aren’t picking up the phones. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call, that is because the phones are ringing off the hook and the phones constantly ringing off the hook is enough to know for the staffers to know that this is deeply unpopular.

VALLAS: Now also for folks in D.C. there’s been a people’s filibuster that’s been happening, it’s literally going into it’s 19th or 20th hour at this point. Overnight people were sleeping in the cold, in the rain and actually not sleeping, they were continuing to filibuster the bill with members of the Democrats in the Senate coming by and joining forces and literally chanting shame outside of the capitol. This has been going on all night, it’s going on this morning, folks who are in D.C. listening right now, watching right now, go to the Capitol, go join folks who are there raising their voices.

HANLON: Absolutely, and so it’s in between where, in between the capitol and the Supreme Court is where the protest is happening, so right outside the Senate. And I had heard from friends within the, who are staff members in the Senate that in the Senate they can hear people’s voices from outside.

SLEVIN: We were wondering where that came from.

VALLAS: It must have been Seth, it’s intel from Seth.

SLEVIN: I’ve heard that people can hear us and now we know where it came from.

VALLAS: But I want to just also not leave for a second Collins and how outrageous it is that she might consider voting for this bill. Here she is at the same time trying to champion or at least appearing to champion protections for people with high medical expenses by trying to expand the medical expense deduction; the house version of the bill actually eliminated outright. And she says that she’s got the support of health groups because of that, but how can someone claim to care about people with high medical expenses and then also vote for this bill?

HANLON: So what this bill does is, it is a partial repeal of the Affordable Care Act. So it pulls out one of the legs from the stool of the Affordable Care Act. The individual responsibility payments. So and what that means is that eventually 13 million people, 13 million fewer people will have insurance and premiums across the country for families if you get your insurance through the market places will rise by $2,000, that’s an average for families nationally. And $2,300 for families in Maine. So what we’re doing here is, this is an attempt to sabotage the Affordable Care Act snuck into a tax bill, a terrible tax bill in it’s own right. And it is exactly what they tried to jam through the senate at the end of July.

VALLAS: And she says she’s OK with voting for this bill because she’s gotten assurances that it’s all going to be fine because, and it really comes down to Trump making these promises to her that a bill that has been worked on for a number of months now on a bipartisan basis called Alexander-Murray, which is basically, it’s also sort of called the Obamacare fixes bill, he said don’t worry, that’s going to become law before this tax bill does. Is that a fair assurance and should that make the rest of us feel better?

HANLON: I mean, so just, it’s very hard to keep a straight face and say that Susan Collins is thinking about voting for this bill based on an assurance from Donald Trump. I mean –

SLEVIN: He’s pretty trustworthy.

HANLON: We know that she’s smarter than that. You cannot possibly put your constituents on the line like that based on an assurance from Donald Trump. But it’s even like sort of worse than that. So first of all, these fixes that you’re talking about, those are good fixes, I mean that is good policy, it needs to happen. But it won’t come close to offsetting the damage from this attack on Obamacare that’s in the bill, not even close. And furthermore, there’s no guarantee. So if Susan Collins votes for this tax bill, this tax and partial health care repeal bill in the Senate today. There’s no guarantee, she has said that Trump has guaranteed that he won’t sign the tax bill into law until these other things become law. But the House of Representatives has said no way, they’re never going to pass these health care bills because they hate Obamacare, they don’t want to fix it.

VALLAS: So there is no possible way that that assurance can actually carry any real weight and even if it did it doesn’t actually negate the damage done by the tax bill to our nation’s health care system.

SLEVIN: She’s saying she’s voting for the bill because of something that’s not in the bill that Donald Trump says may be in the bill, the House of Representatives is saying will not be voted on and will not even be in a different bill.

HANLON: Right. And so –

VALLAS: Just to sum things up.

HANLON: Just to boil down why today is the day, because if this bill passed the Senate today it doesn’t go straight to Trump. They’re going to do what’s called a conference committee between the House and Senate to try to reconcile the differences, however at any point after it passes the Senate, the House can just take up the bill and pass it and send it straight to Trump without any of these health care fixes.

