John Stumpf, Henry Miller, hapless Wells Fargo employees, and a filthy Cockney music hall song

More than 50 years ago, a ballad in

this book taught a lesson that the

John Stumpf scandal teaches us today.

In 1959, certain books were forbidden in the United States, among them Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Little wonder. They contained graphic descriptions of S-you-know-what-X.

Given that the authorities took to jailing Lennie Bruce just a few years later for uttering language that Donald Trump uses regularly on television today, you can understand why you didn’t want to be caught selling a copy of either of Miller’s Tropic books.You could get busted by the same police squad that otherwise spent its time busting hookers and comedians, find yourself publicly shamed as a “pornographer” in the newspapers, and then get sent to prison.

Which is not to say that Americans couldn’t find and read Miller’s books. All you had to do was go to Paris, where, it was said, the booksellers at the stalls along the Seine, over on the left bank, would peddle you a copy, published locally by an outfit called the Olympia Press.

Unfortunately the word got around too quickly, and by the time I arrived in Paris, a college student in the summer of 1959, the bookstalls and some of the bookshops along the Boulevard St. Michel were flat sold out of Henry Miller, drained dry by eager and porn-starved American tourists.

But I did find a consolation prize. It was an English language volume called Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Bawdy Ballads. Some of the ballads, I later learned at the University of Leeds, where I landed for the fall and winter, were reputed to have been written by some of Britain’s most honored poets in their student days.

I wouldn’t know about the veracity of that, one way or another. What attracted me most about the bawdy ballad book was a song that seems to have had its origin in English music halls, circa World War I. Originally a publicly-performable song, its verses had been altered over time by numerous mischief-makers who frittered away their time trying to figure out what rhymes best with various four-letter words.

I was enchanted by this particular ballad because it was a dirty song with a social conscience. I’ll share a few of the more printable lyrics a bit further on, but first a reminder about John Stumpf and Wells Fargo Employees.

By now you’ve likely heard scores of times about John Stumpf’s appearance before Congress, giving testimony concerning the huge scam that occured as employees struggled to satisfy Stumpf’s demands that they cross-sell the living crap out of the bank’s various products.

If you haven’t, and you have the time to spare, watch Stumpf try to verbally wiggle out from under from the righteous lash of Senator Elizabeth Warren before you resume reading:

Now, let us resume so that we can get to those 100-year old filthy lyrics.

In a desperate attempt to meet their quotas and keep the top echelons happy, more than 5,300 employees opened false accounts in the names of their customers and depositors, and charged them fees for the pleasure of being defrauded.

When the scandal finally came out, the 5,300 employees were fired. Even though they would have been fired if they hadn’t defrauded the customers and thus were unable to make their quotas.

And then it came out that scrupulously honest employees who either refused to defraud bank customers or who tried to blow the whistle in The Great Stumpf Swindle were also fired for doing so.

Wells Fargo employees claim they were retaliated against for reporting unethical demands to meet the company's sales goals. 

Wells Fargo paid $185 million in fines and fired 5,300 employees for creating millions of fake accounts, but a half dozen workers who spoke to CNN say they were fired for speaking up! 

One banker said he refused to open up phony accounts and was fired 8 days after calling an ethics line to report the requests. 

A former Wells Fargo Human Resources official said the bank conspired to fire employees for minimal offenses after they made calls to the ethics hotline. He said:"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them,"

Most of these employees were making $12 an hour. Poor schlemiels. And what of John Stumpf, who demanded all the cross-selling? CNN money reports:

Stumpf will leave with about $200 million -- made up of cash, Wells Fargo stock and options, a CNNMoney analysis has found. 

Even if Stumpf is fired "for cause," such as violating company policy, he would have to forfeit only a portion of that sum.

Which brings me, finally, to a century-old, much filthified music hall song, which demonstrates that nothing, absolutely nothing has changed over the years.

For reasons pertaining to more-or-less sanitary language and brevity, I’ll only quote a couple of excerpted verses here, but they’ll give you the idea. And I think you'll quickly see how all the song relates, a century or so later, to Stumpf firing not only the $12-an-hour employees who knuckled under his demands and cheated bank customers, but also those who refused. 

