bastard baby

As of Jan 26, 2022, the Biden Administration CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) is bringing the hammer down on junk fees. This is more than just bank fees - this is going after the junk fees on things like prepaid cards, loans, bank transfers, credit card late fees, even closing costs on a mortgage.

The CFPB needs public comments, like the opinions of real people who are affected by these fees, to build a case about telling financial organizations that THEY CAN’T CHARGE THEM ANYMORE.

The CFPB says it’s particularly interested in hearing from older and lower-income consumers, students, service members and people of color.

There’s some good detail about the comments in this investopedia article. The easiest way to comment is to send an email to [email protected]. Include Docket No. CFPB-2022-0003 in the subject line of the message.

Note that these are public comments. They will be published online through the CFPB website. Don’t include account numbers, social security numbers, or full names. Tell a story - tell about the time you overdrew your account by $1.23 and the bank took $35. Tell about how you signed up for a credit card and the company charged you a bunch of fees you didn’t even know about. Tell about how you transferred money from your savings account to a checking account and the bank charged you $2.50.

These junk fees are a slap in the face of ordinary people who can’t refuse to pay, and the CFBP is taking aim at the banks that charge them. To read what CFPB director Rohit Chopra had to say about this call to action, click here.

FUCKING YES!!!!!!

Y'all know the hole I just asked your help digging me out of like, literally last week?

THAT HOLE WOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED WITHOUT PREDATORY FEES LIKE THIS

ADDRESSES: You may submit comments, identified by Docket No. CFPB-2022-0003, by any of the following methods:

• Electronic: http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions for submitting comments.

• Email: [email protected]. Include Docket No. CFPB-2022-0003 in the subject line of the message.

• Mail/Hand Delivery/Courier: Comment Intake —Fee Assessment, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 1700 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20552. Please note that due to circumstances associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the CFPB discourages the submission of comments by hand delivery, mail, or courier.

Unlike Congress, where sometimes your call or email about a policy goes into the void, every single comment about a regulation is individually read and tallied.

When a regulation is written it will say something like “The CFPB adopted X because it received 5,284 comments telling us to do that.”

Write your comments.

It can be short. It can be long. It can go into detail about your experiences or your background. It can simply be an email saying “overdraft fees suck and should be illegal.”

And it will affect policy.

Note, however, that comments are generally public record, so even though you’re encouraged to give your name, don’t give personally identifiable information.

Federal register comments are one of the least known yet most powerful ways to influence public policy.

Unlike, say, writing a representative which feels like screaming into a void except in election years (though it’s still worth doing) this does matter. Take a few minutes and if you can write something about how this policy would help, do so. 

Ben, 64, Northampton, MA, 2014

I identify as an FTM, non-hormone, non-op, transsexual heterosexual man. That’s the whole string of it. I was in the lesbian community when I was younger, but I never really fit. That was the 1970s and there really wasn’t the language then about transmen or FTMs or any of that. I didn’t have that accessible to me as an identity. I thought, “I’m the only one on the planet like me,” but then in 1985, Lou Sullivan sent his little booklet through the mail to the archives I was working on. It was “Information for the Female-to-male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” a little booklet that he self-published with a little handwritten note that said, “Maybe some people in your archive would want to read this.” Even though he didn’t know me, he didn’t know who he was sending this to, I read it. I read it and within two hours I called him and I said, “I gotta meet you, because now there’s two of us, you know, on the planet.” And I flew to San Francisco to meet him.

When I got there, I dressed up super masculine. I even wore temporary facial hair, because I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was a man. So, he opens the door and he is this little frail ninety-eight pound gay guy with a t-shirt on and I thought, “Well, he’s a man and he’s kinda like me, but he’s kinda not like me.” We ended up talking for five hours straight in his kitchen. In the middle of it, he told me he had to get up and take his AZT. I hadn’t known that he had HIV/AIDS, but I realized then that I was making the closest friend of my entire life, the most pivotal individual for me, and that I was losing him at the same time. We corresponded until he died and when he died, I started the East Coast FTM Group because I had nobody and he had asked me to head up his group in San Francisco, which I couldn’t do.

I always felt some resistance to the fact that I didn’t transition medically, but over time I started to find transsexuals who had not transitioned medically, or who had transitioned partially and then stopped, like my friend Leslie Feinberg. Eventually I found more people with the idea that, “I’m already me, I don’t need any medical intervention to become me.” It took a ten-year journey with a gender counselor to give myself permission around this, because it is not popular, even in our community.

I’ve done a lot of organizing, much of it pre-internet. I did it the way Lou did it at first, all by mail. I remember the first big conference I went to, a True Spirit Conference, and I think there were 300 guys, FTMs, from all over the country and Canada, and I remember thinking, “It’s starting. The movement for FTMs is really starting, big time.” Now I have a vision for making the Sexual Minorities Archives a national comprehensive LGBTQ educational resource center with a museum and an art gallery with many rooms to show the collections, to have a youth room, to have a meeting room, to have a community room, and to be the preeminent LGBTQ archive on the East Coast. That’s what I’m most looking forward to as I age and that’s what I want to accomplish before I die.