Tag Archives: wells-fargo

This Virginia congressman thinks the EPA is already pretty great.

by Louveni6146 Posted on February 7, 2017

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw $3 billion from the bank, in part because it is funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the city’s mayor said he would sign the measure.

The vote delivered a win for pipeline foes, albeit on a bleak day for the #NoDAPL movement. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will allow construction of the pipeline’s final leg and forgo an environmental impact statement.

Before the vote, many Native speakers took the floor in support of divestment, including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Tsimshian First Nation, and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.

Seattle will withdraw its $3 billion when the city’s current contract with Wells Fargo expires in 2018. Meanwhile, council members will seek out a more socially responsible bank. Unfortunately, the pickings are somewhat slim, as Bank of America, Chase, CitiBank, ING, and a dozen other banks have all invested in the pipeline.

While $3 billion is just a small sliver of Wells Fargo’s annual deposit collection of $1.3 trillion, the council hopes its vote will send a message to other banks. Activism like this has worked before — in November, Norway’s largest bank sold all of its assets connected to Dakota Access. With any luck, more will follow.

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This Virginia congressman thinks the EPA is already pretty great.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged alo, citizen, city, corps, dakota, green light, solar, standing, wells-fargo | Comments Off

The Wall Street-Washington Complex Invades Trump’s Cabinet

by DwightDugger Posted on December 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of all the ways Donald Trump has fallen short of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington politics with his Cabinet appointments, none is starker than his choice of Elaine Chao as transportation secretary. Chao is as much of a Washington insider as they come: She served as deputy transportation secretary under George H.W. Bush and as secretary of labor for eight years under George W. Bush. She’s also married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and this year he used his perch to undermine a federal agency that was going after the bank where she works.

Since 2011, Chao has sat on the board of Wells Fargo, earning more than $1.2 million in pay over that period. This year, it was revealed that the bank had fraudulently set up millions of fake accounts that customers had never requested. That activity earned Wells Fargo a $185 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the largest penalty levied so far by the new financial watchdog agency.

The Senate called in Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf in September, and both Democrats and Republicans attacking the company’s behavior. “This is about accountability,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the CFPB, said at the hearing. “You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.” Stumpf resigned a few weeks later.

But McConnell didn’t quite share that sentiment. Instead, he chose to go after the federal agency that had penalized Wells Fargo. As liberal consumer rights group Public Citizen pointed out, less than a week after the CFPB announced its fine against Wells Fargo, McConnell used his authority to try to fast-track a bill that would defang the CFPB by changing its funding structure.

The bill ultimately failed to advance, although the CFPB could lose significant power under President Trump. And McConnell is far from the only Republican to target the CFPB. But for Trump, who ran a populist campaign decrying the power of Washington insiders and the moneyed interests they support, the selection of Chao for a top administration role seems to show he’s not as opposed to the Wall Street-Washington complex as he might have suggested.

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The Wall Street-Washington Complex Invades Trump’s Cabinet

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged citizen, consumer, democrats, financial, lai, Ona, senate, street, washington, wells-fargo | Comments Off

Conflicts of Interest Abound in State Supreme Courts

by Ha Zega Posted on December 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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A new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity reveals troubling conflicts of interest in state supreme courts nationwide. CPI combed through the financial disclosure forms of state supreme court justices in all 50 states and reviewed the states’ disclosure laws for judges. Their findings on both fronts are discouraging.

CPI discovered several instances of justices writing opinions that favored companies they had financial ties to. An Arkansas justice ruled in favor of a company that had been paying his wife a salary of as much as $12,499 for two years. A high court judge in California ruled in favor of Wells Fargo despite owning up to $1 million of the bank’s stock—even as a colleague who owned less stock recused himself. Other justices accepted perks from lawyers —from country club memberships to a $50,000 Italian vacation.

Uncovering such information is exceedingly difficult because most states’ disclosure laws for judges are pretty weak. While federal judges are required to recuse themselves from cases if they or a family member own even a single share of stock in a company involved, state laws are murky and inconsistent. CPI devised a system for grading the state standards for preventing these kinds of conflicts of interest: 43 got a D or lower.

Check out some of CPI’s finds below: Some recent examples of state supreme court justices weighing in on cases involving companies in which they or their spouses owned stock, and a list of the freebies thrown at top judges.