Summary:


The Senate voted Thursday to strike down a rule capping most bank overdraft fees at $5, a measure adopted late last year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that had been expected to save Americans billions of dollars per year.

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, was the lone Republican to oppose the resolution, which passed on a nearly party-line vote, 52-48. It will now move to the House, where Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican who leads the Financial Service Committee, introduced a parallel resolution last month.

The rule would have limited the fees banks and credit unions could charge when customers spend more than they have in their accounts, typically $35 per overdraft. The bureau estimated it would save American households $5 billion a year. It was immediately challenged in court by banking trade groups.


Personal opinon:

Call your bank and tell them to turn off overdraft protection now.

  • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    It’s important to understand that it is now the philosophy of the Sociopathic Oligarchs and their trans-national corporations, that every person should die penniless, with nothing to pass on to their children.

    When people reach middle age, and a bit older, they start to need their health care more, which is tied to their jobs, which are harder to find as you get older. That makes older workers more reliant on those jobs, making them more manipulative, and more accepting of abuse.

    The wealthy don’t like the fact that many older workers get inhertitances from one side of their marriage or the other, or perhaps both, and then suddenly they have options, and dont need the safety of their company any more. They can afford to find a lower stress job, or start their own (possibly competing) business, or they might just retire.

    None of that is good for the wealthy. They want workers who are good little wage slaves, fully dependent on sociopaths to support their families. So now the strategy is to impoverish as many as possible before their deaths, so they have nothing to pass on to their children, to give them easier lives as they age.

    So keep the banks fees up, keep property insurance high, keep property taxes high, and most of all make health care wildly expensive, difficult to access, predatory and parasitic. We always hear about most bankruptcies being cause by medical bills, which is frightening to most people, but music to the Sociopathic Oligarchs’ ears. Those are people who had money, and lost it all, including their children’s inheritance.

    Of course the other tendril of the strategy is to kill Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, so people will work literally until their deaths. Retirment is for the wealthy. The rest of us need to keep grinding.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    4 days ago

    Republicans seemingly are free to fuck the poor and working citizen as hard as they want and they keep voting for more.

    • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      They’re either voting for it or staying home. Same difference. One would think people would eventually wake up but… Seems no.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      What is so depressing is how I keep seeing that Democrats’ approval numbers are so low. The reaction to the Republicans getting more and more awful with each passing year is to…dunk on the Democrats. I’m assuming part of that sentiment is because the Democrats have not been given enough power to stop the Republicans from doing terrible things and that they have not passed all kinds of impossible purity tests…

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Recent actions taken by mainstream Dems:

        • Among the thirty fundraising texts a week I get, I got a text with the wrong name telling me that Medicaid was fried because we “begged democrats to save it” but just didn’t donate enough money :( I can just imagine Pelosi turning to face the other democrats, their faces turned up to her like a bunch of whipped orphans, and sadly telling them that Christmas is cancelled because the donors simply didn’t put enough quarters in her back.

        • Chuck Schumer had a perfect opportunity to take a stand and decided that being difficult with the fucking Nazis was just one line we can’t afford to cross just now. I guess Saturn’s in Pisces ATM, and, wouldn’t you know, the perfect conditions for taking a meaningful stand against the republicans have somehow failed to manifest for twenty years and counting. But don’t worry, we might have pushed the quit button for ourselves AGAIN, but if you donate a little bit more money, we’ll definitely get them next time.

        • At Trump’s shitty speech, they all sat and waved their stupid signs while the only one of them with a fucking spine got walked out by security. Later, Democrats wearing #RESIST shirts politely walked themselves out of the building during the speech. Then they censured the guy with the spine.

        I expect Nazi bullshit from the fucking Nazis. I expect the democrats to fucking show up and DO SOMETHING GOD DAMNIT.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        I’ve spent my entire life watching the “minority” Republicans successfully squash, blockade, deflect, filibuster, or poison every single bill any Democrat has ever put forward to make anyone’s life better, while simultaneously presenting and passing their own bills that make everyone’s life worse in service of their own paycheck.

        Now that the tables are turned and a similar sort of action is required of the Democrats to literally save the foundations of our democracy, they do nothing.

        That’s why.

        I’ve been a proud Democratic supporter and blue voter my entire life and I’ll continue to vote for them if I continue to not be offered better options. But I’m not happy about doing it anymore. I no longer trust the Democratic party to be a bastion against fascism and that’s just the long and short of it. The most basic showing of resistance against any of this bullshit probably would have locked in my vote for Democrats for the rest of my life, but they can’t even do that. We have Bernie Sanders and AOC doing the same things they’ve done their entire lives, and every other person is just sitting back in shock watching their office get looted and doing nothing about it.

