Wells Fargo

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BUSTED BY CFPB

11.18 primary on enbridge pipeline

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heated gmail 9 26

some blame where it’s due.

Fossil fuel companies, obviously. (Truly, no clue how those executives sleep at night.) And I gave you my two cents on big ag.

Also:

Big banks: Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, 60 banks have provided $7.9 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies, with the top four banks alone—JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—providing more than $1.64 trillion.

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AN 4 25

Politico legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney reportsemployees responsible for conducting Trump’s mass layoffs at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) are now "also going to fire themselves," per new emails released in court.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already ordered nearly 1,500 employees fired from CFPB. This leaves only about 200 employees protecting consumers from unlawful digital theft and home-owners from being wrongfully ousted from their homes by disreputable loan practices.

Now what jobs still remain are cannibalizing themselves, according to filings.

“We are three positions off, but we are reconciling it,” read an email from CFPB COO Adam Martinez. “My team doing all of the number/name crunching are running on low fuel and have not slept for a couple of days. They also happen to be RIFing themselves.”

IFrame Content

“RIFing,” reports The New Republic, refers to “reduction in force,” a government term for layoffs.

Up until the DOGE eviscerations, the CFPB was the American consumer’s strongest ally. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed the agency in 2007 in response to the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown and the subsequent worldwide financial crisis. It is an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve that intervenes on behalf of U.S. consumers.

Prior to DODGE, if enough alerts against a lending agency piled up at CFPB, the agency could launch its own investigation and scrutinize the company’s history and practices. In 2022, the CFPB whacked Wells Fargo with a $3.7 billion fine after discovering Wells Fargo had illegally assessed fees and interest charges on consumers’ loans, wrongly repossessed their properties, misapplied bank loans and hit consumers with unlawful surprise overdraft fees and other “incorrect charges.”

Notches in CFPB’s belt also included ordering Navy Federal Credit Union to pay more than $95 million over illegal surprise overdraft fees charged to military servicemembers, veterans and consumers, despite customers’ bank accounts having sufficient funds at the time of purchases. Some college graduates may also recognize the name “Navient,” and be thankful CFPB banned Navient from servicing federal student loans after slapping the company with a $120 million fine for widespread student lending failures.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is known also for ordering lending company Mr. Cooper to cough up more than $70 million for wrongfully foreclosing on homeowners during reviews and impermissibly raising homeowners’ monthly payments and failing to honor mortgage payment arrangements.

Now gutted by DOGE, TNR reports the agency will no longer focus on protecting consumers making digital payments, people with medical debt, or those using peer-to-peer payday lending platforms.

Read the full TNR report here.

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direct action ? 4 24

public citizen

Do you believe corporations should disclose all their lobbying activity, all around the country?

If so, we need your help to bring Wells Fargo’s secretive lobbying to light. Here’s what you need to know:

Wells Fargo spent more than $45 million lobbying in Washington, DC over the past decade

Wells Fargo was fined by the federal government for illegally charging surprise overdraft fees, and we know it lobbied against the Biden Administration’s crackdown on junk fees — so it doesn’t have a strong track record when it comes to protecting consumers

And while the company publicly supports addressing climate change, it’s a member of third-party groups that lobby against climate action

*But there’s still so much we *don’t* know, like how much the company spent on anti-consumer lobbying at the state level or how much Wells Fargo pays trade associations and other third-party groups to lobby on its behalf.
Shareholders and the public deserve to know if Wells Fargo is participating in lobbying that doesn’t align with its publicly stated values or shareholders’ financial interests!

Wells Fargo isn’t going to disclose all of its lobbying activities willingly, so it’s time for the company’s shareholders to take action.

The Wells Fargo annual shareholder meeting is on April 30. Shareholders will be voting on a proposal to expose *all* of the company’s lobbying, beyond what we know about at the federal level.

*We need your help to show these shareholders that there’s broad public support for making Wells Fargo be transparent about all of its lobbying activities....

**Tell Wells Fargo shareholders:**

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sf protest 921

ref report

https://www.commondreams.org/news**/2022/03**/30/despite-splashy-net-zero-vows-big-banks-dumping-trillions-fossil-fuels

despite 'Splashy' Net-Zero Vows, Big Banks Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels

"With Wall Street banks leading the charge, these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all."

JAKE JOHNSON

March 30, 2022

Flouting their public vows to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided a total of $4.6 trillion in financing for the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016.

That's according to the latest edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, an annual report that tracks the banking industry's funding of oil and gas initiatives that are threatening global hopes of reining in carbon pollution and averting climate disaster.

In 2021 alone, the report finds, the world's biggest private-sector banks financed oil and gas to the tune of $742 billion. That year, the 60 banks featured in the new analysis poured $185.5 billion into the 100 companies doing the most to expand the fossil-fuel sector worldwide through offshore drilling, fracking, coal mining, liquefied natural gas infrastructure, and more. Authored by Oil Change International, the Rainforest Action Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and other groups and endorsed by hundreds of organizations from around the world, the report published Wednesday spotlights the marked contrast between banks' public commitments to net-zero emissions targets and their actions, which reflect a continued stake in fossil fuel development.

The worst offenders in the banking industry, according to the report, are the U.S. financial behemoths JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America,which together accounted for 25% of all fossil fuel financing identified over the past six years.

The report highlights a number of specific projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America), drilling in offshore Guyana (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America), and the Line 3 Pipeline (funded by TD, Scotiabank, and the Bank of Montreal), efforts that have drawn fierce resistance from Indigenous communities.

"Indigenous peoples have long been leading the fight for the sacredness of the land, water, and Earth," Mea Johnson, divestment campaign coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement Wednesday. "Mother Earth has always given us what we need to thrive. We will not back down until our natural balance is restored and anyone helping fund the extractive destruction of our communities will be held accountable."

Alison Kirsch, research and policy manager at the Rainforest Action Network, added that "any further expansion of fossil fuels risks locking humanity into generations of climate catastrophe, yet the top fossil clients of the world's largest banks are still being showered with tens of billions of dollars even as they actively expand drilling, mining, fracking, and other fossil fuel development unabated."

"With Wall Street banks leading the charge," Kirsch added, "these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all and must immediately end their support of any further fossil fuel infrastructure expansion."

The banks' financing decisions fly in the face of their own pledges to bring their policies into line with critical climate goals, such as achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a benchmark that 44 of the 60 banks profiled in the new report have backed.

"But global banks have massively supported the companies doing the most to open new oil and gas fields," notes the new report. "Banks with net-zero commitments last year... financed the top 20 upstream oil and gas expansion companies, potentially helping to lock the planet into decades of climate-warming emissions." According to the International Energy Agency, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 would mean ensuring "no new oil and gas fields."

Adele Shraiman, a representative for theSierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said Wednesday that the analysis "makes it clear that banks must clean up their act and stop funding the expansion of dirty fossil fuel projects like fracked gas exports, tar sands pipelines, and offshore drilling in order to align with what the science demands and what their own commitments require."

"Despite their splashy climate pledges, big banks have largely continued with business-as-usual and actually increased their overall fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement," said Shraiman. "As we look ahead to shareholder season, we'll be keeping up the pressure on the banks and their investors to take these critical reforms seriously and stop bankrolling the fossil fuel industry's reckless expansion plans."

corp acct hall of shame 6 23

In 2008, banking giant Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia, a financial services company with deep ties to the slave trade. For many years, Wachovia generated profits and wealth in part through slavery and convict labor. But instead of acknowledging and apologizing for this history, Wells Fargo continued to invest in industries that disenfranchise, terrorize, and brutalize Black communities across the country. Most recently, Wells Fargo was exposed for using discriminatory lending practices that affected tens of thousands Black and Hispanic borrowers in the U.S. Wells Fargo also bankrolled two leading corporations that are perpetuating the modern-day enslavement of Black Americans through the private prison system. These are just a few examples of how Wells Fargo's misappropriated wealth continues to deepen racial inequities in the U.S. We're nominating Wells Fargo for failing to justly redress its historical ties to the slave trade, continuing instead to perpetuate racial injustices through its financing of the private prison system, and profiting from discriminatory lending practices, as well as mass incarceration.

ref report

https://www.commondreams.org/news**/2022/03**/30/despite-splashy-net-zero-vows-big-banks-dumping-trillions-fossil-fuels

despite 'Splashy' Net-Zero Vows, Big Banks Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels

"With Wall Street banks leading the charge, these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all."

JAKE JOHNSON

March 30, 2022

That's according to the latest edition of :{Banking on Climate Chaos:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, an annual report that tracks the banking industry's funding of oil and gas initiatives that are threatening global hopes of reining in carbon pollution and averting climate disaster.

The worst offenders in the banking industry, according to the report, are the U.S. financial behemoths JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, which together accounted for 25% of all fossil fuel financing identified over the past six years.

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/13/indigenous-pipeline-oil-gas-insurers/

as OIL AND gas projects expand across the United States and Canada, often imperiling Indigenous land without ever obtaining consent, land defenders are increasingly pressuring the financiers of fossil fuel infrastructure — banks, insurance companies, and asset managers — to respect their sovereign land right. Amplifying the calls of this grassroots movement, the largest organization representing American Indians and Alaskan Natives passed a historic resolution last month calling on “private insurance companies to end their underwriting of the expansion of tar sands oil, Arctic oil and gas, and LNG export terminals.”