She was poor but she was honest,though she came from 'umble stock,And her honest heart was beatingUnderneath her tattered frock.

But the rich man saw her beauty,She knew not his base design,And he took her to a hotelAnd bought her a small port wine.

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets all the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame? 

See him riding in a carriage 

Past the gutter where she stands.

He has made a stylish marriage,
While she wrings her ringless hand 

See him in the 'ouse of Commons
Making laws for all mankind
While the victim of his pleasure
Lives by selling her behind

Chorus: It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor wot gets the blame,
It's the rich wot gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame?

Why isn’t Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf under Federal indictment for fraud?

                    CEO Stumpf: he pocketed  a $200 million 

                    profit from the misfortunes of Wells Fargo

                     customers that his bank engineered

Some time time ago, over 5,000 employees of Wells Fargo Bank began opening accounts in their customers’ names that the customers hadn’t asked for. There were two million — yes, two million — of these fraudulent accounts, it came out during hearings of the Senate Banking Committee.

The account holders were charged various fees for these accounts  — accounts that they hadn’t asked for. 

The 5,300 Wells Fargo employees who helped commit this fraud were fired, it came out during the Senate hearings. So the guilty were punished, right?

Not so fast. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania noticed a slight, umm, flaw in the testimony of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

As American Banker reports it, Toomey said, “When thousands of people conduct the same kind of fraudulent activity, it’s a stretch to believe that every one of them independently conjured up this idea to commit this fraud. Doesn’t it defy comon sense to think there wasn’t some orchestration of this?”

And who might be leading the orchestra? Senator Elizabeth Warren had a clue. She said to Stumpf:

“While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.5 million shares, and the share price went up by $30, which translate into more than $200 million in gains [for you].”

And make no mistake. The people in whose names those accounts had been fraudulently opened got hurt. The American Banker story reports:

Stumpf also appeared unready for questions about how customers' credit scores would be affected by the scandal. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said the impact on customers went beyond fees and fines because account openings could harm credit scores."What about the folks that may have got a house through Chase and paid a higher interest rate because of that?" Tester asked. "The truth is there are real-world implications here on young families and old families that are going to be put in a poverty situation because of that."Stumpf did not respond how the bank would address the situation, saying "we have more work to do.”

Stumpf’s testimony waffled on and on, back and forth, while he seemed to be absolving himself from any obligation to repay the ripped off bank customers. He had found 5,300 little people to take the fall for him, which was no big deal, Stumpf appeared to be saying, because those 5,300 out of work suckers were only one percent of the bank’s employees.

Senator Warren at one point nearly went ballistic, and fired cannonballs of righteous rage at the evently crooked bank president.

“You should resign,” she said. “You should give back the money you took while this scam went on, and you should be invetigated by  the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I beg to differ, Senator Warren. He should be indicted by the Justice Department. And if he is found guilty — and I have little  doubt that if competently prosecuted he will be found guilty — he should do some time behind bars. How much time?

Well, I wouldn’t want to subject him to the harshness of drug laws that have put some casual pot smokers in prison for decades or more for a single act of possessing or selling a few ounces of marijuana. No, I would not.

Instead, I think he should be prosecuted for each specific act of fraud. For each count on which he is found guilty, he should be sentenced to, oh, let’s be very lenient here — say one measly month in prison, sentences for each act of fraud to be served consecutively, of course. Now let me just, umm, tally this up….

Two million  victims means two million months — those months divided by the 12 months in a year equals 166,666 years. (Not at all harsh considering that if you’d been tried for personally defrauding the bank that many times, not to mention that many drug sales, you’d be in prison for eternity plus a half million years.)

Heck, with time off for good behavior, betcha Stumpf could be out of the clink in less than 80,000 years. I know that may not sound like enough to people who’ve had their credit ruined, who didn’t get jobs or saw their careers wrecked because they had lousy credit,who couldn’t get a house because they had lousy credit, or who may be homeless today as a consequence of the scheme that put $200 million in Stumpf’s personal pocket.

But as I said, I believe in leniency.

P.S. You can find a passel of outrages from the mouth of Stumpf , as well as other outrages, here.