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I’m with ya, but TBH, the voters showing up could have helped a lot, too. Yes the likes of Schumer are infuriating but they were not really given much power - even it it would help if they would do even half of what the likes of McTurtle did in opposition. Sure, Kamala was not perfect, and her presidency would have had its share of problems, and likely would have been mostly “status quo”.

          FFS, even if we could have kept the House and the Senate…

          In any case, under Kamala, we would not be talking about people getting kidnapped/disappeared off the streets for disagreeing with Israel or having the wrong skin color…I sure hope the supposed “leftists” that proudly sat out and are still defiant about it even now, having learned nothing (and still telling Democrats that THEY have learned nothing, lol - JFC) are happy with themselves.

          I’m sure that magical revolution they hope for from accelerationism will happen any fucking day now…things are going so swimmingly right now.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I watched a Jon Stewart interview with an interesting premise. The guy being interviewed made a point that Trump promises change immediately whereas Biden’s platform would have made the us and the world better over years, decades

          • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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            Pretty sure it was Ezra Klein on the weekly show podcast with Jon Stewart. He went into detail about how even just distributing the funds for the broadband bill was just this Kafka-esque insane seven year process of infinite subcommittees and public review processes, and that was what Democrats wrote for themselves; it wasn’t made that way by Republicans to make it shitty, Dems happily blew their own feet off by making the bill’s workings as tortured and slow as possible.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Yes, that was it thanks

              Certainly a big criticism of democrats has been they get nothing done but if you look at the legislation they really did get some far reaching improvements codified …… but then it takes years to implement so no one sees the results and the next president can cancel programs before anything is done.

              One of the programs I was really frustrated by was building out EV chargers. Republicans had started complaining about nothing being done and the explanation was partly that it required states to figure out how to use it, but this could have been transformative for the EV transition. Now very little was done, the current president cancelled the program and started reneging on its commitments

              Last summer I went on a 1,200 mile road trip in an EV and had no problems. But that was in the NorthEast where a lot of charging infrastructure has been built out. We really need to jump start this in a lot of the US where they don’t have the population for it to be immediately profitable. People need to think of it like highways, we don’t just build highways between cities where there’s enough population to make it worthwhile: we know that we’re all stronger with easier travel everywhere. Similarly, you should be able to refuel your vehicle everywhere you can travel with it

  • jonne@infosec.pub
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    4 days ago

    Surprised democrats actually held the line on this one. Are they learning?

  • Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    lol you can’t turn off overdraft protection. I fucking tried. They wouldn’t let me do it.

    I am not using a major national bank, just a local/regional one from my hometown.

    • arotrios@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 days ago

      Find yourself a credit union. It will save you hundreds of dollars in fees, and they won’'t have bullshit rules like this.

      • Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        in my experience the credit unions I am eligible for are no better than commercial banks.

        The best credit unions are highly restricted to a small population with a common association. They aren’t made for the masses.

        • Turret3857@infosec.pub
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          2 days ago

          This is why those of us with good credit unions need to be helping out those who dont by getting them membership. (I have done this for 3 people so far, and am encouraging others to do it as well. Someone do it for Critical Thinker specifically. no one deserves overdraft fees.)

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It’s really unfortunate. Most banks and credit unions turn on overdraft protection by default. And many of them make it difficult to turn it off (burying it in online app/site menus, requiring people to call in or go into a branch to deactivate it, etc.). They do this because overdraft fees are a massive source of profit for them.

    But it’s pretty easy for people to get trapped in a vicious cycle of debt due to these fees. Most people don’t know they can turn these off, and some don’t even realize they are in place to begin with.

    • clonedhuman@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Back in the day, Wells Fargo would intentionally run higher charges first in their cycle so that people couldn’t skirt the edges of overdraft. Like, if someone made a $35 purchase, and three $1 purchases over the same two day period, they would immediately run the $35 purchase and then charge three overdraft fees for each of the $1 purchases instead of running the three $1 purchases first (even if they came first) and then charging a single overdraft fee when the $35 purchase hit.

      I believe they got a fine for it.

    • gibmiser@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Makes me so fucking mad. Government is for the fucking people not the fucking corporations Jesus fucking christ

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Of course if we had actual democratic leadership they’d be running ads about everything costing more because of Trump and saying Republicans want them to go deeper in debt paying for groceries when they can’t make ends meet.

  • SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    For years my bank had overdraft off by default. At some point, in one of their ToS or User Agreement updates, they turned overdraft on for everyone and you had to go in to turn it off.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    The senate has not overturned the rule; they’ve voted to overturn the rule. The rule is not overturned until this passes both halves of congress and the president. Sick of headlines lying about this shit