The resolution, put forward by the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI, also asks insurance companies to adopt policies on “free, prior, and informed consent.” This principle, enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,is “really just a fancy way of saying that any corporation, any bank, any agency that wants to engage in a project that impacts Indigenous lands and treaty lands must get consent from that particular tribal nation or Indigenous community,” said Matt Remle, who is Lakota and the primary author of the resolution. “And if the community says no, that project doesn’t happen.”

Remle is also the co-founder of Mazaska Talks, an Indigenous-led organization focused on campaigns to divest from projects that violate human rights and treaty rights abuses, which came out of an effort that began about five years ago to defund the Dakota Access pipeline.This movement pushed the city of Seattle to divest $3 billion from Wells Fargo in 2017, one of the main backers of the pipeline, and sparked similar campaigns throughout the country. More recently, every major bank has agreed to not fund drilling in the Arctic after facing pressure from Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of over 130 organizations which includes Mazaska Talks.

most Wall Street banks at least publicly acknowledge free, prior, and informed consent while still financing projects, like the tar sands pipelines, that face Indigenous-led opposition. Yet no major U.S. insurance companies, the biggest insurers of oil and gas projects across the globe, have released publicly facing statements about Indigenous rights, let alone the principle of free, prior, and informed consent, according to Elana Sulakshana, energy finance campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. This is, in part, why there has recently been more intense scrutiny of insurance companies’ enablement of fossil fuel projects on Indigenous land.

Activists demand the city of Seattle to divest its money and banking business from Wells Fargo, over the company’s investment in the Dakota Access pipeline, in 2016.

Photo: Alex Garland]

The resolution’s passage builds on the grassroots Indigenous movements underway that have been pressuring insurance companies, as one tool among many, to defend their land.

For instance, last month, the Gwich’in Steering Committee wrote aletter asking insurers to not back the destruction of the sacred calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife refuge.Drilling in the calving grounds threatens the migratory Porcupine caribou, which in turn “threatens the Gwich’in existence and way of life.” The letter calls upon oil and gas companies, banks, and insurance companies to “stand with the Gwich’in Nation by not initiating any oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge.”

This letter was prompted by the Trump administration rushing to auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Under federal law, all agencies are required to respect Indigenous nations’ right to self-governance, which means consulting with communities about drilling projects. The Bureau of Land Management, the agency that administers federal land, did not engage in any form of meaningful consent, said Bernadette Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. She noted that the agency held public meetings in only three of the nine Gwich’in communities in Alaska and did not hold meetings in communities accessible only by boat or plane.

“They only had hearings in certain communities. They did not have the government-to-government consultation that they’re supposed to,” said Demientieff. “They basically came to our community and told us what they were going to do. That was it.”

The Bureau of Land Management pushed back against the claim that it did not engage in government-to-government consultation, stating that it held more than 25 meetings “with tribal governments with the potential to be directly affected by an oil and gas leasing program.”

The Gwich’in Steering Committee also reached out individually to the 22 insurance companies addressed in the public letter to request a meeting. So far they’ve had one meeting, with Swiss Re, in which Demientieff spoke about the environmental devastation they have been witnessing, she said, such as the erosion of the land beneath coastal villages and “thousands and thousands ofdead fish in our lakes and rivers.” On December 14, the committee announced that Swiss Re had committed not to “provide coverage or investment support for projects related to exploration, drilling or production of oil or gas in the Arctic, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

OTHER INDIGENOUS NATIONS have also been seeking to meet with insurance companies. On September 2, the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association, which represents 16 tribal nations, sent a letter to David Long, the CEO of Liberty Mutual, urging the insurance company to “immediately end its relationship” with the Keystone XL pipeline. This pipeline is expected to carry bitumen oil from Alberta’s tar sands into the United States in a proposed route that would violate Indigenous treaty rights and sacred sites. Long and Liberty Mutual did not respond to requests for comment.

Liberty Mutual is providing financial backing to the Keystone XL pipeline with a publicly filedsurety bond worth $15.6 million. An additional $15.6 million bond is required after construction begins....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/whistleblower-wall-street-has-engaged-in-widespread-manipulation-of-mortgage-funds

no lnx

Pro Publica May 16, 2020

Among the toxic contributors to the financial crisis of 2008, few caused as much havoc as mortgages with dodgy numbers and inflated values. Huge quantities of them were assembled into securities that crashed and burned, damaging homeowners and investors alike. Afterward, reforms were promised. Never again, regulators vowed, would real estate financiers be able to fudge numbers and threaten the entire economy.

Twelve years later, there’s evidence something similar is happening again.

Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank — as well as other lenders have engaged in a systematic fraud that allowed them to award borrowers bigger loans than were supported by their true financials, according to a previously unreported whistleblower complaint submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Whereas the fraud during the last crisis was in residential mortgages, the complaint claims this time it’s happening in commercial properties like office buildings, apartment complexes and retail centers. The complaint focuses on the loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion and turned into bonds sold to investors, known as CMBS (for commercial mortgage-backed securities).

Lenders and securities issuers have regularly altered financial data for commercial properties “without justification,” the complaint asserts, in ways that make the properties appear more valuable, and borrowers more creditworthy, than they actually are. As a result, it alleges, borrowers have qualified for commercial loans they normally would not have, with the investors who bought securities birthed from those loans none the wiser.

ProPublica closely examined six loans that were part of CMBS in recent years to see if their data resembles the pattern described by the whistleblower. What we found matched the allegations: The historical profits reported for some buildings were listed as much as 30% higher than the profits previously reported for the same buildings and same years when the property was part of an earlier CMBS. As a rough analogy, imagine a homeowner having stated in a mortgage application that his 2017 income was $100,000 only to claim during a later refinancing that his 2017 income was $130,000 — without acknowledging or explaining the change.

It’s “highly questionable” to alter past profits with no apparent explanation, said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert in securities regulation. “I don’t understand why you can do that.”

In theory, CMBS are supposed to undergo a rigorous multistage vetting process. A property owner seeking a loan on, say, an office building would have its finances scrutinized by a bank or other lender. After that loan is made, it would be subjected to another round of due diligence, this time by an investment bank that assembles 60 to 120 loans to form a CMBS. Somewhere along the line, according to John Flynn, a veteran of the CMBS industry who filed the whistleblower complaint, numbers are being adjusted — inevitably to make properties, and therefore the entire CMBS, look more financially robust.

The complaint suggests widespread efforts to make adjustments. Some expenses were erased from the ledger, for example, when a new loan was issued. Most changes were small; but a minor increase in profits can lead to approval for a significantly higher mortgage.

The result: Many properties may have borrowed more than they could afford to pay back — even before the pandemic rocked their businesses — making a CMBS crash both more likely and more damaging. “It’s a higher cliff from which they are falling,” Flynn said. “So the loss severity is going to be greater and the probability of default is going to be greater.”

With the economy being pounded and trillions of dollars already committed to bailouts, potential overvaluations in commercial real estate loom much larger than they would have even a few months ago. Data from early April showed a sharp spike in missed payments to bondholders for CMBS that hold loans from hotels and retail stores, according to Trepp, a data provider whose specialties include CMBS. The default rate is expected to climb as large swaths of the nation remain locked down.

After lobbying by commercial real estate organizations and advocacy by real estate investor and Trump ally Tom Barrack — who warned of a looming commercial mortgage crash — the Federal Reserve pledged in early April to prop up CMBS by loaning money to investors and letting them use their CMBS as collateral. The goal is to stabilize the market at a time when investors may be tempted to dump their securities, and also to support banks in issuing new bonds. (Barrack’s company, Colony Capital, has since defaulted on $3.2 billion in debt backed by hotel and health care properties, according to the Financial Times.)

The Fed didn’t specify how much it’s willing to spend to support the CMBS, and it is allowing only those with the highest credit ratings to be used as collateral. But if some ratings are based on misleading data, as the complaint alleges, taxpayers could be on the hook for a riskier-than-anticipated portfolio of loans.

The SEC, which has not taken public action on the whistleblower complaint, declined to comment....

Some lenders interviewed for this article maintain they’re permitted to alter properties’ historical profits under some circumstances. Others in the industry offered a different view. Adam DeSanctis, a spokesperson for the Mortgage Bankers Association, which has helped set guidelines for financial reporting in CMBS, said he reached out to members of the group’s commercial real estate team and none had heard of a practice of inflating profits. “We aren’t aware of this occurring and really don’t have anything to add,” he said.

The notion that profit figures for some buildings are pumped up is surprising, said Kevin Riordan, a finance professor at Montclair State University. It raises questions about whether the proper disclosures are being made.

Investors don’t comb through financial statements, added Riordan, who used to manage the CMBS portfolio for retirement fund giant TIAA-CREF. Instead, he said, they rely on summaries from investment banks and the credit ratings agencies that analyze the securities. To make wise decisions, investors’ information “out of the gate has to be pretty close to being right,” he said. “Otherwise you’re dealing with garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.”

The whistleblower complaint has its origins in the kinds of obsessions that keep wonkish investors up at night. Flynn wondered what was going to happen when some of the most ill-conceived commercial loans — those made in the lax, freewheeling days before the financial crisis of 2008 — matured a decade later. He imagined an impending disaster of mass defaults. But as 2015, then 2017, passed, the defaults didn’t come. It didn’t make sense to him.

