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What Wells Fargo did to you, how Senator Warren is defending you, and why the Law Code of Hammurabi is better than our pathetic system of justice today

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We need to roll back our system of law by 3770 years or so.

Senator Elizabeth Warren tore into Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who claims he is "accountable" for a massive scam that impacted millions of the bank's customers. However, Stumpf has not resigned, returned any money, or faced criminal prosecution.

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Highlights

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - Starting in 2011, Wells Fargo put pressure on its employees to open bank accounts and credit card accounts by pressuring them to meet quotas and goals.

Standards that many consider to be unrealistic.

In desperation to keep their $12 per hour jobs, many of these employees, about 5,300 or 2 percent of the company's rank-and-file workers, engaged in fraud.

The fraud involved employees stealing their customer's identities and opening new bank accounts and credit card accounts to meet their goals and keep their jobs. Those accounts subsequently incurred fees which brought in revenue to Wells Fargo. About two million accounts were created. Employees who did exceptionally well were awarded bonuses.


The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $185 million and the company agreed to refund $5 million to customers. Those 5,300 employees who engaged in fraud have been fired. However, no responsibility has been shouldered by the executives of the company who created the program, and the unrealistic pressure that spurred employees to commit fraud. The company was very likely aware of the practice, and did nothing meaningful to stop it over a five year period.

Wells Fargo says the 5,300 fired employees comprise just 1 percent of the company, but this is a lie. The actual figure is about two percent, which suggests these were not rogues, but active members of a culture -a culture that promoted theft and looked the other way. The company has about 260,000 employees according to their own 2015.

Nobody has estimated the number of employees who either resigned or were dismissed because they could not ethically meet their sales goals imposed by Wells Fargo executives. The impact on those people and their incomes may be the greatest of all.

During a Senate hearing, Elizabeth Warren went at Wells Fargo CEO, John Stumpf. She asked if he resigned. She asked if he returned any of the money he was paid during the period. He then asked if any high level executives were fired as a result of the scam. The answers were all very awkward forms of no.

"You should resign," she said. "You should give back the money you took while this scam was going on and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission."

Warren did not let the CEO off the hook at all. It's a pleasure to see the man who personifies "the man" petrified as Warren grills him.

But alarming is the fact that Warren was the only Senator on the panel to ask such tough, pointed questions, or to insist on straight answers. What are our other lawmakers doing? Why is Warren alone challenging this CEO?

Most importantly, will anyone go to jail over this massive fraud?

It is apparent to most Americans there are two systems of justice. One for the ordinary citizen and one for the wealthy. The wealthy might be fined or face a slap on the wrist, or nothing at all. Whereas ordinary people face mass incarceration within the prison-industrial complex.

In truth, our legal code is no less absurd than the Law Code of Hammurabi which demanded an eye for an eye of ordinary people, but allowed the rich to merely pay a fine. We have no right to chuckle at the absurdities of the ancient code because our modern system of justice is a thousand fold more complex, and somehow renders no more justice than Hammurabi's and perhaps even less.

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