Things got a bit heated at a Walmart in Massachusetts recently, after a employee allegedly set three fires inside the store.
Police responded to the store around 5:25 p.m. on Tuesday after a report of a fire in the store’s jewelry section, MassLive.com reports. When they arrived they found it wasn’t just the one fire — there were three set throughout the store.
“All three fires had been extinguished by Walmart staff and several customers who used the fire extinguishers that were located throughout the store,” police said, adding that no one was injured.
After officials determined that the fires had been deliberately set, the suspect was identified on a surveillance video. She had been seen fleeing, police said, and investigators called her to ask her to come back to the store — but she hung up on them. The next day she turned herself in and was arrested.
She’s now facing three counts of burning a building’s contents, three counts of destruction of property over $250, and one count each of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. The store had to close to deal with smoke and fire damage.
Imagine you’re a politician who received tens of thousands of dollars in recent years from a bank, and hundreds of thousands from a banking industry that wants to do away with new consumer protections. Then that bank is caught opening up millions of fake accounts without authorization. If you’re one of these bank-backed legislators, this huge scandal is apparently an opportunity to take shots at the federal regulator the banking industry has been trying to undermine since its creation.
This morning’s House Financial Services Committee hearing on the ongoing Wells Fargo debacle spent an awful lot of time on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that recently hit Wells with a $185 settlement over the mountain of bogus bank accounts, and which has been the target of pro-bank lawmakers since it was created as part of the 2010 financial reforms.
“We are here today because millions of Americans were ripped off by their bank and seemingly let down by their government,” said committee chair, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (TX). “If [the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] had examiners on site at Wells Fargo during the time when fraudulent accounts were open and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was conducting regulator investigations, why did it take the Los Angeles Times to expose the fraud? And once exposed why did it take almost 18 months for the CFPB to initiate a supervisory review?”
Hensarling has been a vocal opponent of the CFPB, sponsoring multiple pieces of legislation to reshape the Bureau to be less efficient and put its budget directly under the control of Congress. He’s also, as Allied Progress points out, received more than $33,000 from Wells Fargo and its executives since 2011. According to OpenSecrets.org, Hensarling has taken in nearly half a million dollars from commercial banks and investment firms during the current election cycle alone.
Likewise, when Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ) commented that the “CPFB has one job and they blew it,” you have to wonder whether that’s his principles talking, or the $20,250 he’s received from Wells and its executives since 2011 (not to mention the more than $350,000 he’s received from banks and investment firms in the current election cycle).
In total, per the Allied Progress report, Wells Fargo and its execs have contributed more than $560,000 to around three dozen members of the Financial Services Committee — ranging from as little as $2,000 to Rep. Bruce Poliquin (ME) to as much as $55,700 for committee vice-chair Rep. Patrick McHenry (NC). Regardless of the amount contributed to these lawmakers, they all sponsored or co-sponsored at least one piece of legislation intended to gut the CFPB.
Thankfully, this morning’s hearing did also attempt to hold Wells Fargo accountable for its own bad behavior. Hensarling and other members of the Committee didn’t hold back when it came to grilling Stumpf on what he knew, when he knew it, and why action wasn’t taken.
Stumpf said that from 2011 to 2013 the board would get reports at a committee level about ethics line requests related to the issue, but maintained that he didn’t know about the fraudulent account openings until 2013, when it was growing in the California area. All that despite being the chairman of the Wells Fargo board.
New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney — who has received her fair share of contributions from the financial industries, but has not signed on to any legislation to gut the CFPB — questioned Wells Fargo’s knowledge of the fraudulent actions by employees, citing reports that workers brought the issues to light as far back as 2007.
“When you were asked if you would extend the review back to before 2009, you refused to commit to extending the review back even earlier,” she stated. “If you were presented with evidence that Wells was engaged in some of these same illegal practices prior to 2009, would that change your mind about extending the review?”
Once again, Stumpf said he would take the matter into consideration.
Maloney also questioned Stumpf’s action in the selling of $13 million in Wells Fargo stock in Oct. 2013, suggesting the sale was made because the CEO had become aware of the fraudulent account issues.
“It’s suspicious that this happened after your billion-dollar bank was turned into a school for scoundrels,” she said. “Did you dump $13 million worth of Wells Fargo stock on the open market after you found the bank had been fraudulently opening hundreds of thousands of scam accounts ripping off customers?”
Stumpf denied the allegations, noting that he currently holds four times as many shares in the bank than he is required.
When asked to classify what happened with the two million unauthorized accounts, Stumpf once again declined to say they were fraudulent or part of a scheme.
“I think it was dishonest, it broke our code of ethics,” he said.
That answer didn’t sit well with Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy ($23,000 from Wells and associates since 2011), who questioned why the bank didn’t take action sooner, and why it turned a blind eye.
“You have got to be kidding me. Board members knew in 2011, they were looking at this, and if they are looking at 1,000 people fired, and they don’t know why,” Duffy said. “If they pulled the curtain back, if you want to call defrauding customers or stealing, it’s obvious that Wells Fargo had a big problem.”
“You have clearly failed, you’ve clearly failed in your own ethical standards internally,” McHenry said after reading the bank’s code of ethics and business conduct, which states all employees, including executives, are required to follow the law. “You have broken, and your company has broken, long-standing laws and defrauded customers.”
Stumpf noted that the company’s customer service rates are the highest they have ever been and that the culture of the bank is worth being proud of.
“For you to say the culture is okay is telling me you’re tone deaf,” McHenry countered. “The impact is not on your insinuation, but on the wider industry on how consumers access credit.”