Flynn, 55, has deep experience in commercial real estate, banking and CMBS. After growing up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, the youngest of 14 children, and graduating from college — the first in his family to do so, he said — Flynn moved to Tokyo to work, first in real estate, then in finance. Jobs with banks and ratings agencies took him to Belgium, Chicago and Australia. These days, he advises owners whose loans are sold into CMBS and helps them resolve disputes and restructure or modify problem loans.

He began poring over the fine print in CMBS filings and noticed curious anomalies. For example, many properties changed their names, and even their addresses, from one CMBS to another. That made it harder to recognize a specific property and compare its financial details in two filings. As Flynn read more and more, he began to wonder whether the alterations were attempts to obscure discrepancies: These same properties were typically reporting higher net operating incomes in the new CMBS than they did for the same year in a previous CMBS.

Flynn ultimately collected and analyzed data for huge numbers of commercial mortgages. He began to see patterns and what he calls a massive problem: Flynn has amassed “materials identifying about $150 billion in inflated CMBS issued between 2013 and today,” according to the complaint.

The higher reported profits helped the properties qualify for loans they might not have otherwise obtained, he surmised. They also paved the way for bigger fees for banks. “Inflating historical cash flows creates a misperception of lower current and historical cash flow volatility, enables higher underwritten [net operating income/net cash flow], and higher collateral values,” the complaint states, “and thereby enables higher debt.”

Flynn eventually found a lawyer and, in February 2019, he filed the whistleblower complaint. The complaint accuses 14 major lenders — including three of the country’s biggest CMBS issuers, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo and Ladder Capital— and seven servicers of inflating historical cash flows, failing to report misrepresentations, changing names and addresses of properties and “deceptively and inaccurately” describing mortgage-loan representations. It doesn’t identify which companies allegedly manipulated each specific number. (Spokespeople for Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo declined to comment on the record. The complaint does not mention Barrack or his company. )

The SEC has the power to fine companies and their executives if fraud is established. If the SEC recovers more than $1 million based on Flynn’s claim, he could be entitled to a portion of it.

When Flynn filed the complaint, the skies looked clear for the commercial mortgage market. Indeed, last year was a boom year for CMBS, with private lenders in the U.S. issuing roughly $96.7 billion in commercial mortgage-backed securities — a 27% increase over 2018, which made it the most successful year since the last financial crisis, according to Trepp. Overall, investors hold CMBS worth $592 billion.

Flynn’s assertions raise questions about the efficacy of post-crisis reforms that Congress and the SEC instituted that sought to place new restrictions on banks and other lenders, increase transparency and protect consumers and investors. The regulations that were retooled included the one that governs CMBS, known as Regulation AB. The goal was to make disclosures clearer and more complete for investors, so they would be less reliant on ratings agencies, which were widely criticized during the financial crisis for lax practices.

Still, the opinion of the credit-ratings agencies remains crucial today, a point reinforced by the Fed’s decision to hinge its bailout decisions on those ratings. That’s a problem, in the view of Neil Barofsky, who served as the U.S. Treasury’s inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program from 2008 to 2011. “Practically nothing” was done to reform the ratings agencies, Barofsky said, which could lead to the sorts of problems that emerged in the bailout a decade ago. If things truly turn bad for the commercial real estate industry or if fraud is discovered, he added, the Fed could end up taking possession of properties that default.

CMBS can be something of a last resort for borrowers whose projects are unlikely to qualify for a loan with a desirable interest rate from a bank or other lender (because they are too big, too risky or some other reason), according to experts. Underwriting practices — the due diligence lenders do before extending a loan — for CMBS have gained a reputation for being less strict than for loans that banks keep on their balance sheets. Government watchdogs found serious deficiencies in the underwriting for securitized commercial mortgages during the financial crisis, just as they did in the subprime residential market.

The due diligence process broke down, Flynn maintains, in precisely the mortgages he was worried about: the 10-year loans obtained before the financial crisis. What Flynn discovered, he said, was that rather than lowering the values for properties that had taken on bigger loans than they could pay off, their owners instead obtained new loans. “Someone should have taken the losses,” he said. “Instead, they papered over it, inflated the cash flow and sold it on.”

For commercial borrowers, small bumps in a property’s profits can qualify the borrower for millions more in loans. Shaving expenses by about a third to boost profit, for instance, can sometimes allow a borrower to increase a loan’s size by a third as well — even if the expenses run only in the thousands, and the loan runs in the millions.

Some executives for lenders acknowledged to ProPublica that they made changes to borrowers’ past financials — scrubbing expenses from prior years they deemed irrelevant for the new loan — but maintained that it is appropriate to do so. Accounting firms review financial data before the loans are assembled into CMBS, they added.

The financial data that ProPublica examined — a sample of six loans among the thousands Flynn identified as having inflated net operating income — revealed potential weaknesses not readily apparent to the average investor. For those six loans, the profits for a given year were listed as 9% to 30% higher in new securities than in the old. After they were issued, half of those loans ended up on watch lists for problem debt, meaning the properties were considered at heightened risk for default.

In each of the six loans, the profit inflation seemed to be explained by decreases in the costs reported. Expenses reported for a particular year in one CMBS simply vanished in disclosures for the same year in a new CMBS.

Such a pattern appeared in a $36.7 million loan by Ladder Capital in 2015 to a team that purchased the Doubletree San Diego, a half-century-old hotel that struggled for years to bring in enough income to satisfy loan servicers, even under a previous, smaller loan.

The hotel’s new loan saddled it with far greater debt, increasing its main loan by 60% — even though the property had landed on a watchlist in 2010 because of declining revenue. Analysts at Moody’s pegged the hotel’s new loan as exceeding the value of the property by 40.5% (meaning a loan-to-value ratio of 140.5%).

Filings for the new loan claimed much higher profits than what the old loan had cited for the same years: The hotel’s net operating income for two years magically jumped from what had previously been reported: 21% and 16% larger for 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Such figures are supposed to be pulled from a property’s “most recent operating statement,” according to the regulation governing CMBS disclosures.

But, in response to questions from ProPublica, lender Ladder Capital said it altered the expense numbers it provided in the Doubletree’s historical financials. Ladder said it wiped lease payments —$700,608 and $592,823 in those two years — from the historical financials, because the new owner would not make lease payments in the future. (The previous owner had leased the building from an affiliated company.)

Ladder, a publicly traded commercial real estate investment trust that reports more than $6 billion in assets, said in a statement, “These differences are due to items that were considered by Ladder Capital during the due diligence process and reported appropriately in all relevant disclosures.”

Yet when ProPublica asked Ladder to share its disclosures about the changes, the firm pointed to a section of the pool’s prospectus that didn’t mention lease payments, or explain or acknowledge the change in income.

The Doubletree did not fare well under its new debt package. Revenues and occupancy declined after 2015 and by 2017, the hotel’s loan was back on the watch list. The hotel missed franchise fee payments. Ladder foreclosed in December 2019, after problems with an additional $5.8 million loan the lender had extended the property.

The Doubletree loan was not the only loan in its CMBS pool, issued by Deutsche Bank in 2015, with apparently inflated profits. Flynn said he was able to track down previous loan information for loans representing nearly 40% of the pool, and all had inflated income figures at some point in their historical financial data.

There was also a noticeable profit increase in two loans Ladder issued for a strip mall in suburban Pennsylvania. The mall’s past results improved when they appeared in a new CMBS. Its 2016 net operating income, previously listed as $1,101,207 in one CMBS, now appeared as $1,352,353 in another, data from Trepp shows — an increase of 23%. The prospectus for the latter does not explain or acknowledge the change in income. The mall owner received a $14 million loan.

Less than a year after it was placed into a CMBS, the loan ran into trouble. It landed on a watchlist after one of its major tenants, a department store, declared bankruptcy.

Ladder said it excluded $203,787 in expenses from the new loan because they stemmed from one-time costs for environmental remediation of pollution by a dry cleaner and a roof repair. Ladder did not explain why the previous lender did not exclude the expense also.

The pattern can be seen in loans made by other lenders, too. In a CMBS issued by Wells Fargo, a 1950s-era trailer park at the base of a steep bluff along the coast in Los Angeles reported sharply higher profits — for the same years — than it previously had.

The Pacific Palisades Bowl Park received a $12.9 million loan from the bank in 2016. The park reported expenses that were about a third lower in its new loan disclosures when compared with earlier ones. As a result, the $1.2 million in net operating income for 2014 rose 28% above what had been reported for the same year under the old loan. A similar jump occurred in 2013. (Edward Biggs, the owner of the park, said he gave Wells Fargo the park’s financials when refinancing its loan and wasn’t aware of discrepancies in what was reported to investors. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.)

Flynn said he found that for the $575 million Wells Fargo CMBS that contained the Palisades debt, about half of the loan pool appeared to have reported inflated profits at some point, when comparing the same years in different securities.

Another of the loans ProPublica examined with apparently inflated profits was for a building in downtown Philadelphia. When the owner refinanced through Wells Fargo, the property’s 2015 profit appeared 23% higher than it had in reports under the old loan. Wells bundled the debt into a mortgage-backed security in 2016.