SLEVIN: And we know that the Senate was the real backstop in health care, they’ve been the backstop throughout the Trump presidency.

VALLAS: Collins has been the backstop.

SLEVIN: And Susan Collins has been the backstop. This is the pivotal moment to stop this bill today.

VALLAS: So Susan Collins’ phone number one more time, Seth Hanlon.

HANLON: 202–224–2523. And I would also, I mean she’s got state offices throughout Maine, Portland, Bangor, her town of Caribou, Lewiston, Biddeford.

SLEVIN: We’re going to read a couple of them. So Bangor; 207–945–0417, Caribou; 207–493–7873, Portland; 207–780–3575.

VALLAS: And we’re going to put all these in the comments of this feed so folks who are watching this now or who watch it in the next couple of hours can find these numbers easily.

HANLON: And go there, they can go to these, even better, go there in person.

VALLAS: Show up to the office. So that’s the time we have this morning, Seth Hanlon is the tax guru among many other things at the Center for American Progress. Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator is my beloved sidekick and this is what we know as of right now at 11:37 on Friday about the tax bill, lots more to come and lots that you can do to kill this bill. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week while many of us were eating our turkey or if you’re like me, our Tofurky, the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission or FCC released a plan to effectively bring what’s known as net neutrality to an end. To help unpack what this means and frankly what it means for regular people who use the internet, I’m joined by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, she’s the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. Katrina, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So just to kick us off, net neutrality is one of those kind of wonky sounding terms that doesn’t even sound like English. Help us understand what is net neutrality and then we can get a little into what the FCC is now proposing to do.

VANDEN HEUVEL: I will do my best. I think this fight around net neutrality is the free speech fight of our generation. I do think net neutrality is a term that can turn off a lot of people though many millions have learned what it is just due to their own real life experiences. But net neutrality essentially is the principal that all internet traffic should be treated equally. It prevents internet service providers from charging a premium for access to internet quote, fast lanes or slamming the breaks on content which poses a threat to their financial or political interests. I like the expression the open internet, the internet democracy. Net neutrality keeps the internet open, free, fair, it preserves a level playing field where good ideas can prosper no matter who or where they come from. It plays an essential role, the free, open democratic internet in our civic dialogue. And I think that in essence is why the FCC in 2015 passed rules to protect net neutrality, reclassified the internet as a public utility in 2015 and the enforcement of rules of the road, of a level playing field. These are seem to me broad kind of conceptual frameworks which people who believe in a democratic country, opposed a rigged economy, opposed a rigged internet would support.

VALLAS: So you referenced some actions that were taken by the FCC in 2015 under the Obama administration and that is what today’s FCC under the Trump administration is effectively proposing to role back. What did those rules that the FCC put in place in 2015 effectively do and I recognize that you’ve described some of that but I think it’s helpful as we think about what this plan is coming out of the FCC to understand what they’re rolling back.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, as I said it kept the internet from being segmented into slow lanes, fast lanes, and if you were unwilling to pay more, you may now get consigned to a slow lane. There was also something very important which is what the Trump FCC is trying to do is eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections that were put in place. These would include the ban on blocking, replacing them with a quote, “transparency” regime enforced by the FCC. Now transparency and your listeners know what words can mean and don’t mean, transparency of course is a euphemism for quote, “doing nothing”, so a broadband carrier like AT&T if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state. Blocking it’s critics and promoting it’s own agenda. And I think and I know that thousands who’ve sent protest comments to the FCC protesting a role back of net neutrality rules, allowing such kind of censorship is an anathema to the internet’s and America’s founding spirit. There’s some people, legal scholars who believe that by going this far in trying to overturn rules put in place under the Obama administration the FCC may have overplayed it’s legal hand. And that this will go to the courts because government agencies aren’t free to abruptly reverse long-standing rules on which many have relied without a good reason. A mere change in FCC ideology isn’t enough. And I think we can talk a little bit about the activism that we’re going to see because the future of the internet, Rebecca, for your listeners is good to know, is at stake on December 14 when former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai chosen by Trump to chair the FCC is going to force a vote on ending net neutrality.

