Get Your Money out Of Wells Fargo

The Occupy Wall Street movement, and its offshoots across the nation, are fundamentally about ending the current system of government, in which corporations and government have basically joined forces and become one, and are consolidating the power of the elite over the 99%.

There are many ways in which that affects us:

• Wars that we pay and die for to secure corporate interests abroad
• A health care system designed to make money for the health "care" industry, with patients as an afterthought
• Wars designed to require massive "defense" budgets, so that war contractors can profit
• An insane War on People Who Use Drugs, which benefits the owners of private prisons*, and a whole industry designed to profit from criminalizing human behavior.
• A War On Terror, which exists for the above reasons and also to ensure that we are all scared into giving up our rights as citizens without question.
• An all-out assault on Social Security (which we have paid for) and Medicare (which we pay for), in order to free up more money for the elite.
• The looting and destruction of our national resources (oil, gas, water) so the rich can profit from them.

But the way that the financial industry has simply become a de facto branch of government is breathtaking. There is a revolving door between Wall Street and government, and there is no longer any meaningful difference between the two.

When Goldman Sachs wants something done, it just calls up one of its many employees who have taken a sabbatical for "public service" in government. They have had employees in positions like Treasury Secretary, bail-out chief, or New York Federal Reserve board members, and those guys don't take phone calls from you or me.

JP Morgan is now funding the NYPD, which means that they have now taken over part of the police department for their own purposes (this would explain the macing of helpless protesters.)

Wells Fargo is as bad as any of these big corporations.

• It intentionally made millions of fraudulent mortgage loans, for which its executives paid themselves billions, while knowing that that taxpayer would have to pay when the loans went bad.

• It practiced predatory lending, pushing people into loans they could not afford because the dees were higher, while knowing that these people would end up ruined and in foreclosure.

• It conspired to get inflated appraisals and to inflate a housing bubble which made many people, including many of our friends and family right here in Jackson Hole, desperate to buy a home in the fear that they would forever be locked out of home ownership, and then ruined them when the bubble inevitably popped. 

• It worked with mortgage brokers, including mortgage brokers here in Jackson Hole, who lied to our friends and family about what kind of loans they were getting, and lied to them about being able to refinance. 

• It has repeatedly, and on a widespread basis, lied to homeowners about loan modifications, encouraging them to miss payments so as to qualify, and then seizing their homes.

• It has forged loan and securitization documents (robosigning) and foreclosed on property which it had no right to foreclose on. Some of these people are undoubtedly our friends and family.

• It has arbitrarily added fees to mortgage payments, without informing the homeowner, and then added cascading late fees when those fee weren't paid, resulting in foreclosure. 

• It has taken billions of dollars in bail-out money. It has been given much more in loan guarantees that are backed by the taxpayer. It has been given access to unlimited interest-free loans from the Federal Reserve. And it has continued to pay its executives obscene amounts of money.

• It is destroying local, community banks by getting cheap funding from the equity markets, which realize that the government will not allow it to fail, because it is actually part of the government.

• It is the fourth-largest bank in the US.

• And it is a massive criminal enterprise. It is the new Mafia. 

To date, not one person from Wells Fargo has ever been convicted of a crime in the what was the biggest fraudulent transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in the history of the world.

Many of us do not even realize the extent of it, because it has been covered up by the government (which was complicit) and the mainstream media (which is owned by the same corporations).

But it's time to wake up. If you have an account at Wells Fargo, close it. Close it today. You will feel good about yourself. Get an account at a local bank or credit union.

And this Saturday, make sure that you let Wells Fargo know how you feel. They are open until 1PM on Center Street. Include them on your protest sign, and bring it with you when you close your account.



*Private Prisons! We live in a country where there are private prisons. Think about that for a moment. And these private prisons are allowed to lobby government to change the laws to get more customers.