The building, One Penn Center, is a historic Art Deco office high-rise with ornate black marble and gold-plated fixtures, and a transit station underneath. One of the primary tenants, leasing 45,000 square feet for one of its regional headquarters, happens to be the SEC. The agency declined to comment

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-death-cult-finally-says-it-time-to-kill-the-useless-eaters-for-capitalism/

no lnx

Trump’s death cult finally says it: Time to kill the ‘useless eaters’ for capitalism

Brit Hume Fox News Screengrab

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon March 27, 2020

435

Donald Trump has given the Democrats a gift — if they are brave enough to use it.

Last Sunday, Donald Trump declared on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

This slogan, imported from the libertarian far right, signaled an important shift toward ending social distancing and “reopening” the economy, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread Trump’s mouthpieces at Fox News and elsewhere then began to parrot the same macabre and disturbing argument.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, told Fox News: “Let’s get back to living… And those of us that are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”

Right-wing propagandist Glenn Beck told viewers of his BlazeTV show that Americans who are older should just go back to work and prepare to die: “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country.”

Brit Hume of Fox News told Tucker Carlson that he supported Dan Patrick’s view of this potentially lethal transaction:

What we’re living in now, this circumstance as we try to beat this virus, is not sustainable — that the utter collapse of the country’s economy, which many think will happen if this goes on much longer, is an intolerable result… [H]e is saying, for his own part, that he’d be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that’s what it took to allow the economy to move forward. And he said that because he’s late in life, you know, that he would be perhaps more willing then he might’ve been at a younger age, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint.

What are they really saying? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be “useless eaters” — in this case older people, people with pre-existing health conditions and anyone else who may die from the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday, Trump said the quiet part loud, basically admitting on Twitter that his electoral fortunes are tied to the pandemic’s impact on the American economy:

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

To paraphrase the character Ivan Drago in the movie “Rocky IV”: “If they die, they die”. Or as another famous Russian, Joseph Stalin, is reported to have said: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

For Trump and his allies, worsening the coronavirus pandemic, even at the risk of many lives, is of little importance compared to keeping him in office to continue a regime of looting, extortion and massive corruption.

The Democratic Party needs new slogans for the 2020 presidential election, I would suggest these:

Trump wants you to die — so he can stay in office forever.

Trump and the Republicans are trying to kill you — for money.

Are you 60 or older? Have a pre-existing health condition? Donald Trump and his Republican Party don’t care if you die from the coronavirus.

Donald Trump could have stopped the coronavirus. He lied, and people died.

Yes Trump and the right are embracing and celebrating death. It is ghoulish. It is also one more illustration that the Age of Trump is an American dystopia where what was previously unimaginable (for most decent people) has become “normal.”

Yes, Trump and his movement’s death impulses are part of a natural progression in which an authoritarian regime maximizes its power by terrorizing the public.

These calls by Trump and his allies for millions of Americans to sacrifice themselves for such abstractions as “the country,” “the economy” and “the market” should not be a surprise. Such madness and cruelty are the logical and inevitable result of decades of right-wing strategy and policies.

These plans were never hidden. Indeed, they were clumsily obvious. Since the 1970s, predatory gangster capitalism has been accepted as either “normal” or “inevitable” in the United States (as well as the United Kingdom and elsewhere). To that end, the “free market” was presented by the news media, many Democrats and virtually all Republicans, and most of the educational system as somehow synonymous or interchangeable with “freedom” and “democracy.”

This form of predatory gangster capitalism, now often called “neoliberalism,” rests upon several basic tenets:

Profits are more important than people.

Every part of human life and existence should become a commodity or a financial instrument.

Society should be organized around the “survival of the fittest,” in Malthusian or social-Darwinist terms: Those who cannot survive and prosper under “free markets” will be abandoned, quite likely to die.

Notions of the collective good, the commons, the social safety net and other aspects of social democracy, as well as the very idea of government and collective action, are to be undermined and eventually eliminated in service to “freedom” and “individual liberty.”

There should be few if any restrictions on the behavior of corporations, banks and the ultra-rich, or on the financier class.

There are “winners” and “losers” in society, “makers” and “takers” in society. These are natural and almost inexorable categories. The winners are to be subsidized by the state and the public. The losers are to be punished, and if possible eliminated.

Capitalism and democracy are the same thing.

Of course the harsh realities and negative consequences of predatory gangster capitalism have been effectively concealed from the public, which has come to accept this ideology through the use of anodyne language like “entrepreneurship,” “efficiency,” “transparency,” “accountability,” “public-private” and “opportunity.”

All claims that this system has been successful are dubious. Serious economists and other intellectually honest policy experts have repeatedly proven that its premises are fundamentally incorrect.

Gangster capitalists exploit system shocks and other crises (sometimes crises they themselves have caused) as a means of advancing their agenda.

Consider the coronavirus relief bill as originally submitted by the Republicans, which proposed creating a $500 billion slush fund to subsidize the richest corporations and wealthiest Americans, with no accountability and no oversight – a fund that Donald Trump and his vassals could loot at will — while handing out much smaller sums to ordinary Americans who are struggling to survive in a moment of economic calamity.

The moral obscenity of that bill even included petty cruelty: The poorest Americans would receive little if any money in direct payments, while money flowed to corporations and the ultra-rich by the billions.

These disparities have been somewhat painted over in the Democrats’ counterproposals in the House and Senate. But on a grand scale, the picture is not that different: The largest corporations will still receive at least $500 billion — with minor oversight and a few insignificant restraints — that they will inevitably use to enrich their shareholders at the expense of their employees and the public.

In practice, neoliberalism amounts to socialism for the rich and the powerful and the harsh medicine of the “free market” for everyone else. The coronavirus relief bill is more proof of that fact.

This is the logic of “too big to fail.” It’s also a function of the moral hazard that allows a plutocrat like Donald Trump to gain control over a so-called democracy with the goal of funneling resources (through tax policies, government subsidies and other laws) to themselves and other members of his class, while denying resources and opportunities to the vast majority of Americans.

Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget is a statement of values. As with the coronavirus relief bill, it punishes the poor and vulnerable by gutting the social safety net and transferring more money, both in the form of tax cuts and direct subsidies, to huge corporations and the richest Americans.

As documented by Dr. James Gilligan in his book “Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others” the policies of the Republican Party on issues ranging from health care to guns, the environment and tax policy have shortened the American people’s lifespans and caused other forms of physical harm.

Predatory gangster capitalism needs agents and other actors to advance its goals. The corporation is one of the primary means through which this form of capitalism wages its “revolutionary” struggle against a humane and democratic society.

As has been widely noted, if the corporation was a person, it would be a sociopath. This makes the corporation an indispensable part of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult.

James Gamble, a retired corporate attorney who is now director of the National Center for Access to Justice, offered a warning, in a recent article at Medium, about “the extraordinary power of corporate ‘persons’ who are legally obligated to act like sociopaths”:

Sociopath? Yes. The corporate entity is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money. Pretty close to a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder. And corporate persons are the most powerful people in our world.

The “maximize rule” does its damage in two ways. Corporate entities are direct actors in the world. A decision to build a factory in a place with weak environmental laws, low wages and poor worker protection matters. Preferring share buybacks to increased wages or lower prices matters. Lobbying for taxpayer subsidies that transfer wealth from poor to rich matters. They contribute to the problems listed in paragraph one in obvious ways. More damaging: the maximize rule infects real people with tragic faith in the magic of markets.

A recent Business Insider article sheds further light on the corporation as sociopath:

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is only just beginning. But it’s not too early for some Americans to flout social distancing and isolation guidelines and return to work, according to some executives.

Dick Kovacevich, the former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo, told Bloomberg News that healthy workers under the age of 55 should return to work in April if the outbreak is controlled, saying that “some may even die” with his plan.

“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, a current executive at Cisco and Cargill. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

While this iteration of capitalism sells itself to the public as indispensable to “liberty” and “freedom,” its ultimate tendency is authoritarian and fascistic. Such traits and goals make it a natural tool and weapon for Trump and his allies.

While the American people and the world are paralyzed the coronavirus pandemic, Attorney General William Barr is refusing to let a good crisis go to waste. As reported by Betsy Woodruff Swan for Politico, the Trump regime wants to use the coronavirus to enact a de facto state of martial law where basic legal rights are suspended:

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States….

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could deploy right now to try to slow the coronavirus outbreak.

Swan explains that these Justice Department requests “span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated,” and appear to have important implications for habeas corpus, “the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.”

According to Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, this means that “you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government. … That is something that should not happen in a democracy.”

This union of neoliberal gangster capitalism and authoritarianism can result in a society ruled by “inverted totalitarianism.” In his seminal book “Democracy Incorporated,” philosopher Sheldon Wolin explains how this happens:

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. …

It works indirectly.

Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

Will the American people follow the commands of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult? Are they willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of “the economy” and Trump’s re-election campaign by returning to work, ending social distancing and ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts?

Some will. Trump’s cult members will follow his commands without question. They have been systematically programmed by Trump’s cult and its disinformation machine. They understand that protecting and defending the cult leader must always come first.

Many Americans who do not have sufficient savings, live on stagnant wages, have little if any job security, are not union members, cannot work from home and are otherwise stuck in a precarious economic conditions may well be coerced into risking their lives, because they lack other options.