VALLAS: So the main focus, and I want to get back to what folks can do to raise their voices in advance of that, hearing a lot of our listeners, the folks who are not content to just be informed by who want to take action. But before we get to that piece, the main focus in the media since the announcement from the FCC last week has largely been on the battle between the so-called telecom titans, Comcast and AT&T, Verizon, and the internet giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook, that’s sort of what’s been described is this big epic battle between those two types of corporate interests. But as you’re describing, there’s a lot more at play than who is going to win a big corporate tug of war, this is going to have real consequences for regular people who use the internet.

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, absolutely.

VALLAS: No, no go right ahead.

VANDEN HEUVEL: I was going to say no, I mean there is a corporatism at work here, I mean the media monopolists in the telecom industry hate net neutrality. They’ve worked for years to overturn guarantees of an open internet because it gets in their profit way. Now if net neutrality is eliminated, these media monopolists will restructure how the internet works. I mean as I said earlier, creating these kinds of information super highways for corporate and political elites and digital dirt roads for those who can’t afford the corporate tolls. So you’re looking at I think it’s a kind of concept that is antimated grassroots anti-establishment politics for several years now. But you’re looking at a change that’s going to rig the internet and those who see that clearly are fighting hard. I mean, it’s fair to say that you’re witnessing an essential kind of regime change where if Pai at the FCC is successful he’s going to hand the keys to our open internet to major corporations to charge more for this tiered system. So it will, along with the tax bill which may well make it through and make our lives more unequal, more dirty, more unhealthy, you may well see a tiered system or well see powerful websites can pay to have their content delievered faster to consumers.

There’s another argument that’s been kind of thrown out there which is the FCC chair says that he’s trying to make sure that new investment goes into the internet. His rationale is eliminating rules that cable and phone companies as we talked about despite years of healthy profit, he’s saying need even more, need to earn even more money than they already do. That their current rates of return don’t yield adequate investment incentives. He’s claiming that industry investments have gone down since 2015, the year the Obama administration last strengthened the net neutrality rules. Wrong, it’s just not the case. And the FCC filing to repeal an increase in internet investments since 2015 as group called Free Press has demonstrated, but let me step back and just ask why is the issue of whether industry investments should be the dominant measure in success in internet policy? Why is that the measure? What about improved access for students or the emergence of innovations like streaming TV? So I think there’s a lot of skewing, a lot of false information being thrown around as the FCC tries to steam roll through changes that will impact and harm consumers, people with less access to capital, students, independent media, alternative voices, so there’s a real First Amendment free speech issue here too.

VALLAS: And you, as you mention access to power being at the core of this, some including W. Kamau Bell have pointed out that the end of net neutrality could be particularly devastating for artists and activists by effectively silencing the voices of people who aren’t already established or backed by those with power and with access to power. He actually in an op-ed in The New York Times points out and I’ll quote him, “This fair internet, where everyone from an amateur comedian to a celebrity to a huge media company plays by the same rules, means you don’t need a lot of money or the backing of someone with power to share your content with the world.” And he names the example of Issa Rae, who started the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” which was started as YouTube series in 2011 but has now actually become a show that’s got it’s third season happening on HBO. It’s hard to imagine that happening, he points out and I would agree in a world that doesn’t have net neutrality.

VANDEN HEUVEL: What we’re witnessing, Rebecca is more than a regulatory shift. It’s more than a story that should be consigned to the business pages. This is about a societal change. this is more than a regulatory shift. And if the FCC allows this digital inequality, this digital divide, digital profiteering to define the internet, it will effect all of what you spoke of, it will effect personal communications, education, commerce, economic arrangement, our politics and democracy itself and it is a civil rights issue in a fundamental way because it’s about a kind of allocation of power about whose voice is heard. The most vulnerable are usually those who have a harder time making their voices heard and a free internet lifts up and can amplify those who don’t have the money power, the political power in our unequal society. So this is a real fight for the kind of society we want to be and I think that needs to be understood as we move to oppose not just the net neutrality I

have to say because the FCC your listeners should check it out, I mean they’re beginning to overturn efforts to close the digital divide between wealthy and poor Americans, they’re declaring war on consumers and in what I think is one of the most callous steps, the FCC abandoned an effort to limit the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls that sometimes force inmates families’ to pay upward of a dollar a minute to speak to their loved ones. So there is a real rollback of humanism as corporatism ascends.

