Do Three Wrongs Make a Right?

Well, see that CUNA announced a bold, new three-pronged initiative at the America's Credit Union Conference held last week in San Diego.  CUNA is always so earnest in these pronouncements....

Not So Sweet....!!

The three bold, new, inspirational initiatives are: 1) "Keep On Keeping On" with that little failed "tar baby" of a political effort called "biz loans"; 2) work to suppress and "CONTAIN" the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's efforts at reform; and 3) re-new the hallucinatory search for a national CU brand, message, identity.  Definitely a program which has all the freshness of last week's roadkill and the logical consistency of an NCUA "Disney-based" exam.  Why so?


Y'know nothing speaks quite so clearly to the challenges of the third goal - the lack of a national brand, message, identity - as the unspoken, harsh truths underlying the first two goals - biz loans and "Operation CONTAIN".



Fair or not, CUNA has failed politically to convince Congress over the last five years, in the midst of the worst economic contraction of our times, that permitting CUs to make a few more business loans to help Americans get back to work is reasonable. If you can't pass that in this environment....well!? 


And, in reality, the majority of America's credit unions - CUNA's constituency - do not view "biz loans" as the number one issue of importance; perhaps not even in the top ten. If you seriously listen to smaller CUs which are "financially evaporating" at an increasingly alarming rate; "biz loans" are not "The Problem" for the vast majority of credit unions.


CUNA's continuing failure on the "biz loan" issue does leave it with a growing perception of "political inconsequentiality", sliding toward irrelevance....



"Operation CONTAIN" simply serves to geometrically compound both CUNA's political weakness and the "national CU identity crisis". CUNA, right or wrong, sets out with this program "to contain" efforts to correct, prohibit and reform the well-documented financial abuses inflicted upon the American consumer over the last decade.  If you haven't "noticed" the effects of that flagrant, financial thievery in your state, your hometown, and in your neighborhood; then you and I are living on different planets! 


Reform of the consumer financial system in America is no longer optional!  With "Operation CONTAIN", CUNA again "wrong-foot's" itself with its friends, most of its credit union constituency, and with the original purpose, philosophy, tradition and "identity" of America's credit unions as consumer financial cooperatives.

CUNA's "Big-Foot" Initiatives!!

CUNA's new, bold, inspiring initiatives are simply: 1) Wrong-footed, 2) Wrong-headed, and 3) Wrong-hearted.....

0 for 3, with two out, in the bottom of the ninth...