If public opinion polls are correct, Trump is becoming more popular because of the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying stagecraft and spectacle of his lie-filled “daily briefings.” Despite his incompetence, a new Gallup poll reports that 60 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic. (Including nearly all Republicans, of course.)

This evidence suggests that Trump, the Republican Party, the right-wing media and their corporate allies are effectively leveraging decades of programming in which most Americans have been taught to believe that patriotism, capitalism, freedom and consumerism are inexorably connected, if not in fact the same thing. In the Age of Trump and his pandemic, such beliefs can kill.

320 cory bb

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/24/lock-him-up.html

"A piece of shit": Government report on Wells Fargo corruption shows top executives' direct complicity in millions of acts of fraud

Last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency handed down stiff penalties for John Stumpf (previously) who was CEO of Wells Fargo during its scandal-haunted decade, during which time it stole from rich people, poor people, veterans, active-service military personnel, homeowners, small businesses, etc, as well as 2,000,000 ordinary customers who had fraudulent accounts opened in their names in order to bleed them of transaction fees, sometimes at the expense of their good credit and even their financial solvency. Under the deal, Stumpf will have to pay $17.5m in fines and cannot ever work in finance again (don't worry, he's still a multi-multi-multi millionaire). Read the rest

wells Fargo's ex-CEO will pay $17.5m in fines and never work in banking again (but he is still very, very rich)

When John Stumpf (previously) was CEO of Wells Fargo, he oversaw a string of scandals including literally millions of acts of bank fraud, and still managed to walk out of the business with millions in bonuses and no criminal prosecutions. Read the rest

bUSTED: Regulators pop another crooked bank

For the past three years, Wells Fargo has been pilloried…

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When Brokers Act Badly at Wells Fargo, Women Take the Fall

:{:{Susan Antilla:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:subpixel-antialiased;color:#6653ff;"):}:

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**private prisons, child detention facility & weapons profiteers**

:{As we reported in our last newsletter, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:**Wells Fargo and JP Morgan announced they would stop financing**private prisons, in a big win for the #FamiliesBelongTogether coalition and #BackersOfHate campaign. But we’re not stopping the work to expose and hold to account private prison profiteers. In April, along with our friends In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy, we published a new report “The Wall Street Banks Still Financing Private Prisons.” We also participated in a Twitter Chat hosted by our coalition partners Moms Rising to explain the research on private prisons and the banks financing them.

Read the report, "The Wall Street Banks Still Financing Private Prisons"

In our last newsletter, we noted that PAI director Kevin Connor was featured on NPR’s *Morning Edition* discussing the financial profiteers behind the Homestead detention center, a South Florida facility that is holding migrant children. (For more information, read our post on it)

Here’s a new May 27 *Miami Herald*article - also citing PAI - on resistance to the detention center and the power and financing behind it. Because of the growing scrutiny of its role in the Homestead child detention center, Caliburn, the detention center’s parent company, canceled its plans to go public.

“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump said recently.

Someone should alert him that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. This pretty much describes General Motors’ receipt of $600 million in federal contracts, plus $500 million in tax breaks, since Trump took office.

Some of this corporate welfare has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22 million in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

The nation’s largest banks saved $21 billion last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went intomassive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, thousands of lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs. [vid]

Banks that are too big to fail—courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout—enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83 billion a year because they have the backing of the federal government. This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street, giant banks a huge advantage.

In 2017, Wall Street’s bonus pool was$31.4 billion. So, take away the hidden subsidy, and that bonus pool disappears, along with most profits. Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. But they will make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions– socialism for the rich at its worst –while leaving employees twisting in the wind. Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18 million pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 millioncustomers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125 million exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Whatever happened to the idea of a meritocracy – an economic system that allows everyone to get ahead through hard work, and economic gains go only to those who deserve them?

Around 60 percent of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives. Trump’s response has been to expand this divide by cutting the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22 million per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet, that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism.

They need stronger safety nets, and they deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie.

If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/20/jpmorgan-chase-tops-banks-financing-fossil-fuels-climate-change

A report published today names the banks that have played the biggest recent role in funding fossil fuel projects, finding that since 2016, immediately following the Paris Agreement's adoption, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing climate-changing projects worldwide.

The top four banks that invested most heavily in fossil fuel projects are all based in the U.S., and include JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays in Europe, Japan’s MUFG, TD Bank, Scotiabank, and Mizuho make up the remainder of the top 10.

This report comes as March has already brought deadly weather to places such as the American Midwest, where historic flooding has left four dead and farm losses could reach $1 billion, and Mozambique, where Tropical Cyclone Idai has devastated the East African country and President Filipe Nyusi estimated that more than a thousand people are likely dead.

Both disasters have been linked to climate change. “Increased flooding is one of the clearest signals of a changing climate,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben in a statement published by ThinkProgress, adding that flooded Nebraska’s “current trauma is part of everyone’s future.”

“One inescapable finding of this report is that JPMorgan Chase is very clearly the world’s worst banker of climate change,” the report, titled “Banking on Climate Change,” found. “The race was not even close: the $196 billion the bank poured into fossil fuels between 2016 and 2018 is nearly a third higher than the second-worst bank, Wells Fargo.”

A half-dozen environmental groups — Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Sierra Club, Oil Change International, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Honor the Earth — authored the 2019 report, which was endorsed by 160 organizations worldwide. It tracked the financing for 1,800 companies involved in extracting, transporting, burning, or storing fossil fuels or fossil-generated electricity and examined the roles played by banks worldwide.

Global Snapshot of Fossil Fuel Sector Finance

Past report cards by the groups have focused only on coal, or on “extreme” fossil fuel projects, like tar sands extraction, ultra-deepwater oil drilling, and coal mining, and power generation. 2019’s report card expands, for the first time, to cover the fossil fuel sector as a whole.

Total fossil fuel financing, in billions of U.S. dollars, by bank and year, 2016-2018. Credit: Banking on Climate Change 2019 report

This year’s report card also dived deep into lending to shale oil and gas companies for the first time, finding that Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase “are the biggest bankers of fracking overall — and, in particular, they support key companies active in the Permian Basin, the epicenter of the climate-threatening global surge of oil and gas production.”

JPMorgan Chase also provided the most financing to LNG projects, Arctic oil and gas projects, and ultra-deep-water oil and gas extraction, the report concluded. The Royal Bank of Canada topped the list on tar sands oil financing.

“Coal mining finance is dominated by the four major Chinese banks, led by China Construction Bank and Bank of China,” the 2019 report found, adding that Bank of China provided the most financing to coal power projects as well.

On March 19, China’s State Development & Investment Corp., listed as one of the report’s top coal power companies, reportedly confirmed that it would stop investing in thermal coal power plants three years ahead of schedule.

“Since the Paris Agreement, JPMorgan Chase has provided $196 billion in finance for fossil fuels,” the groups wrote, “10 percent of all fossil fuel finance from the 33 major global banks.”

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/13/headlines/dems_grill_wells_fargo_ceo_over_abusive_practices_dapl_private_prisons

Dems Grill Wells Fargo :{CEO:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: over Abusive Practices, :{DAPL:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Private Prisons
Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers grilled Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan Tuesday over the bank’s practices of predatory lending, misleading and defrauding customers, and its relationship to the NRA, private prisons and the fossil fuel industry. California congressmember and Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters called Wells Fargo “a recidivist financial institution.” After the hearing, she told reporters she would call a vote on a bill to break up megabanks found liable for repeated consumer violations. This is New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning Sloan over the bank’s role in climate change and its financial backing of the Dakota Access pipeline, which she noted has leaked at least five times since it started transporting oil in 2017.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by climate change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?”

Timothy Sloan: “I don’t know how you’d calculate that, Congresswoman.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Say, from spills or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure, building sea walls from the erosion of infrastructure, or cleanups, wildfires, etc.”

Timothy Sloan: “Related to that pipeline? I’m not aware that there’s been any of what you described that’s occurred related to that pipeline.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “How about the cleanups from the leaks of the Dakota Access pipeline?”

Timothy Sloan: “I’m not aware of the leaks associated with the Dakota Access pipeline.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-trump-devos-and-mulvaney-helped-banks-and-colleges-steal-students

Trump Administration hid a study documenting financial abuse of students by some banks working hands-in-glove with colleges, the latest example of how instead of “draining the swamp” Donald Trump is turning official Washington into a paradise for swamp monsters.

The suppressed fee gouging report was made by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB.

Students attending colleges which have marketing agreements with banks and other financial institutions paid much higher overdraft and account fees than students at schools with no such deals, the study found.

“Wells Fargo charged students the most of all those with college campus marketing agreements—an average of $46.99 per account per year, while banks without such deals charged students an average of $11.93 in fees,” Kate Berry of American Banker reported.

Some nonprofit credit unions also engaged in fee gouging. The University of Kentucky Federal Credit Union, for example, charged $37 per account annually, the study found.

One lender has charged $600 just to issue loan checks.

The Trump administration wants to kill the CFPB, as we have documented in nine previous DCReport articles. Lacking authority to do that, Team Trump has turned the bureau into a protection agency for the worst banking practices, damaging millions of consumers. Hiding findings of abusive practices and disloyalty to customers are key parts of this Trumpian strategy.

