Editorials

The recent brouhaha over the Wells Fargo corporation’s sleazy behavior, with hundreds of petty and major executives participating in opening phony accounts for unsuspecting customers and reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in fees has been covered in the local media as an OhMyGod moment. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, not to toot our own horn too loudly, we told you they were crooks, way back in 2005.

That’s when our homeless and disabled friend Betty Bunton died after an asthma attack, and also after her meager SSI check was shamelessly stolen through a type of Wells Fargo account (they call them “products”) which provided her with an ATM card which encouraged her to run up astronomical fees at interest rates up to 90%, which not surprisingly left her pennyless. 

I’m not going to re-run the whole sordid story here. You really should click on this link to read the obituary/expose I wrote after her death. 

My conclusion then: 

“What can be done about this practice? We don’t know, and we don’t even know if it’s still going on. We’ve laid this all out here so someone else can try to figure it out. Barbara Lee is on the House Banking Committee, so maybe she can take a look at remedies. Loni Hancock or Wilma Chan might want to see if anything can be done in California. We hope other publications will find other victims and do stories about them. It’s too late now to do any more for Betty, but in her memory we hope that telling this story as she wanted us to do will help someone else avoid getting conned as she was. ‘ 

Oh sure. I was more naïve then than I am now. No one, none of the legislative luminaries mentioned, nor other more prestigious publications than this one, did a damn thing, though I forwarded the piece to several of them. Wells Fargo has just rolled on stealing from all of us. And now, finally, after they’ve stolen enough not just from poor disabled homeless people, but also from what used to be known as the middle class, Attention Must Be Paid, as Arthur Miller said about Willy Loman.  

In fact, let’s just break here to quote more of the whole brilliant speech from Death of a Salesman to underline the point: 

“I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” 

In the meantime, human beings like Betty Bunton have had terrible things happening to them. In the dozen or so intervening years since Betty died, hundreds or thousands of depositors large and small have been robbed by Wells Fargo. 

It seems that now, finally, there’s a kerfuffle, not really about the victims as yet, but at least about Wells Fargo’s manifest institutional transgressions. Senator Elizabeth Warren (former Oklahoma high school debate champ) has succeeded in putting words to it, as she does so well: “You [Wells CEO John Stumpf] should resign…you should be criminally investigated.” She’s right, of course…but why did it take so long for anyone to suggest this? 

Local politicians and major media are now all over it. Lefty officeholders at all levels now vow to cut up their Wells credit cards and donate their generous campaign contributions to charity.  

There’s been a lot of excitement about the “Citizens United” decision which says that corporations must be considered “persons” according to the First Amendment, which is said to guarantee their right to buy political speech. But that discussion doesn’t recognize the major harm which has always been done by corporations, long before Citizens United. 

Corporate public relations engines work overtime building benevolent images for their clients—Wells Fargo is not the exception but just typical. They give not only to politicians but to genuinely worthwhile artistic causes like the Oakland Symphony, which has done an outstanding job of bringing classical music to a wide audience at affordable prices. Here in Berkeley the Bayer corporation, which has just announced a merger with glycophosphate herbicide promoter Monsanto, builds goodwill by sponsoring educational programs. That’s how it’s done, that’s what makes people in power reluctant to challenge corporate power. 

The major damage is not done by corporations per se, which are not people even though they may be persons for free speech purposes. Elizabeth Warren is demanding, rightly so, that the sentient human beings who do harmful acts in performance of their corporate employment should face criminal prosecution as individuals. Corporations can’t go to jail, but corporate executives at many levels can and should. Think, e.g., about all of those people who worked for Volkswagen to disguise their products’ contribution to pollution and climate change. And how about oil company employees? Or airbag manufacturers? 

It’s true that a bunch of low-level Wells Fargo employees were fired for carrying out what they believed to be company policy, but the bosses who set that policy walked, with millions in bonuses in their pockets, 

And let’s not forget the corporate profiteers at the highest level. The harm done by the corporations that the Koch brothers and their ilk own is not necessarily done by the corporate structure, but the obscene profits which are extracted from them are used by the Kochs and others like them to promote horrendous candidates and anti-democratic changes to the election laws in many states.  

Does anyone still read Upton Sinclair any more? Starting more than a hundred years ago he wrote a series of novels and essays cataloguing corporate sins and sinners which still read true. Not much has changed, it seems.  

What he said then is still true today about executives like John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt of Wells Fargo: 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Not to mention his (or her)bonuses....