Elizabeth Warren's wonderfully brutal takedown of Wells Fargo CEO

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/20/elizabeth-warrens-wonderfull.html

12 Likes

We need a whole lot more people like this in our government at all levels.

46 Likes

I want to clone her and Ruth B. Ginsberg.

42 Likes

Actually, this doesn’t impress me all that much. I mean he certainly deserves to be publicly excoriated for this.but she isn’t really asking questions. She knows all those answers, they’re just a rhetorical device. I’d rather that she asks open ended questions of the kind that let him dig a hole for himself and then have her bury him in it. So instead of “Did you do this or this or this?” something more like “What did you do to to prevent this?” “When you found that employees were creating false accounts, how exactly did you change your controls to prevent that from re-occuring?”

19 Likes

Oh you know it!

7 Likes

Yeah! Then they can go out and stump for their presidential candidate…

Who, by the way, has received more than 4 times as much in political donations from Wells Fargo than any other candidate on the list: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2016&id=D000019743

6 Likes

Typical Leftist Democrat, attacking the Job Creators! Why, if this persecution keeps up, they’ll pack up their pile of money and quit, and then where will we be?

/continues to be pushy, obnoxious, hands out copies of Atlas Shrugged, eventually chokes to death on unearned privilege

38 Likes

Rest assured, that despite what you might hear, she and Hillary DO get along, and she WILL be a strong voice and influence during Hillary’s first and second terms.

I had heard that some of the executives in charge of this scam were going to get multi-million dollar golden parachutes. Can anyone confirm or deny this, please? Thanks.

2 Likes

There is one issue with the mentality Warren has (and I say this with the disclosure that I adore her and would vote for her to any office at any level)…

The notion that the person at the top must fall on the sword is an issue. While I understand that she wants corporate leadership to finally be held accountable for when screw ups happen; we don’t expect the head coach to resign because the QB threw an interception and lost the big game. We don’t expect the POTUS to resign because someone bombed the wrong target.

I know this is different and she is pursuing a different end game…but Stumpf for all the horrible things we can lay at his feet; probably had no idea this thing was going on. Should he as the senior most leader be holding someone very close to his level accountable…yes. he should. Should he be giving back his properly earned compensation for this? I don’t know. And I am not so sure it is a testament to his character or lack thereof that he didn’t volunteer it either.

This one is a little sticker and has a lot more shades of grey in it that some of the other corporate scandals we have seen in the last few years.

This being said…thank god we have someone like Warren around to be the fantastic spokesperson and champion she is.

wouldn’t you also reject the notion that the person at the top deserves to be rewarded regardless of what happens below? i’m thinking really about jamie dimon who still has a job with enormous rewards despite his company helping to push the world economy off a cliff. in terms of your analogies, he’s the coach that makes his qb throw the ball directly to an opponent on each possession, he’s the potus who orders his generals to drop bombs on istanbul instead of aleppo.

14 Likes

Sorry, those are terrible analogies. They’re single serendipitous events, not long, profitable conspiracies winked at by scofflaw corporate culture. The coach does not personally profit when an interception is thrown. A better analogy is a coach who promoted a culture of cheating on his team, and yes that coach should be fired.

25 Likes

No but I expect him to clean the fucking house of the upper level managers and lower level executives that knew and either promoted the behavior or just looked the way and then maybe go hey this was on my watch and I fucked up big time maybe I should resign as well.
This is a bank where things went bad because people were doing the shit on purpose. To use the football game analogy if the QB threw the interception to intentionally lose the game then fucking yes the coach should raked over the damn coals for allowing that kind of behavior on the team.

21 Likes

I don’t see anything in here about the executive who did “retire” as part of this and the $125 million she was getting as part of it. It looks like the company might be “considering” taking some of that money back but if you look at the article in Fortune, http://fortune.com/2016/09/20/wells-fargo-ceo-says-board-is-considering-clawing-back-some-of-execs-125-million-payday/ it looks like she got a lot of kudos before she left about what a good job she was doing.

My thinking is, how secretive could she have been for none of what was going on to be known higher up the food chain than her? The people giving her the bonuses and letting her “retire” rather than making it an official firing should also be held accountable because they either knew something fishy was going on for the unit to make all the money it was making or they were complicit in covering it up for not truly holding her accountable.

8 Likes

its a fair point that I cannot disregard whatsoever. But it is hard to make the argument when we as common level associates would not accept if someone came to us and said “We agreed to pay you X…but we are going to pay you less than that now because you messed up those TPS reports”

The solution I would say is that those upper level people should simply not get such exorbitant bonuses in the first place.

You seemed to skip past the point I made that he most likely had no idea this was going on. Much like a head coach may not know that a group of players are taking PEDs. Should every coach be fired when a player gets busted for PEDs? What if said QB was throwing the game on purpose because he was in on a gambling scheme…again is the coach ultimately accountable for that?

You are also selectively ignoring: “I know this is different and she is pursuing a different end game…”

I am admitting I am making very basic analogies and simplifying them for illustrative purposes only; however, you feel free to cherry pick regardless.

on the other hand, i wouldn’t quibble much to be told that i was losing pay because i damaged the ceiling when i burned a stack of tps reports in the cubicle next to mine.

6 Likes

I can’t disagree here. I agree those should be his actions. And someone above mentioned that EW should have asked some more open ended questions. I suspect Stumpf would have hemmed and hawed and not taken a stance; but we could hope he would say something like “Believe…heads will roll for this. And I WILL be the one to handle it. NOT UP IN MAH HOUSE”

1 Like

I think most of us would agree in theory, but in reality would still be pissed.

“As soon as I learned of the problem, I fired the person responsible.” Unfortunately, open-ended questions of that sort are precisely what they are prepared to answer.

3 Likes

It was a great critique, but it if was truly a takedown that CEO wouldn’t still be there. So long as people don’t actually get rid of corporate bullies instead of merely complaining about them, the resistance remains symbolic and they keep playing the same shitty game.

10 Likes