We know of the study only because it was mentioned last August in a scathing resignation letter by Seth Frotman, a CFPB assistant director and student loan ombudsman. Frotman accused Mick Mulvaney, who is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as acting director of the CFPB, of suppressing the report because it showed large banks knowingly ripped off students by charging high or inappropriate fees.

Frotman’s resignation letter charged that under Mulvaney the bureau was “shielding bad actors from scrutiny” while both undercutting enforcement of laws to protect consumers and undermining the bureau’s independence.

Referring to his extensive travels and especially his talks with military families who were conned by financial product sales agents,Frotman wrote that “American families need an independent consumer bureau to look out for them when lenders push products they know cannot be repaid, when banks and debt collectors conspire to abuse the courts and force families out of their homes and when students loan companies are allowed to drive millions of Americans to financial ruin with impunity.”

Mulvaney offered a cavalier response in a CNBC interview. Mulvaney said that he had never even heard of Frotman and had been told that while ombudsman Frotman never complained about the issues raised in his resignation letter. He avoided dealing with the substance of the issue—lender disloyalty to customers.

The study was pried loose by Allied Progress through the Freedom of Information Act, a nonprofit consumer watchdog created in 2015, during the Obama Administration, by Karl Frisch, a lifelong communications adviser for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations.

The fees in the study Mulvaney suppressed are modest compared to a test of student loan fees I made in 2008. The cost to a bank of sending a payment electronically is so minute that many banks charge nothing for the service.

After failing to get NelNet, a student loan servicer, to discuss its fees, I took out a Sallie Mae student loan for one of my children, an action I described in my 2012 book The Fine Print. NelNet divided the loan into two payments, one for each semester. It levied a $300 fee for the cost of issuing the first check. I repaid the loan immediately to avoid a second $300 charge.

Responsibility for protecting students from lenders falls to the CFPB under the law creating it. That law was sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat whom Trump loathes. The duty to police colleges so they do not help banks abuse students falls to the federal Department of Education, where Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has repeatedly taken the side of bankers against the interests of students, as well as parents and grandparents who co-sign student loans. Some of her anti-student actions are detailed in It’s Even Worse Than You Think, my book about the Trump administration.

Hiding the study until it was flushed out using the 1966 Freedom of Information Act is just the latest example of how Trump has aggressively worked to do the opposite of what he promised in his inauguration speech:

“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people… January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

A core finding of the suppressed report is that marketing deals between colleges and banks enrich the banks at the expense of students.

“The bureau and other government entities have expressed concern over the relationship between revenue sharing provisions in contracts and fees charged to student accountholders,” the report says. “These provisions raise questions about potential conflicts of interest, including whether revenue sharing encourages higher-fee financial products that crowd out competition from providers of accounts for which student accountholders” would pay less.

Bank representatives say the report is hooey.

The report found that 573 colleges had marketing agreements. About 1.3 million students paid $27.6 million in fees to 14 banks and credit unions in the 2016-17 academic year, the report states.

In a form of what is apparently a legal kickback, 116 colleges were paid $16.7 million by banks and credit unions to promote financial accounts in 2017, deals designed to capture young customers whose financial resources would be expected to grow over time. PNC Bank paid colleges $7.6 million, U.S. Bank paid $3.2 million and Wells Fargo paid $2.1 million.

Significantly, lower fees were paid by students at the 457 colleges which did not get kickbacks. The estimated 839,000 students at colleges without marketing agreements paid $11.93 on average in fees, compared with $36.52 for the 482,000 students who used accounts at colleges with marketing agreements.

These fees differences indicate there is no enforcement of a 2015 Obama era rule by the Education Department requiring colleges to exercise reasonable diligence to make sure that under marketing agreements with banks students pay fees “consistent with or below prevailing market rates.”

https://www.alternet.org/environment/big-banks-just-flunked-their-own-test-climate-indigenous-rights

October 16, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Crédit Agricole and 91 other global banks met in Washington, DC, to revise the Equator Principles, industry-led due diligence standards meant to prevent banks from supporting environmentally and socially harmful projects.

On the very same day, in a bitter irony, many of those same banks re-upped their support for Enbridge, the Canadian company behind the Line 3 tar sands pipeline, which tramples Indigenous rights and is flatly incompatible with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. They did so just days after the publication of a landmark United Nations report showing the desperate urgency of taking concrete steps to tackle the climate crisis. It’s as if the banks wanted to supply their own headline example of exactly why the Equator Principles are broken and in dire need of repair.

The current round of soul-searching around the Equator Principles dates back to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the Indigenous-led campaign calling out the banks behind the project. DAPL was a crisis for those banks, and it was a scandal for the Equator Principles Association. How did such an obviously flawed project pass muster?

In response to activist pressure, in 2017, the Equator Principles Association agreed to a revision process, including examining how the principles deal with the internationally accepted standard that projects cannot be built unless directly impacted Indigenous communities give their free, prior and informed consent. The Equator Principles currently ignore these principles in rich countries like the US — and ignore climate impacts everywhere.

It’s astonishing that the banks were discussing those revisions on exactly the same day that many of them reaffirmed their support for Enbridge, when the Line 3 pipeline — the company’s largest new investment — is in danger of becoming DAPL 2.0. In a clear echo of DAPL, Enbridge has failed to secure the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous communities impacted by Line 3: three Ojibwe tribes in the Minnesota portion of the pipeline’s proposed path remain staunchly opposed. There’s been a steady and growing drumbeat of Indigenous-led legal and direct action, up to and including peaceful civil disobedience.

Of course, all this comes on the heels of the historic report recently released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that describes food shortages, growing wildfires and massive coral reef destruction by 2040 unless we take immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

We urgently need to stop expanding and start phasing out fossil fuels to have any chance of meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Flying in the face of these facts, the Line 3 pipeline would increase extraction and burning of tar sands, one of the dirtiest forms of oil. Enbridge is a company going in exactly the wrong direction: Last year, it even sold off a huge wind farm to free up capital to build Line 3.

JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Crédit Agricole are the lead banks behind two key Enbridge credit facilities, loans that act like giant credit cards for Enbridge to use as it pleases. They are crucial for Enbridge’s ability to build Line 3. When these loans are set to mature, banks have a choice: They can let them expire, or they can renew their support. One of Enbridge’s credit facilities was renewed recently, with another scheduled for renewal in December. At the beginning of October, Minnesota-based Native rights group Honor the Earth and a coalition of Indigenous and environmental organizations sent a letter to those three banks laying out the case against Line 3 and calling on them not to renew their support.

Because Enbridge is funding Line 3 from its general corporate coffers, the pipeline illustrates another fundamental shortcoming of the Equator Principles: Since the standards only cover direct finance for projects, Line 3 is outside of their scope, despite the project’s clear impacts on Indigenous rights and the climate. This is a litmus test for the current revision of the Equator Principles, which should cover projects like Line 3 if they’re going to be worth anything. As a start for companies sponsoring harmful projects, the Equator Principles evaluation should be triggered when these companies are up for credit renewals as well.

But JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Crédit Agricolecan’t hide behind the revision of the Equator Principles. They should immediately end their support for Line 3 by dropping their financing for Enbridge, so long as the company is pushing forward this destructive project. The December credit renewal will serve as another test. This time they should make sure they pass it.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

https://www.ran.org/endfinanceline3/

honor the earth 3 banks ltrs

City of Angels Funds Some Hellish Fossil Fuel Projects

By Doug Norlen

This month the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a startling report, which finds that severe impacts of climate change are happening much sooner than previously expected, and that countries must take far more aggressive actions to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. The report finds that the burning of fossil fuels must be curbed sharply.

The harmful role Wall Street banks play in propping up fossil projects around the world is increasingly known. Yet there is much less awareness of the role major cities play when they place billions of dollars of their public funds into these same Wall Street banks. According to L.A. city records, as of July 2018, Los Angeles had banking and/or investment relationships with several Wall Street banks, many of which are notorious for their financing of fossil fuel and human rights debacles around the world, including JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

According to Banking on Climate Change, a fossil fuel finance report card, between 2015 and 2017 these Wall Street banks collectively provided over $50 billion in financing for tar sands, ultra-deep water drilling, coal mining, coal power and liquid natural gas projects around the world. These projects contribute vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and many of them have severe local environmental, social and human rights impacts as well.

But in 2018, cities have more ethical options. Rather than investing the public's money in environmental and human destruction, cities can establish public banks. When properly structured and operated, public banks can prohibit the use of their funds for fossil fuel and other harmful projects. Instead, they can fund renewable energyand other green enterprises, affordable housing, education and low-cost loans to job-creating entrepreneurs—all while avoiding paying hundreds of millions of dollars in exorbitant fees to Wall Street banks.

The movement to establish public banks is growing nationwide. California is at the forefront, with efforts to pass state-wide legislation allowing establishment of municipal banks as well as campaigns to establish public banks in San Francisco, Oakland and other East Bay cities, Los Angeles and other municipalities.

When Los Angeles voters go to the polls next week, they will decide whether to approve Charter Amendment B, which amends the city's charter to enable it to take affirmative steps to establish a public bank. And Los Angeles is a great case study on the need for public banks. According to Public Bank L.A., the city maintains bank accounts with between $4 billion and $12 billion in cash, and manages up to $45 billion in investments through large commercial banks.