VALLAS: And you named the example of some of the voices that maybe don’t get the kind of access that one would or the kind of spotlight or readership that one might have is one is a person who is more established or has power. You mentioned more vulnerable folks and low-income people obviously fall into that category. It’s a lot of what we try to do with Off Kilter with our sister project Talk Poverty is elevate and amplify those voices but I think in this conversation in particular about someone who will be well known to our listeners and who we’ve had on the show several times Linda Tirado who wrote an essay that effectively started as a twitter storm some number of years ago and then became a viral post on a blog I believe it was Huffington Post actually on their blog that then catapulted her to having a book deal and having a platform and she’s become this really important but very different voice from those who are already sort of in the established halls of power on these kinds of issues or who get invited on the Sunday shows because people already know who they are. That’s another rise that would not be possible without fairness on the internet.

VANDEN HEUVEL: No there is a danger first of all, Michael Copps who was a truly New Deal small d democratic commissioner of the FCC, now working on media democracy reform issues has called this net neutrality rollback naked corporatism at its worst. And the danger as you put face to these issues is by empowering these providers to create fast lanes for the few you’re squelching alternative points of view. You’re squelching those voices which don’t have big money behind them but have power of emotion, power of reason, power of ideas and there’s a lot of talk, you know this Rebecca, America is the land of a robust marketplace of ideas. Well this takes a direct aim at that principle which has animated in a trans-partisan way people who understand the value of a full range of debate in a downsize politics of excluded alternatives. I worry we return to that downside politics of excluded alternatives with this step and certainly the rise of a corporatism which Michael Copps speaks of. This is a fire sale for humongous corporate interests, for the monopolists of the telecom world and there are going to be protests December 7th in advance of the December 14 FCC vote targeting the offices of corporations that have opposed net neutrality such as Verizon. There are going to be protests against offices of members of congress who have opposed net neutrality. There will be marches on the FCC both digitally and on the streets and there are legal and legislative strategies to defend the internet and the future. At TheNation.com we’ve started something called ‘Take Action’ a few months after Trump won, it’s kind of our guide for our community is the 3 steps you can take every week to be part of the resistance with limited time, limited money but the free press, free internet, democratic internet, the fight for net neutrality has been a central part of those bulletins in the last months after we’ve seen what was imminent with the Trump administration, the rollback of civilizing advances like net neutrality.

VALLAS: So the politics on this as well are somewhat baffling. I have to confess because obviously this is part of a larger deregulation agenda. This, it’s true of not just at the FCC under Trump but really throughout the entire administration’s agenda. But it also just seems a little bit odd frankly, coming from an administration that has taken the exact opposite position on other issues related to competition. I’m thinking here specifically about the Time-Warner AT&T merger. It was literally just one day before the FCC announcement on net neutrality that the Trump justice department announced its opposition to the proposed merger.

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, incoherent, no it’s incoherent. The reality is if you’re a strong supporter of free markets, net neutrality is what allows for competition and free market in the broadband space. If you’re someone who strongly supports free speech and freedom of expression, net neutrality is what prevents companies like Comcast that own NBC from prioritizing or censoring content online. I think there is a split in the progressive community about the Trump administration’s move on the merger, the possible merger, the AT&T Time Warner, right?

VALLAS: Yes.

VANDEN HEUVEL: But I do think monopoly and anti-trust work has risen on the progressive agenda in important ways. What is chilling however is a personal vendetta against CNN so it looks like what we’ve seen too often from this administration, a politicization of tools of justice, kind of privatization of justice for the sake of an administration. So there is an incoherence that is puzzling but what is not puzzling is what you spoke of earlier which is with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor though I suspect he still lurks around the White House judging from Trump’s tweet, the dismantling of the administrative state, the march through the institutions, the deregulatory crusade is in full throttle. And this what we’re witnessing with the FCC is in sync with that. And in that sense there is a coherence to this deregulation of all kinds of reforms that have brought us clean air, clean water, free internet, democratic internet, and so it’s in that context one needs to look at this.

