Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise

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Wells Fargo is guilty of serial malfeasance, and there’s reason to suspect more down the road.

In 2015, the Department of Justice’s U.S. Trustee Program entered into a national settlement agreement with Wells Fargo Bank N.A. (Wells Fargo) requiring that the bank pay $81.6 million for its repeated failure to provide 68,000 homeowners with legally required notices related to mortgage payments. Wells Fargo’s actions violated federal bankruptcy rules, thereby denying homeowners the opportunity to challenge the accuracy of mortgage payment increases.

“When creditors fail to comply with the bankruptcy laws and rules, they compromise the integrity of the bankruptcy system and must be held accountable.,” said a Department of Justice release on the settlement.

In the summer of 2016, Wells Fargo admitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that it improperly charged customers for collateral-protection insurance on their cars financed through the bank. In July 2017, the bank said it had found 800,000 customers potentially affected by the improper charges, with 274,000 of them forced into delinquency on their car loans as a result and 25,000 cars wrongly repossessed. Wells Fargo said it would refund customers about $80 million in charges.

In Sept. 2016, Wells Fargo settled for $24.1 million with the Justice Department and the OCC over the improper repossession of cars owned by members of the U.S military.

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act requires a court order to repossess a vehicle if a service member took out a loan and made a payment before entering military service.

“We all have an obligation to ensure that the women and men who serve our country in the armed forces are afforded all of the rights they are due,” U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker of the Central District of California told the Los Angeles Times. “Wells Fargo failed in that obligation.”

That same month, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million to settle lawsuits related to the bank’s creation of customer accounts without the customers being aware of the activity. The sham accounts were created by employees under pressure to perform or be fired.

Wells Fargo said initially that the practice involved the creation by employees of up to 2.1 million sham accounts. In Aug. 2017, Wells Fargo said it found 1.4 million more sham bank and credit card accounts, bringing the total up to 3.5 million.

As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine put it, “…the Wells Fargo scandal took a lot of coordinated nefarious effort.”

Wells Fargo also found that thousands of customers were enrolled in online bill pay programs without their authorization. Wells Fargo said it found 528,000 potentially unauthorized online bill pay enrollments. Wells Fargo employees set up the accounts to meet product sales goals. In this case, the bank said it would return $910,000 to people enrolled in those accounts without their permission.

Wells Fargo is guilty of a gross betrayal of its customers’ trust

And Warren Buffet, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a large investor in Wells Fargo, expects the bad news to keep coming. “There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen,” he told CNBC on Squawk Alley, a CNBC news program, in August 2017.

 

 

Big campaign donations are evil, says Senator Ron Wyden, but keep them coming

 

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Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)  is running for-reelection. So he’s hitting up his constituents.

“Sign the petition calling for affordable housing solutions,” his email said on Sunday. “We need more affordable housing and we need it now. I’ve proposed new legislation to encourage, support, and accelerate the construction of affordable housing nationwide.”

And if you sign the petition, he asks for money, with choices ranging from $5 to $500 or more.

If you sign the petition, you also get a thank you message and another request for money, this time with choices of $7, $24, $36 or $125.

All these appeals from a Senator who, according to OpenSecrets.org,  had $7,557,657 of campaign contributions in the bank as of his last fundraising report on June 30. In comparison, his Republican opponent in this 2016 Senate race, Mark Callahan, had a measly $4,546 on hand.

And just 27 percent of the money Wyden has raised for his current race has come from donors within Oregon, with 73 percent ($5,420,369) coming from out of state.

In the meantime, while asserting that big donors undermine democracy, Wyden has been pulling in money from big donors big time.

Over the past six years, the biggest donors have been some really big players, like Nike Inc., Intel Corp., and Berkshire Hathaway.

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If you think about it, why does Wyden, who’s 67, need such a big war chest? If he’s re-elected, as he likely will be, he’ll be 73 at the end of his next term and will have spent 42 years in Congress. Won’t that be enough?

If Wyden truly believes there’s too much money corrupting politics, with big donors of particular concern, why not take a break from fundraising? A lot of us would welcome the time-out.

(Good grief. I just got one more email fundraising plea from Wyden. This time, he’s asking me to contribute $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or more. Will the next plea be for $10,000 or more?)

Donations to Senator Ron Wyden 2011-2016 (Source: OpenSecrets.org)

These numbers don’t reflect donations from organizations themselves, but from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Rank Contributor Total
1 Nike Inc. $124,222
2 Blue Cross/Blue Shield $105,900
3 League of Cons. Voters $75,012
4 Intel Corp. $74,307
5 Akin, Gump et al $70,155
6 Berkshire Hathaway $57,900
7 DaVita HealthCare Partners $50,750
8 Metlife Inc. $48,507
9 DLA Piper $43,700
10 King & Spalding $42,560