THE HISTORY OF THESE TWO CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES HAS NEVER BEEN DIFFERENT. THEY LOOT, POCKET THE PLUNDER, PAY A PALTRY FINE, TUCK SOME INTO FIENSTEIN'S POCKETS, AND GO ON FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF ECONOMIC CRIME.
WE WANT THE FUKERS JAILED!
So did all the crooks fired from Wells Fargo get new jobs at Bank of America?
Not too long ago, Wells Fargo got its head handed to it by regulators, drawing a $3 billion fine for opening fake accounts in real customers' names, to beef up their bonuses as well as fool shareholders into thinking the business was growing, potentially driving up the stock price.
That's no partisan take -- that's just plain dishonesty.
The bank had to pay a $3 billion fine, at least one executive faced prison and a hefty personal fine of $17 million, and if anything, it was too little. A small fry bank that did this would rightly be shut down as some kind of criminal racket.
Still, the punishment should have gotten the other banks' attention. At a minimum, they could focus on not doing those things and saving their banks some humongous fines and jail times.
Not Bank of America, which based on news accounts, was pretty much doing the same thing even after Wells Fargo was raked over the coals.
According to Reuters:
July 11 (Reuters) - Bank of America (BAC.N) on Tuesday agreed to pay $250 million in fines and compensation to settle claims the bank systematically double-charged customers fees, withheld promised credit card perks, and opened accounts without customer authorization.
Bank of America agreed to pay $100 million in restitution to harmed consumers and another $150 million in civil penalties after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said the bank violated a number of laws beginning in 2012.
Why the fine was just a fraction of what Wells Fargo got is enough to give one pause.
They were, after all, doing the same thing -- as if they'd hired all the crooks who get canned at Wells Fargo to carry on doing the same thing.
But more likely, they were cloaked in woke, and viewed that as its own armor to ensure that they would never be punished the way other banks were.
Sure, they're a big bank. But it's more than passing strange that they got off so lightly, like this was a Hunter Biden-typle deal.
Might that be because Bank of America has gotten significantly more "woke"?
It seems possible in light of the Hunter Biden deal -- but also because of other events in the news regarding the bank -- that they handed over customer data on gun purchases to the FBI without a subpoena, and without a legal process, as well as handed over bank data to the bureau to identify January 6 protestors. Maybe they got some brownie points for their devotion to the woke-ified government agencies.
What's more, they've been on the woke train for a long time, since at least the 2008 Obama election and financial meltdown of that era.
In 2021, Chris Rufo reported at City Journal that the bank had introduced a "woke at work" policy, brainwashing its employees into thinking America was a white supremacist society:
Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”
Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.
Can't get more wokesterly than that.
Oh, but they could, they could. The Washington Free Beacon reports that they were accused by an activist group of politicizing their actual banking, not just sucking up to the government's coercive organs:
A national ad campaign targeting Bank of America over its politicized business policies says the bank has gone "full woke," pointing to the bank's race-based home financing and decision to cut off loans to gun manufacturers and fossil fuel industries.
Consumers' Research, a consumer advocacy group, launched the "Bank of UnAmerica" campaign this week with nationwide TV ads, a Times Square billboard, and mobile advertisements in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Miami, and other cities.
The ads accuse Bank of America of "using a social score system straight out of China's playbook" by "building a system to track your carbon emissions and monitor your driving," "coming after your Second Amendment rights," and "favoring certain home buyers based on their race."
None of that sounds good for profits, which is their job to focus on.
They did have quite a big business in fines for bounced checks, which they got rid of a year ago, making it a more reasonable $10 per bad check or unexpected subscription debit. While bouncing checks is not good personal finance practice on the customer side, and in countries like France could get you thrown in jail, (last time I checked, which was awhile ago), excessive fees in the neighborhood of $35 x 2 = $70, for what are usually the poorest customers, is not good either and the bank's fines current included that practice. It actually became a money-making center for the bank, resembling battered cities like St. Louis which have made much of their city income off excessive traffic stops and fines in poor areas, prompting lots of bad will towards police.
Because who was most likely to be hit by the fees? That's right, the poor, the people with shaky, unpredictable incomes, the people most likely to get laid off. How many of those poor were actual minorities? Let's just say it was probably quite a few.
Which right there exposes the hypocrisy of the bank and its wokesterly virtue-signalling. The bulk of these bad business practices on the fee front most likely hit minority customers hardest. So, while they were virtue-signaling their racial grievance-mongering and indoctrinating their employees in the practice of wokedom, they were leaning hardest on minority customers who had the shakiest incomes to pad their profits. Presumably, the fake account-opening would have involved customers of higher incomes, but there may have been many minority customers in that group, too.
What an ugly picture that is.
Were they to have focused on sound business practices, making fees reasonably aligned to their costs, and focused instead on growing the business by making it more attractive to customers across the board, they might not ever have gotten into this situation. blunted
But the wokedom seems to have blunted the punishment they took now, which suggests to the rest of us that wokery is nothing more than a shield for avoiding punishment for elemental bad business practices.
In other words, the woke-industrial racket that the bank and much of the corporate world has embraced, is a racket in more ways than one, an incentivization for blunting the impact of punishment for bad practices going on.
Which really means the scrutiny should continue and be ongoing for how the feds take on banks with bad practices and whether wokery has exerted a corrupting influence on who gets punished.
As for Bank of America, out with it: How many minority customers did you stiff as you made all those pious virtue-signaling statements about America the hopelessly racially flawed place all full of white supremacists? The bank that smelt it, dealt it.
Image: Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 2.0
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