VALLAS: So where do things go from here? You mentioned the December 14th likely vote that’s when we’re expecting Ajit Pai to try to move this forward. We probably expect it to pass because of the makeup of the FCC.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Of the FCC, yeah.

VALLAS: But probably on partisan lines.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Partisan lines, I think just for those who, you want to go to Fight for the Future and which is a group, advocacy group which is planning to run 200 demonstrations December 7 at Verizon wireless stores in the United States, you want to write your representatives and I think you want to sent comments to the FCC just to ensure that they understand the intensity of opposition and then I think the courts may need to play a role as I was saying earlier, it may embolden the judiciary in light of the FCC, one pursuing ideology, not reason, and two the 76% of Americans support net neutrality. So the FCC in short is on the wrong side of democratic majority and if you cant see the role of the judiciary aligned with movements has played in at least halting some of the worst excesses of the Trump administration, it is possible the courts could play a role that would be constructive and maybe save net neutrality.

VALLAS: And do you believe that, I’m asking this recognizing that your not necessarily the lawyer who would bring these cases but as someone who was followed this closely do you believe that there could be legal challenges that could be successful on the basis of First Amendment or other types of bases?

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know I don’t know how they would be brought but as I said earlier one issue is that government agencies aren’t free to abruptly reverse long standing rules on which many have relied and to do so without a good reason or false reason. As I said earlier, the chair of the FCC now is claiming that industry investments have gone down since 2015 and trying to invoke a kind of let’s free the market, let’s support small entrepreneurs and start ups. But the FCC filings actually reveal an increase in internet investment since 2015. Now the court might look at that and say, as I said earlier that this mere change in FCC ideology isn’t enough to support these changes. And so we may see court challenges in that regard. I do think some of the best minds in the legal world trying to sink through First Amendment law in a 21st century environment will be involved with this.

VALLAS: Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. I wish that I could ever be bringing you on to talk about good news Katrina but —

VANDEN HEUVEL: Soon!

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well I appreciate your optimism but I hope that that’s true but thank you so much for coming back on the show and let me know when there is good news and we’ll have you back.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee resigned as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, leaving CFPB deputy director Leandra English to serve as acting head of the agency until the senate confirms a new director. But fireworks ensued when Donald Trump stepped in and installed budget director Mick Mulvaney, an avowed critic of the CFPB instead, citing a law on administration vacancies which he says allows him to fill the slot with his choice. To discuss what all of this means for the future of the consumer watchdog and for your pocket book, I’m joined by Gary Rivlin, he’s an investigative reporter and investigative fund fellow at The Nation Institute, and he’s covered the CFPB extensively. Gary, thanks so much for joining the show.

So just to kick us off here, remind us the history of this still relatively young agency. People probably remember it was the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren from during her years as a law professor but give us a little bit of the context and a little bit of the story there.

GARY RIVLIN: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. In 2007, then professor Elizabeth Warren at Harvard writes a paper for a relatively unknown journal proposing this idea for a consumer financial protection agency commission, something that would be like a consumer like we have for our toasters, a consumer products commission like we have a protection for the $20 toaster we buy but what about the $200,000 mortgage that we were learning the hard way could really destroy lives. And so she puts in this paper, and there are a lot of papers like that that get nowhere, but then a year later 2008, the subprime meltdown; we’re seeing that in fact many lives were turned upside down because of predatory financial products, subprime mortgages and such. And so this idea in the journal just takes on momentum, Barney Frank, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts is chairing the House Financial Services Committee and when they’re taking on what would turn into Dodd-Frank, the legislative response to the 2008 crisis, he included this idea for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, interestingly in this first blush the way it was in the original legislation it was supposed to be a five person commission but then the Senate version put in charge a strong director whose funding was independent from congress. They wouldn’t have to go to congress every year hat in hand for appropriations.

