I don’t believe in the death penalty. For people anyway. Wells Fargo, however, needs to be given a lethal injection, and disappear forever. For anyone who doesn’t know, Wells Fargo is a huge financial services company—what in the olden days was called a bank—that recently admitted to the following:
thousands of employees, under intense pressure to meet aggressive sales targets, opened as many as two million bogus accounts without customers’ knowledge, in some cases forging signatures…and then charging them fees.
Furthermore, even though a Los Angeles Times article published in December 2013 brought this clearly criminal activity to light, Wells Fargo essentially did nothing about it, allowing it to continue for years. Even worse, they fired employees who spoke out about this—I’ll say it again—clearly criminal activity.
Elizabeth Warren has been absolutely fantastic on this issue, telling Wells Fargo’s CEO to his face that he belongs behind bars. She’s right. But that’s not enough. Based on what we already know, Wells Fargo itself must be put out of business. It is worth noting that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the agency that actually caught Wells Fargo—exists only because Senator Warren, President Obama, and Congressional Democrats fought Republicans tooth and nail to create it as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. If Republicans had their way, it would disappear tomorrow. Trump is also on board with getting rid of it.
I know killing Wells Fargo means people will lose their jobs, that doing so will cause real economic harm. I get it. Although I would add that after Wells Fargo is executed and dissolved our government can certainly confiscate some of its resources—including clawing back money from executives who benefited from the illegal activity—and use that money to help the innocent victims among those whose jobs disappear.
But at some point, at long last, we have to do what is necessary to stop corporations from committing crimes against us, not to mention forcing their competitors to either go along or themselves face extinction. That time is now. There will be short-term pain, but the long-term gain will be tremendous. We need to set an example.
We need to get to a place where the next time some hotshot executive suggests implementing some kind of illegal scheme—whether it’s defrauding customers like Wells Fargo did, or telling lies about the safety of a product that leads to consumers dying like GM did, or ignoring safety standards so completely that employees died like Massey Energy did, or any of the host of other simply outrageous things we’ve seen in just the last few years—the person sitting in the next chair simply slaps that executive across the face and says, “Are you fucking kidding me? Do you remember what happened to Wells Fargo?” Actually, that’s not good enough. It needs to be the people sitting on both sides.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).