Just when I was warming up to Elizabeth Warren, she reminded why I always detested her:
Warren slammed Stumpf for failing to fire any senior executives linked to the scandal, while Wells Fargo’s aggressive sales tactics helped pump up the bank’s stock price…
“You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket,” Warren said.
This is not only ridiculous but disgusting. Nobody forced these horrible bank clerks to cheat people. If my Dean or whomever sets enormous, impossible, unachievable publication requirements and I decide to meet them by plagiarizing, it will not be the Dean’s fault. It will only be mine.
Gosh, I come from a place where everybody constantly cheats, bribes, behaves dishonestly but nobody is ever to blame. It’s always the evil authorities, the nasty elites, the dishonest police, the grabby doctors, the mean teachers, and the general unfairness of human existence that “squeezed them to the breaking point so that they would cheat.”
It wasn’t Putin who threw fake ballots into the ballot boxes on Sunday. Without the actions of thousands of irresponsible, dishonest people, it would not be possible to falsify the election.
Or as they say in Spain, the Franco dictatorship existed but there seems not to have been a single Franco supporter. Franco did everything entirely on his own while 40 million people were victimized by him.
Clarissa's Blog 
Wait, this is in conflict with your comments about the CEO of Planned Parenthood who you held personally responsible for the actions of a low-ranking worker she probably never met.
I completely disagree with your post. So Bush and Cheney aren’t to blame for torture because they didn’t personally torture anyone?
When five thousand people in a corporation are doing illegal shit , that behavior is not an aberration anymore. It is company culture, a culture that is set by higher ups. Of course the fucking CEO knew and encouraged it. And even if the higher ups didn’t know about it, shouldn’t they take the blame for something that went on for years but they were too incompetent to notice?
So, the lowly clerks paid for their actions by losing their jobs. Can we expect the same from their bosses? Why are they walking away with $100M bonuses?
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She did not say that bosses are not to blame.
And remember Nuremberg…
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Fuck blame, we’re talking consequences. Easy to act contrite in front of a congressional committee.
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Military personnel is under orders and can be court-martialed for not following orders. And even that doesn’t free them from responsibility in my eyes. As for bank employees who victimized customers simply because they wanted a bonus – they are no victims.
That CEO should get everything that’s coming to him. But the people who actually perpetrated the con should not be justified or excused.
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“That CEO should get everything that’s coming to him.”
That’s the problem here. Nothing’s coming to him, except more money. The clerks have lost their jobs, and rightly so.
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If he didn’t tell anybody to cheat customers, there is nothing anybody can do.
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So, HSBC paid a fine for laundering mexican drug cartel money. It’s hilarious. Some of their branches opened on Sundays in order to facilitate these transactions. Talk about customer service, ho ho!
The fine was probably two weeks of their profit, which they get to deduct from their taxes. So, should the CEO go to jail for money laundering? Or is the idea here that since the CEO didn’t personally take bags of money from El Chapo on Sundays, he isn’t responsible, it’s the bank clerk who should go to jail?
Wall Street people have enough cheerleaders, christ. You don’t need to join the party!
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I think you misunderstand my post. I have zero interest in defending this CEO, that CEO or Putin. What I’m saying is that the eager participants in the schemes of the CEOS and oligarchs are no victims.
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“I think you misunderstand my post.”
I think you may be right. But it still felt good to write what I did! 😀
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😎😎😎
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I don’t for a second think that the piece of garbage in those PP videos is a victim and was forced to behave the way she did. It’s clear from the videos that she is working hard to self-promote.
As for the rest, I’m responding to a specific quote from Warren that I find extremely objectionable. She chose to make this argument and not the one you are making.
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Hi Clarissa, I disagree with your post as well, but for different reasons. First, Wells has a senior executive (nicknamed “The Watchmaker” according to the Wall Street Journal) who has been micro-managing the branch network. Second, they were training and setting sales targets and incentive bonuses for cross-selling. Branch people won’t misbehave for no reason and it is virtually impossible that such widespread misconduct could occur without management knowledge and encouragement. Opening an account in someone’s name without their consent is fraud. Lack of financial controls to validate transactions is negligence. The executives at Wells are guilty of something; the only question is which regulation they violated.
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I’m not saying that the executives are not guilty. I’m saying that Warren’s idea that the workers who actually opened fake accounts are poor little victims is immoral and wrong.
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Well, now the employees who were fired for being honest are suing:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law
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Everybody has quotas at work. I would have been let go from my job a long time ago if I hadn’t fulfilled my quota. But I never saw it as an invitation to plagiarize.
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Their claim is that the particular quota they were given was impossible to reach honestly.
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