And I knew Barney Frank and he was perfectly happy to give in on that, which is kind of one of those rare examples where legislation actually gets tougher, more progressive rather than kind of being muddled and going towards the middle and we’ve seen since this agency was created, it’s a strong independent agency in large part because of these legislative battles that went on behind the scenes in 2009, 2010.

VALLAS: So sort of take us up to present day, with maybe some examples of what they agency has done since it was put in place about five and a half years ago. It receives a lot of criticism from conservatives, we’ll get into all of that but kind of looking straight at the facts what has it done, what has it accomplished, who has it helped?

RIVLIN: Well it’s one of those rare examples, I think when an agency has done precisely what the folks who came up with it, Elizabeth Warren, legislators, not all Democrats, there were three Republicans who voted in favor of Dodd-Frank had in mind. An agency that looked at financial products whether on the fringes, payday lending, check cashing to student loans to credit cards to auto loans to mortgages. And looked at this array and you know they have done basically two different categories of action. One is enforcement and they have leveed big fines against major banks, Citigroup and Bank of America just to hit two from the top of my head for behavior that hurt consumers and made them pay in those cases $700 million or so each and made them change their practices to taking on debt collectors, fighting those who are abusing customers, you know all told in the first five or six years through the end of 2016. The CFPB returned around $12 billion to nearly 30 million consumers.

And then a second category is rule making, this was a rather, this was one of those rare examples of a rather strong agency the government created and they were given the ability to write rules and so they’ve written rules about pre-paid cards that essentially give those many millions, many of them unbanked, have no bank account, no relationship with a mainstream bank, they give them some of the same rights that credit card holders have. They put into place rules around debt collection, there’s a rule they just passed a finalized a month or two back around payday lenders and so this is an agency that has used the power they were given and the flipside and maybe this will be a nice transition to the next piece of this conversation, it means they’ve taken on a lot of people from those in the student loan business to the mainstream banks, the fringe lenders, the credit card companies, there are a lot of, the good news is they were given a lot of power, the bad news it means that they have a lot of well funded interests trying to undermine them.

VALLAS: I love to sort of put a face on these issues because a lot of times you can name a bunch of different purposes or explain a agency’s jurisdiction or even mention big amounts of money like you just did but to sort of make it concrete in your reporting on the CFPB over the years and what it’s done, you actually, you provide a few examples of people that you’ve spoken with, one of them Jean DiSantis, he’s a former T.D. Bank customer who lives up in New York. He’s also a consumer lawyer but he himself had faced all kinds of problems with T.D. Bank where they were basically stepping all over his rights and the story which I would love to hear you tell a little bit, it just feels so familiar to me and I’m sure it will to many listeners because of how common it is for consumers to face often insurmountable obstacles in having their rights protected when it comes to financial companies and banks and other kinds of businesses.

RIVLIN: Right so that’s a story I co-wrote for The Intercept with Susan Antilla, and Susan in this case happened to be the one who talked to Mr. Disantis but what I love about this story, well let me back up. So, another thing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did was create a complaint database. Me, you, anyone listening, we have a problem with a bank, they overcharged us, we’re getting these fees, we feel frustrated, the bank isn’t listening, we can log on, call the CFPB and they’ll register the complaint on a public database and then the financial institution in question has a chance to respond and often their response is as it was in the case of Jean DiSantis, was oh this is going to make us look bad let’s give them this $150. In this case, Mr. DiSantis, he spends the winter in a second home and he had his mail forwarded but you know, T.D. Bank has a rule, we won’t forward the mail so he misses a relatively modest, I think it was $150 credit card payment and he gets a late fee and he’s refusing to pay the late fee, hey, I had mail forwarded, this isn’t fair and then he’s getting fine after fine, I think it was like $125, $130 worth of fines. And he’s a consumer lawyer. This is what he does for a living and he could not get them to get rid of his fines.

So he goes to the CFPB, puts in a complaint, within a couple of weeks they wiped out the fine and what I love about that story is that even he, even someone who this is what he does for a living, he was frustrated, he needed this public database. To date there’s been a little over 800,00 complaints logged at this database and it drives business [INAUDIBLE]. I did an interview with one bank lobbyist who is trying to undermine it by saying it has less credibility than Yelp which is a very clever line but I’m not even understanding what he’s saying. This is a complaint and the bank has a chance to response or in some cases even recify.

