FPI / December 27, 2022

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

Wells Fargo has been caught ruthlessly preying on its own customers again in a way that can only be called deliberately abusive.

The banking behemoth also happens to be one of the largest big-corporate supporters of a multi-faceted corrosive cultural agenda that seems designed to destroy the very social fabric of this nation.

Surely, there must be a common corporate thread binding these two things together.

The Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 20:
 

Wells Fargo & Co. reached a $3.7 billion deal with regulators to resolve allegations that it harmed more than 16 million people with deposit accounts, auto loans and mortgages.

The settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau includes a $1.7 billion penalty, the agency’s largest-ever fine, and more than $2 billion in consumer restitution, the regulator said Tuesday....

The consumer watchdog agency said the bank illegally assessed fees and interest charges on loans for cars and homes. Some consumers had their vehicles illegally repossessed while others had overdraft fees unlawfully applied, the agency said.

“Wells Fargo is a corporate recidivist,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, on a call with reporters Tuesday. He said the settlement “should not be read as a sign that Wells Fargo has moved past its longstanding problems.”

The modern business environment inhabited by soulless multi-national corporations completely divorced from local communities sees the customer as the enemy. The customer must be manipulated, deprived of information, squeezed via hidden fees and whatnot and generally plucked to maximum effect. This is not how one treats a neighbor you have to look in the eye every day.

Americans have been shaking their heads over runaway “corporate wokeness” for years now yet there has been no real attempt to break a deliberate stranger business motif that literally fits the psychological profile of serial killers. And yet it perfectly explains why these oversized companies lavishly fund the cultural poison of abortion, homosexuality, “transgender” youth, massive illegal immigration and more.

If a Wells Fargo sees a vulnerable population as being easier to exploit financially, it certainly makes financial sense for it to boost the damaging social forces that weaken its customer base to the core. WorldTribune has frequently cited Wells Fargo’s financial backing for the worst excesses of the progressive social revolution. The megabank has been a long-time vocal supporter of transgender youth.

In May, we noted its support of the radical Equality California organization, which worked tirelessly to enact these kind of new sex education guidelines for Golden State public schools:
 

According to a Fox News report:

“Ultimately, California’s finalized framework [on sex-ed in schools] tells teachers that students in kindergarten can identify as transgender and offers tips for how to talk about that, adding ‘the goal is not to cause confusion about the gender of the child but to develop an awareness that other expressions exist.’

“The document also gives tips for discussing masturbation with middle-schoolers, including telling them it is not physically harmful, and for discussing puberty with transgender teens that creates ‘an environment that is inclusive and challenges binary concepts about gender.'”

Equality California is a branch of the Equality Federation. The 2019 annual report of the Equality Federation lists Wells Fargo among its donors. Far from concealing any of this, Wells Fargo boasts of its help in grooming America’s youth to sexual confusion and perversion. Its corporate website features a lengthy page authored by the executive director of GLSEN, a homosexual organization specifically targeted at kids. This paragraph about says it all:
 

Beyond honoring historic events, celebratory holidays, and calls to action to protect our LGBTQ+ youth, we also face the challenge of the upcoming election, where the future for LGBTQ+ youth is truly on the ballot, and the imperative to address the structural racism in education and society that can undo all of our work. At the same time, the Supreme Court Bostock decision in June, which affirmed federal anti-discrimination protections for transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people has opened new avenues for positive change in our schools.

GLSEN in turn features its corporate ally in a post on its website authored by the bank’s Chief Administrative Officer and Human Resources Director Hope Hardison titled “Why Wells Fargo Supports Safe Spaces for All Students.” Hardison writes:
 

[O]ver the last several years, Wells Fargo has supported GLSEN’s goal of placing a GLSEN Safe Space Kit in every middle school and high school in the U.S.

Working together, we achieved that goal. Each Kit contains GLSEN’s Safe Space stickers, Safe Space posters, and GLSEN’s Guide to Being an Ally to LGBT Students. We hope that these simple tools help educators become allies to LGBT youth and show students they have the support they need — and provide the hope and opportunity to help them thrive. 

An image of one of the posters is included. “This is a safe and inclusive space for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and their allies,” the poster reads. Wells Fargo has also been a staunch advocate of abortion in America.

In June, the company announced it would reimburse transportation and lodging costs of employees who travel to other states to get an abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Wells Fargo was one of 38 companies reported to have “directly funded” Planned Parenthood as the abortion retail giant was in the throes of a murdered baby parts-selling scandal in 2015.

WorldTribune has documented Wells Fargo’s financial support for two of the most rabid pro-illegal immigration organizations in America. In 2014 we listed the bank among donors to CASA de Maryland, a radical group with reported heavy ties to Central American communist guerillas. “CASA de Maryland is run by people who belonged to a guerilla group that targeted American Marines and soldiers and a U.S. Navy commander for assassination for political purposes,”

J. Michael Waller, a Latin America expert with the Center for Security Policy, told Newsmax in a 2009 article authored by Kenneth R. Timmerman. In 2019, we noted Wells Fargo’s financial support of the 2018 national convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. Here’s what LULAC has been up to in recent years:
 

An important advocacy group fighting Voter ID laws via repeated legal challenges is the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. The organization declared a “major victory” in Iowa at the end of September when a judge overturned several parts of that state’s Voter ID law. “The decision by Judge Joseph Seidlen rejected requirements that Iowa voters must provide a voter ID number to get an absentee ballot or that people who could not produce a driver’s license or ID issued by the state could be denied a voter ID card,” LULAC gloated in a statement. “Also thrown out was a rule that rejected votes from people based on a person’s signature.”

If you are gravely shaken by electoral integrity outrages over the past two major election cycles, you can thank Wells Fargo for the role it has played in undermining representative government in the United States. Wells Fargo also has its sticky hands inside the progressive ruling establishment. In 2020, we detailed how Wells Fargo serves as a financial donor to the Swamp D.C. think tank the Cato Institute.

The faux-conservative “free market” organization is so enamored of massive illegal immigration as a means to provide cheap labor for amoral employers that it has worked with nation-destroying globalist billionaire George Soros to further the floodtide:
 

Even more alarming is a 2016 Washington Examiner article detailing how Soros recruited Cato to join in an effort to thwart the tracking of illegal aliens in our nation.

“The philanthropic Open Society Foundations run by George Soros sought in 2010 to foster an alliance between civil liberty advocates and proponents of illegal immigration in order to block… language that would have required closer tracking of immigrants, hacked documents reveal,” the Examiner reported.

“The move was made after an off-the-record meeting in November 2009 between representatives of Soros’ organization and groups that included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Immigration Law Center, and the libertarian Cato Institute.”

In September, WorldTribune observed that Well Fargo was part of a Federal Reserve pilot program to use climate change as a means to enact a social credit system akin to what is seen in communist China:
 

The Fed “is working with the big banks to monitor their ability to comply with the ruling class’s preferred enviro statist technocratic tyranny,” Jordan Schachtel noted in The Dossier blog on substack.com....

The banks involved in the so-called “pilot program” are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.

They will rip you off as they work to destroy your bequeathed legacy as Americans. Wells Fargo is displaying its profound antipathy toward U.S. consumers in every way conceivable. Why, then, are millions of citizens still giving this big-box corporate menace their money?

Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]