Wells Fargo acknowledged this month that its employees had, over the course of several years starting in 2011, opened as many as 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by customers. The company agreed to pay $185 million in penalties and fines to settle cases brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ..
.. “You haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, rebuked Mr. Stumpf, as she urged him to resign. “It’s gutless leadership.”
Mr. Stumpf repeatedly said any forfeited compensation was an issue for the board — of which he is the chairman — to take up. “Whatever the board accepts, whatever they do, I will accept and I will support,” he said
.. but he already held nearly 5.5 million shares of stock owned outright or vesting imminently as of March, when Wells Fargo filed an annual disclosure of his holdings.
Based on Tuesday’s closing share price of $45.09, those 5.5 million shares would be worth nearly $247 million.
The Black Eyes in Donald Trump’s Life
Donald attended the New York Military Academy, where he thrived despite a regrettable attempt to throw a smaller student out a second-floor window
.. At about the age of 25, he was named president of Trump Management.
.. “I’m not allowed to rent” to black families, a Trump building superintendent reportedly explained at the time, adding that he was just doing “what my boss told me to do.”
.. If a black person did make it as far as filling out an application, it was coded — in some cases, “C” for “colored” — to make sure it was not accidentally approved.
.. Anyone who had invested in his only public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, when it listed in 1995 would have lost about 90 cents on the dollar by 2005.
.. But many years ago he was obliged to release them for casino regulatory filings — and at that time he paid no federal income tax at all. Because of tax loopholes, he managed to report zero income (actually losses!) for both 1978 and 1979.
.. Melania Trump says that her husband “is intensely loyal … he will never let you down.” Then again, she’s his third wife.
.. This is a narcissist who has no core.
Conservatives Have Groomed the Perfect Suckers for Trump’s Epic Scam
There have been ex-presidents who have enriched themselves by dubious means, as the George Bushes and Bill Clinton have by giving high-dollar speeches to plutocrats. But there has never been a presidential nominee whose primary raison d’être is to make money, and who has organized his or her campaign around that goal.
.. In a sense, conservative voters have been groomed for Trump since the 1960s. As the historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler and The Nation in 2012, the American conservative movement has become more and more amenable to get-rich-quick schemes, snake-oil salesmen, and confidence men. Direct-mail barons like Richard Viguerie began raking in the dough in the 1960s by stirring up ideological hysteria and convincing an audience of senior citizens that only their small-dollar donation could fend off union bosses, abortionists, and gays. Of course, most of the money ended up with the fundraisers.
.. Conservative ideology, as Perlstein persuasively argues, is particularly vulnerable to grifters because of its faith in the goodness of business and its concomitant hostility toward regulation—which makes it easy for true believers to buy into the notion that some modern Edison has a miraculous new invention that the Washington elite is conniving to suppress.
.. There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies.
.. Writing in the New Republic in 2014, the journalist Ben Adler documented how an entire class of Republican politicians, including Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee, used mailing lists built up in their presidential campaigns to sell dubious products afterward.
.. In Cain’s case, anyone who gave money to his campaign would get ads, after the campaign ended, promising a “breakthrough” remedy for erectile dysfunction, “one of more than 50 similar pitches for miracle cures and easy-money tricks that Cain has passed along to his e-mail followers.”
.. Cain made more than $420,000 from e-mail ads in 2013—minus Newsmax’s cut and the costs of maintaining his list.
.. By the time Trump launched his campaign, the conservative movement had already destroyed the intellectual immune system that is necessary to resist grifters.
.. Could the people who have been conditioned to think they need to buy the Patriot Power Generator in order to fight off an ISIS attack on America’s power grid really be expected to see through Donald Trump? Conservative publications like National Reviewhave spent a generation cultivating an audience of gulls. Now they’re shocked that a far more talented hustler has stolen them away.
Tiny Motor Powers a New Threat to Cycling Races
In an interview on Monday, Varjas said that his crank-assist devices could produce more than 250 watts, the amount of power a professional rider might typically average during a four-hour race. The smaller hub-assist motors, which he makes only for custom orders, typically produce only about 25 watts, he said, and require the rider to be able to maintain a high pedaling rate as is the case with all professionals. Even a 25-watt boost would be significant during a professional race.
.. “If you have this system, you can stay with the group, but nobody hears it, nobody sees it, nobody knows about it,” he said of the devices, which cost 10,000 to 25,000 euros (about $11,300 to about $28,200), depending on features.
.. But he added that he believed that some kinds of carbon fiber, the material used to make pro bikes, could render the technology invisible to the cycling union’s new screening devices.