Owning Up To Our National Crookedness, via Wells Fargo

THE WELLS FARGO WAGON is way, way off track. Tens of millions in federal fines, for criminal fraud. Five thousand employees fired, for opening accounts, providing services, and charging fees to customers without their permission. A definite no no. How do we say "supervisory oversight"? What distinguishes this is that its corporate entry level worker-employee crime, a relative rarity, rather than the usual corporate top executive crime. That said, what does it matter? Fraud is fraud, right? The company announced a program to award brownie points to sales people who brought in more customers, presided over the opening of new accounts, and some few thousand of the salivating would be millionaires saw the carrot a bit too closely, and sprang into action. Surely, when you're working in a bank, and you knowingly open checking and savings accounts for people who did not request them, there is a little voice in the back of your mind, telling you: "maybe we'd better be careful here, yanno, sit down, take a deep breathe, and decide where our priorities really lie". At least, you'd think. We'll never know, unless one of the dismissed tellers comes clean with a tell all expose of her life in petty crime. Now, technically, all these bottom of the corporate ladder peeps should be indicted, tried, and sent to the big house for a few years, but your best bet is that that'll never happen, and that fact is included as part of the two hundred million dollar corporate settlement with the United States of Acquisition. Now that we have irrefutable evidence that your average American is a crook (shop lifting at Wal Mart at epidemic proportions, one third of American students admit to cheating), maybe we can take some of the heat off the big corporate boys, and fellow crooks Hillary and Trump, and spread the blame as thinly as it should, all across the fruited plain, to each and every one of us.