VALLAS: And they hate it because it works, right? I mean the end of that story is within a week of filing a complaint with that database, with the CFPB, T.D. Bank dropped the interest, dropped the penalties, he had actually been successful at taking on this big bank because he had this CFPB behind him. But it’s not just the bank that hate the database, that hate the agency, Republicans hate the agency and it’s been a real hobby horse for them over the years so while there is a lot of attention right now because of questions about the agency’s future, it is absolutely nothing new to see Republicans attacking the CFPB and frankly trying to burn the place down. Tell a little bit of that story, what we’ve seen in terms of Republican attacks on the CFPB over the years.

RIVLIN: To my head, the fight over the CFPB would be the Obamacare fight if there wasn’t an Obamacare. The issue that conservatives in congress love to hate and I think the count for bills to undo Obamacare was around 50, well there have been 134 bills since 2011 in either the House or Senate introduced to either eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or water it down. So Barney Frank was in charge of the committee, House Financial Services Committee in 2010 when Dodd-Frank passed but after the midterm elections Republicans took the majority in the House and so, and they’ve held it since 2011, the start of 2011 and so the House Financial Services Committee, especially it’s oversight and investigations subcommittee has become sort of the ground zero, the place where they attack the CFPB and they have an Benghazi like fervor. I mean, the CFPB had to be housed somewhere but it was an old building and needed refurbishing so the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee talked about the Taj Mahal they were building. They talked about the salaries, because these are financial regulators, the salaries at places like the FDIC, the SEC and the CFPB are higher than the average salary for government workers, so they talked about the lavish salaries and all.

There’s been some controversy around race discrimination within the agency, I would say and in fact a Democratic report showed that it’s true federal agency that there is issues of equality, issues of the treatment of people of color. But they have used that, I think they have like four hearings on that. They’ve never had a similar hearing in the House Financial Services about similar stuff going on inside the FDIC but then again they weren’t looking to score points. It’s also interesting that, it’s almost like a way of raising funds to criticize the CFPB.

In the article we mention a few members of congress in particular, Ed Wagner, Sean Duffy, these are kind of the people who have taken their turn as either the chair of the oversight and investigations committee or just an outspoken critic of the CFPB, they introduced legislation, they publicly criticized the agency and low and behold you see that they can increase their fundraising but a million or more every cycle because now they’re getting contributions from Financial Services Roundtable, the American Bankers Association, from individual financial institutions that have a stake in seeing a weaker CFPB.

VALLAS: And that’s a lot of what you’ve actually reported on in that piece is there is effectively a dark money infrastructure supporting what has been a years long campaign to burn the place down.

RIVLIN: Right so some of it is reported. Just go to opensecrets.org and see who is contributing to whom but there is this other element, I mean one thing I did is I found this group, the U.S. Consumers Coalition. It’s a coalition with no members and it seems to my mind very anti-consumer. But I had lunch with this fellow Brian Weiss who created it. He won’t say where his funding is from but he has a lot of it because they have done some lobbying work over the last few years, they hired Newt Gingrich to testify on their behalf before the House Financial Services to write a op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. And so what you see are these, and the U.S. Consumers Coalition is one of several of those front groups, astro turf groups pretending to represent a group behind the scenes, their funding is either dark or there is another one supposedly, Politico implied was funded by the Koch brothers, a third has been funded, and this one is more public by the student loan industry. The CFPB has done a lot to help clean up student loans.

Naviance I think is the way you say it, the big student loan server, they hit them with a huge fine, a favorite example of mine of CFPB in action is there was this crazy thing that was going on. Anyone whose parent, grandparent had co-signed a student loan if that parent, grandparent died the lender would up the rate that someone had to pay because suddenly they didn’t have this co-signer even if that person faithfully, even that borrower faithfully was making their payments every month. And the CFPB spotlighted this practice and the industry got rid of it on it’s own because it was embarrassed by the publicity around it.