The enormous sum of public funds that L.A. entrusts to fossil fuel banks undercuts the climate leadership of city officials. For example, this past August L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti joined a coalition of hundreds of mayors across the country to condemn Donald Trump's plans to weaken vehicle efficiency standards and rescind California's waiver right to set stronger greenhouse gas regulations. In December 2016, Garcetti joined other mayors to denounce Trump's decision to walk away from the Paris agreement. The city council has shown progressive streaks on banking issues as well. In December 2017, the Council unanimously voted to enforce both federal and state Community Reinvestment Act ratings disqualifying Wells Fargo from submitting a Request for Proposal for the city's commercial banking services. And yet, the city still banks with Wells Fargo.

If L.A. voters approve Charter Amendment B, the city will be one step closer to creating a municipal bank and redirecting its billions of dollars of public funds to environmentally sound, fiscally smart, sustainable community needs. In doing so, L.A. will serve as a beacon of progress to inspire the larger national movement to establish public banks.

For a sense of why Los Angeles so badly needs to approve Charter Amendment B, we've included descriptions of just a handful of the harmful projects Los Angeles is currently supporting by keeping its money in fossil fuel banks (based on publicly available information). Here is a sample of some of the projects that LA's banks support:

Dakota Access Pipeline (United States):

Citi — $235 million in project finance
MUFG — $235 million in project finance
Wells Fargo — $120 million in project finance

The Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, extends over 1,000 miles across several U.S. states, damaging Native American ancestral lands and water. Passing within just a half-mile of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the pipeline has destroyed sacred sites and threatens the tribe's drinking water with potential oil spills. Beginning in 2016, Native American water protectors, including Standing Rock Sioux tribal elders and members, led opposition to DAPL. Supported by thousands of allies, this grew into one of the largest and most iconic movements in the world to halt fossil fuel pipelines. In response to peaceful, prayerful resistance, police from several states and agencies, members of the U.S. National Guard and armed private security forces used military equipment and tactics, including attack dogs, to intimidate, assault, arrest and otherwise commit grievous human rights abuses against water protectors and their allies. Opposition to the pipeline expanded far beyond the project site and supercharged the growing global movement against financial institutions that support fossil fuel projects.

Atlantic Coast Pipeline (United States):

Bank of America — $673.5 million in corporate loans (13)
Citi — $673.5 million in corporate loans (14)
JP Morgan Chase — $648 million in corporate loans (15)
MUFG — $1.182 billion in corporate loans (16)
Wells Fargo — $673.5 million in corporate loans (17)

The proposed 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, running from West Virginia through North Carolina, is the third longest gas pipeline in production or in some phase of development over the past 20 years in the U.S. Trees have been cleared along the pipeline route and infrastructure development has begun. Although two lawsuits against the pipeline are now pending in federal and North Carolina courts, federal law allows pipelines to be constructed prior to the resolution of all litigation. The ACP was the only oil or gas pipeline to be on Donald Trump's list of 50 Priority National Security Projects prior to his election.

According to published reports, the central purpose of the ACP is to enter South Carolina and eventually reach Elba Island, Georgia where gas will be exported from a liquid natural gas facility now under construction. This recognition raises serious concerns regarding the use of eminent domain to take privately owned property for private gain instead of public use.

The ACP threatens the livelihood of more than 30,000 indigenous peoples that live along the pipeline route. In May 2018, an alliance of community, statewide and national groups filed a complaint to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Civil Rights Compliance Office, alleging that the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality discriminated on the basis of race and color in issuing permits and certifications to the ACP as part of the permitting process. In September 2018, environmental groups filed legal challenges in an appeals court against federal permitting agencies.

Kusile Power Station (South Africa):

Bank of America — financial advisor
JP Morgan Chase — financial advisor
MUFG — part of 705 million euro corporate loan to South Africa's state power company, Eskom, to purchase boilers from Hitachi Power Europe for the Kusile coal power plant

Once completed, the 4,800-megawatt Kusile coal plant in South Africa will be one of the largest coal plants in the world. The estimated annual greenhouse gas equivalent emissions of the plant—30 million tons—would increase South African energy sector emissions by 12.8 percent and the country's total contribution to climate change by 9.7 percent. South Africa already has the distinction of being among the top global greenhouse gas emitters per capita. The Kusile project area already exceeds permitted ambient levels of hazardous air pollutants that create soot and smog, which cause harm to respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems, leading to heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility. If completed, Kusile will increase the cost of electricity for the poor and household consumers to compensate for Apartheid-era "special pricing agreements" that give large industrial users, which consume most of South Africa's electricity, guaranteed rates that are among the lowest in the world. The cost of Kusile, which in 2007 was estimated by Eskom to be 80 billion rand, had more than doubled to 172 billion rand by 2016. It is "expected to further strain Eskom's financial resources, and place upward pressure on Eskom's electricity price trajectory in the years ahead." In 2015 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Hitachi with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with contracts to build Kusile and Medupi (another enormous coal plant in South Africa), resulting in a $19 million settlement.

Long Phu-1 Coal Plant (Vietnam):

MUFG and JP Morgan Chase — among the lead financial arrangers, with potential combined $650 million in finance

Long Phu-1 in Vietnam would emit an estimated 6.3 million tonnes of CO2 per year. As a "supercritical" coal power plant, Long Phu-1 is prohibited from being financed by most official government export credit agencies (ECA), including the U.S. Export-Import Bank. However, the former director of the EPA's Air Enforcement Division, Bruce Buckheit, revealed that the project consulting firm Environmental Resources Management doctored the coal plant's greenhouse gas emissions estimates to make Long Phu-1 appear to be a more efficient "ultra-supercritical" plant, which would be allowed under ECA coal financing restrictions. Analysis of Long Phu-1 by Friends of the Earth U.S. reveals that the project violates other international policies, including requirements to analyze alternatives, identify cumulative and associated risks and impacts, evaluate labor and working conditions, prevent pollution, protect community health, provide safety and security, and ensure biodiversity conservation. In February 2018, the New York Times reported that U.S. Export-Import Bank financing for Long Phu-1 had collapsed after it was revealed that project financiers included Vnesheconombank, a Russian bank that is on the U.S. government's sanctions list and is part of a federal investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump presidential campaign. It was also reported that a top Long Phu-1 project official had been sentenced to prison for corruption. MUFG and JP Morgan Chase, like the U.S. Export-Import Bank, must also comply with U.S. sanctions. However, it remains unclear whether these banks continue to be potential financiers of Long Phu-1.

Wells Fargo Terminates Banking Services for Florida Political Candidate Over Her Support for Medical Marijuana

Fargo: we stole houses and we're being investigated for dirty low-income housing credits

In its latest round of shareholder disclosures, Wells Fargo admitted that it "unnecessarily foreclosed" on 400-odd householders (that is, stole their houses) and failed to grant loan modifications to 625 qualified borrowers (this is just the latest revelation about Wells Fargo stealing houses); it's also being investigated for its practice of purchasing low-income housing credits. (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

350 sv 5/18

Wells is lead banker not only to the world’s biggest transporter of tar sands (Enbridge) but also to Bay Area’s biggest refinery operator (Chevron). And Wells can't afford much more bad publicity, so they are a great target for our activism.

..Even as the Dakota Access Pipeline inches toward completion, multiple cities including Seattle, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Raleigh, and Philadelphia have spoken with their wallets, severing ties with the oil pipeline-funding banks—in particular, Wells Fargo.

On May 31, New York City became the latest city to join the effort, when Mayor Bill de Blasio and comptroller Scott Stringer announced that they will vote to stop New York City from entering into new contracts with Wells Fargo and strip the bank of its role as book-running manager for NYC's General Obligation and Transitional Finance Authority bond sales.

Seattle was at the forefront of the movement back in February, when a coalition of activists convinced the city council to pass an ordinance that, as the Nation explained, "would effectively bar the local government from doing business with or investing in Wells Fargo in the future. It was an ambitious ask: Seattle was deeply intertwined with the bank, cycling about $3 billion through the institution each year."

...

http://www.alternet.org/activism/feisty-group-exposed-wells-fargos-wrongdoing

Front-page stories in Tuesday’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times revealed that Wells Fargo’s board would be slashing $75 million in compensation from two former top executives whom it blamed for the bank’s scandal over fraudulent accounts. But missing from these three papers’ stories—and from similar stories in other major print and broadcast news outlets—was the feisty group of bank employees that initially exposed the wrongdoing: the Committee for Better Banks.

A report issued Monday by a four-person committee of Wells Fargo’s board determined that John G. Stumpf (the former CEO) and Carrie L. Tolstedt (the former head of community banking)—both of whom were ousted last year—were primarily responsible for pressuring low-level employees to create and foist two million unwanted bank and credit card accounts on unsuspecting customers. To penalize the two former executives, it demanded a “clawback”—the forced return of pay and stock grants—that industry watchers say is the largest in banking history and one of the biggest ever in corporate America.

The bank’s crackdown on Stump and Tolstedt was triggered by embarrassing media reports and government investigations into Wells Fargo’s sales-goal practices. Those practices first came to light in 2013, when bank employees—most of them tellers and call center employees who assist customers with their personal or business banking needs—shared their concerns with the media, government regulatory agencies, and members of Congress.