VALLAS: So now bring us to 2017. Trump comes in, he and his budget director Mick Mulvaney essentially call for the elimination of the agency, not outright but effectively by defunding it in his budget. But they then find that the agency turns out to be extremely popular, even among Trump voters who polling shows that by a 2 to 1 margin want to see the CFPB left alone or even strengthened. So it seems that they’ve sort of changed their tactic and their playbook from trying to get the agency eliminated, and I say they including Republicans broadly to now trying to defang it and then this takes it to the present day moment where Director Cordray has resigned, he had selected his deputy director or assumed I should say actually, assumed that this deputy director Leandra English was going to take on the role of acting director because that’s how it’s written in Dodd-Frank, the law that established the agency but surprise, Trump says not so fast, I want to put in Mick Mulvaney, my budget director to wear two hats as acting director of the CFPB as well.

RIVLIN: Right so, let’s go back to a year ago. President-elect Donald Trump, everyone from the payday lenders to the big banks are like wow, this is a great opportunity and there was a call to fire Richard Cordray which actually a president can’t do. And there’s a lot of disappointment in those early months of the Trump administration that I heard talking to bank lobbyists, conservatives,that the president wasn’t taking on the CFPB and you put your finger on it. I mean this is one of these issues that puts Trump between a rock and a hard place. He’s the so-called populist who is going to help the forgotten American, those who are struggling get by. On the other hand he empowers Goldman-Sachs to run his administration. He’s coming up with policies, taxes, whatever to favor the super-wealthy. But the CFPB is just one of these issues where they just decided not to touch it because as you pointed out, it’s very popular among the left and right. I think something that’s kind of not quite fully understood is dating back to the Tea Party, there’s a real strong anti-Wall Street strain on the left and the right. And so this idea that you’re going to defang this agency that has been doing a good job of taking on Wall Street doesn’t go over well.

So industry’s strategy, it’s very clever if not also diabolical is to say yes, we support the CFPB we just think it should be a five person commission that goes to congress every year for appropriations. And by the way, they have too much power we should have legislation forbidding them from doing a public database. We should take away some of their rule making enforcement powers. So to take on something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is political dynamite. But behind the scenes, tinkering with it to take away much of it’s power, that’s been the strategy that industry and many, hardly all on the Republican side have been behind.

VALLAS: And how better to do that than to put in place an acting director who when he was a member of congress called the CFPB a “sick, sad joke.” That’s a direct quote, said it shouldn’t exist and repeatedly voted to weaken it’s authority including votes to block the agency from tackling predatory payday loans, discriminatory auto lending practices, it goes on and on. That’s now the fox guarding the hen house.

RIVLIN: Right and I mean I think it goes without saying that Mulvaney, whoever the permanent director would be would not be an aggressive enforcer of the laws. We’ve seen over time that depending on whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in charge, we’re seeing less enforcement at places like the FCC and such. But it goes without saying it will be a much more mild enforcement agency. I think the big issue here is the rule making. And it’s, not only will there not be these more progressive rules that have come out to limit what financial institutions can do but I think we’ll see an unwinding of rules just like we’re seeing in the EPA. It’s a long process, it might take a couple years but to undo some of the rules that were put in place. And in fact put in place rules that are business friendly. It was interesting, while I was reporting this story there has always been this thrust in congress like it should be a five person commission, it should be a five person commission, it’s a tsar, it’s a dictator. He has too much power. Well that was before Donald Trump was elected and they had the majority in the House and Senate. And there was a lot of people including Jeb Hensarling, the chair of the House Financial Services committee said like maybe this idea of a tsar isn’t so bad as long as it’s our tsar. I think what you’re going to be seeing happening over the coming years, the CFPB in the hands of someone more conservative is what more conservative, especially a more libertarian director will do as far as making rules that are pro-business, that gives them more room to I would argue abuse customers.

VALLAS: And to use your words what will be good news for big banks and fringe lenders will be sad news for the forgotten who thought they were sending a champion to the White House. I’ve been speaking with Gary Rivlin, he is an investigative reporter and an investigative fund fellow at The Nation Institute who has written extensively on the CFPB. Gary, thank you so much for joining the show.

RIVLIN: Thank you, my pleasure.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.