The employees were brought together by the Committee for Better Banks (CBB), an advocacy group supported by the Communication Workers of America. The CBB works in tandem with community organizing groups like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, and Minnesotans for Fair Economy, that for over a decade have challenged Wells Fargo’s predatory lending and foreclosure practices, particularly in low-income and minority communities. By joining forces, the CBB and the other groups helped the bank’s employees and consumers find common ground.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story in 2013 after talking with Wells Fargo workers affiliated with CBB. The Timesexposed widespread complaints about fake accounts and high-pressure sales quotas at Wells Fargo. It reported that low-level employees—who earned between $10 and $12 an hour—feared for their jobs if they didn’t make strict quotas for opening new customer accounts. To meet these quotas, the Times reported, the employees opened unneeded accounts for customers and forged clients’ signatures.

Wells Fargo employees called the banks’ practice “sandbagging” and a “sell or die” quota system....

fine open acct w/o telling ppl then fees 9/16

===

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $185 million for opening millions of credit and debit card accounts in the names of actual people, who didn’t know about or authorize the accounts.

Now, Senator Mitch McConnell — who reports more than $1,000,000 in Wells Fargo stock owned by his wife (who sits on the bank’s board of directors) — is trying to cripple the agency.

Sign the Petition to Senator Mitch McConnell

We, the undersigned, demand that Mitch McConnell immediately withdraw the legislation (S. 3318) that would weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and that he recuse himself from any further matters related to this critical agency. 9/15/16

uc and columbia divest from pvt prisons 12/23/15 kpfa 7 am

WF is bank for uc and city of berekeley 900m credit to GEO?

Corporations that Claimed They Were Cutting Ties but Returned to ALEC

Wells Fargo, which was a member of ALEC in 2011, told CMD in September 2012 that it declined to renew its ALEC membership in 2012,^[33] and then subsequently sponsored ALEC's 2013 Annual Meeting in Chicago.^[56]
Arizona Public Service told the Arizona Capitol Times on April 12th that its membership expired that summer and they would not renew it,^[57] then rejoined ALEC in November 2012, paying "$7,000 in membership fees and an additional $3,000 to have a seat on ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force," again according to the Arizona Capitol Times.^[58]
EnergySolutions, which had been a member of ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, told CMD in July 2012 that it had been an ALEC member but was no longer "in a position to contribute at this time,"^[25] but still listed as member of host committee in July 25-29, 2012 meeting brochure and rejoined ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force on June 12, 2013.^[12]

7. Wells Fargo

Like BofA, Wells Fargo had a reputation for being a West Coast bank throughout much of its history. But when the New Deal was greatly undermined in the 1980s and 1990s and the Glass-Steagall Act was overturned in 1999, Wells Fargo expanded considerably. Wells Fargo now has a strong presence all over the U.S. and has been allowed to acquire one bank after another (including Wachovia in 2009). Wells Fargo, whose assets increased from $609 billion before 2008 to $1.4 trillion [12] in 2013, needn’t worry about having a lot of competition because it has devoured so many of the local and regional banks it once competed with.

robo-sign fake docs manual exposed

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/21/as_wells_fargo_is_accused_of

A new internal report says the Justice Department massively overstated its successes in targeting mortgage fraud while in fact ranking it as a low priority for investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general says despite playing a central role in the nation’s financial crisis, mortgage fraud was deemed either a low priority or not a priority at all. This comes as a recently revealed internal Wells Fargo document appears to guide lawyers step by step on how to fabricate missing documents to foreclose on homeowners. Wells Fargo is the country’s largest mortgage servicer and services some nine million home loans....

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/court-filing-wells-fargo-used-guide-making

See America's biggest bank run from its responsibilities

Hiding behind riot police and scurrying into alleyways, executives from America’s biggest bank, Wells Fargo, entered their April 24 shareholders’ meeting in San Francisco while hundreds of peaceful protesters stood outside demanding accountability and justice.

image

Inside, several proxy shareholders were arrested as they called to end Wells’ fraudulent foreclosures, tax dodging, predatory lending, profiting from private prisons, and paying-off politicians to rig the rules.

IFG’s Plutonomy Program posits that globalization’s extreme concentrations of wealth and power require people to deal more directly with the individuals at the very top. So we stood in solidarity with over 400 events organized by Occupy, families fighting foreclosure, indebted students, immigrants’ rights groups, and even Wells’ own workers, as they blocked-off several streets in SF’s Financial District. See this video of a foreclosure fighter sharing her story at IFG’s recent Teach-in on Wells Fargo.

John Stumpf, American banking’s highest-paid CEO who made almost $20M in 2011, called the shareholders’ meeting to order inside while, outside, janitors who clean Wells’ offices told the crowd how profits were squeezed from cutting workers' healthcare and holding down wages. But the bank’s record profits in 2011 were driven mainly by mortgages, where Well’s ruthless “Robo-signing” practices continue to foreclose on families, 84% of which in SF were found to be “clear violations of law” by a recent report from the City Attorney.

Warren Buffet, Wells’ single biggest shareholder, owns almost twice as many shares as any other investor. His legendary investment fund, Berkshire Hathaway, has made him America's second wealthiest man (after Bill Gates) with a personal net worth of $44B. Buffet has been in the news lately as the namesake of President Obama's proposed “Buffett Rule" which would begin to reverse years of regressive taxation in America. Buffett says his secretary now pays taxes on a higher proportion of her income than Buffett himself pays. That's because capital gains are now taxed at only 15% while wages are taxed at almost double the rate. Meanwhile, Wells Fargo avoided ALL taxes from 2008--2010.

http://app.e2ma.net/app2/campaigns/archived/33867/767dc81619c6293bda3e4e03e7b9f9be/

WHY SHUTDOWN WELLS FARGO'S SHAREHOLDERS MEETING

Last week, IFG partnered with San Francisco's community based organizations and local Occupy activists to organize a Teach-in about America's biggest bank, Wells Fargo, in preparation for their shareholders' meeting in SF on April 24.

WHY SHUTDOWN WELLS FARGO'S SHAREHOLDERS MEETING

Check out this three-minute to see why grassroots groups want to shutdown Wells. The free public event provided a platform for families fighting foreclosure, indebted students, immigrants' rights advocates, private prisons critics, Occupiers, and others impacted by Wells Fargo, to tell their stories. Participants also heard about how to get involved, including training in non-violent direct action.

IFG’s Plutonomy Program works with grassroots groups to address globalization’s extreme concentrations of wealth and power that are corrupting democracy and destroying the planet through a financial system out of control. _{America’s biggest bank}_deserves everyone’s attention.

See: http://stopwellsfargo.com/en/ for more about the actions around Wells Fargo's Shareholders meeting

alec 40th 2013 slc; they had pledged to stop but did not

September 30, 2013

Freddie Mac and Wells Fargo Settle on Loans

Wells Fargo said on Monday that it would pay $780 million in cash to Freddie Mac to resolve substantially all repurchase liabilities on home loans sold to Freddie before 2009.

The settlement was reached Friday and totaled $869 million before adjusting for credits related to previous loan repurchases.

Wells Fargo announced the settlement five days after Citigroup agreed to pay Freddie, the government-controlled mortgage company, $395 million to settle similar claims over about 3.7 million mortgages sold from 2000 to 2012. Citigroup is the third-largest American bank by assets.

Wells Fargo, the fourth-largest American bank by assets, said the cost of its agreement was covered by reserves.

On Aug. 7, Wells Fargo estimated a probable $2.2 billion loss over claims that it had breached representations and warranties in the sale of mortgage loans.

It was unclear how much of the latest settlement related to Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought at the end of 2008.

Freddie Mac and its larger rival Fannie Mae, which both received federal bailouts in 2008, have pushed banks to buy back mortgages that soured during the nation’s housing downturn.

Banks can be required to buy back loans if the representations and warranties over how well the loans were underwritten, and whether borrowers could afford them, prove false.

Freddie did not respond to a request for comment. Wells Fargo declined to comment, citing a “quiet period” before its Oct. 11 release of third-quarter results.

Steering Minorities into Subprime Loans

The bank

Wells Fargo

The details

On July 12, Wells Fargo settled with the Justice Department over claims that the bank steered African-American and Hispanic customers into high-interest subprime loans and charged them more than it did white borrowers with similar qualifications. The Justice department described a pattern of systemic discrimination between 2004 and 2009.

Who’s been hurt

Roughly 34,000 black and Hispanic borrowers in 36 states.

The settlement

$175 million. $125 million will go to harmed borrowers, and $50 million will go to help with down payments in areas of the country hit hard in the crisis and where the Justice Department found widespread evidence of discrimination.

Did Wells admit wrongdoing?

Nope. The bank still denies the DOJ’s claims, saying it settled to avoid a long legal battle.

Key Reads

The Washington Post recently detailed the lasting impact on black and Hispanic communities of credit scars from subprime fiascos. We’ve also reported on complaints that Wells Fargo has fallen short in its upkeep of foreclosed homes in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

http://www.propublica.org/special/a-scorecard-for-this-summers-bank-scandals

epi:

hank p change tax code $25b cash to wells fargo 242 merge Wachovia 977M$ bonus 2008

ex wachovia ceo kohlhagen blamed crash on poor ppl 244 led to GOP line 2 yrs alter, eg shelby "socail engr" dog whistle?] griftopia