As for what the bank is doing now, Stumpf reiterated that the company will undergo a full review of sales practices going back to 2009.
While the bank announced earlier this month that it would end sales goals by Jan. 2017, Stumpf said on Thursday that the date has been moved up to Oct. 1.
“We want to make sure that nothing stands in the way of our customers,” he said, noting that the bank is working on a new incentive program that will better compensate employees. It was unclear how this program would differ from sales goals.
Additionally, he says the bank has already begun reaching out to customers affected by the fraudulent accounts, noting that 20,000 credit card holders have already been contacted. So far, he claims 25% of those customers say they either didn’t want or don’t recall signing up for the credit cards.
To remedy the situation, the bank has closed accounts that customers do not want, notified the credit reporting bureaus, and refunded any fees incurred.
For deposit accounts, the bank is contacting customers to examine how they were affected.
“There’s no question that we’ve done things, and we’re working to make that right,” Stumpf said.
But when lawmakers compared the situation to someone robbing a Wells Fargo bank, Stumpf claimed that breaking the law was totally different.
While moving walkways have become ubiquitous at airports around the country — along with the rage that comes from getting stuck behind the person who chooses to stand still and block everyone else from walking on them — conveyor belts that shuttled people around were invented long before air travel became the norm.
USA Today takes a look back at moving sidewalks, flat escalators, or Trav-O-Lator machines, which is what the Otis Elevator company called their patented version in 1955.
“No matter what you choose to call it, a moving walkway is a simple variation of the conveyor belt,” Steve Showers, corporate archivist for the Otis Elevator Company, told USA Today.
Moving walkways first showed up at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, followed by a “Moving Pavement” experience at the Paris Expo in 1900, but weren’t commonly used until air travel and airports expanded in the 1950s, Showers notes.
Dallas Love Field Terminal — which opened in 1958 — was the first to install a moving sidewalk: passengers could travel from the main terminal to the first gates in each of the airport’s three concourses on the walkways.
The new technology had its share of hiccups though, including mechanical shutdowns due to clothing and shoes getting stuck in it, or minor injuries from the moving handrail, according to Bruce Bleakley, director of the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, author of a book on the history of Love Field.
Unfortunately, Love Field was also where the first death from a moving walkway was reported, when a two-year-old girl was killed on Jan. 1, 1960 after her clothing got tangled in the metal step plate at the end.
That didn’t keep other airports from installing moving walkways, however, as evidenced by their ubiquity all around the world now.
“The reasons have not changed,” Jonathan Massey, aviation sector leader at the Corgan, architecture and design firm told USA Today, “We put in moving walkways to let people get to their gates with fewer steps and less effort.”
We are sure you will be shocked, shocked to hear that a major telecom company that currently makes some money from having customers pay to keep private data private wants to be able to continue doing so whenever possible. And yet, here we are.
FierceWireless reports that at a conference this week, AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie offered some thoughts about the ISP privacy rule the FCC is mulling over.
“There always should be a level playing field,” Lurie complained. That stance is neither new nor surprising from AT&T, which has complained before about how unfair it will be if Google and Facebook can collect, share, and sell your data but carriers like AT&T can’t.
Lurie was also asked directly about AT&T using its wireless customers’ information to provide targeted advertising. He promised the company respects customers’ privacy, saying “We’ve always been very, very transparent about our policy … We have earned the trust of our customers and we have to keep that trust.”
It’s not so clear whether AT&T has really earned that trust, though. The company began charging 40% more to U-verse GigaPower customers who opt to keep their data private in 2013, a program it has since expanded to other cities.
AT&T has objected in the past to having its “Internet Preferences” option called a pay-for-privacy scheme… except, it is. Consumers who want to keep their private data private pay $29 per month more ($99 vs. $70) for that privacy.
AT&T does not yet apply such a program to its wireless customers, but it’s unsurprising that they want to leave the door open for just that. The proposed rule the FCC is currently considering may apply to both wireless and fixed-line (your home broadband) carriers, if adopted; AT&T clearly wants to prevent that.
And indeed, AT&T has company from other ISPs that also hate the FCC’s proposal. Comcast argued in August that you, the consumer, would actually suffer actual, active harm if Comcast isn’t allowed to charge you extra for privacy. (Yes, really.)
Comcast doesn’t have a program like AT&T’s yet, but wants to be able to do so in the future. Preventing the trade-off of personal data for money would deprive consumers of lower-priced offerings, Comcast said, and would therefore be bad for everyone.
It looks like Spotify could be preparing to shore up its streaming music service amid competition in the digital field: according to a new report, Spotify is in advanced talks to buy SoundCloud.
The Financial Times cites one of those mysterious, all-powerful “people brief ed on the discussions,” who said it was unclear how much Spotify would be willing to shell out for the company, and discussions could well result in a dead end.
Insiders at Spotify say SoundCloud has been viewed as a threat as long as it was considering offering a cheaper, mid-tier subscription service that might have rivaled Spotify. But when it decided not to go that route — offering a standard $9.99 monthly option instead — things changed, sources say.
The acquisition would bring SoundCloud’s community of independent creators along with it, folks who have uploaded, recorded, and promoted their original mixes and DJ sets on the platform.
Apple recently announced that its Apple Music Service has 17 million subscribers, with Spotify announcing soon after that it hit 40 million paying subscribers.
Yet another former Wells Fargo employee has come forward to talk about the high-pressure atmosphere created by the bank, where she says there were only two types of employees: those who sold customers on products they didn’t want, and those that were shown the door.
Today’s Washington Post features a first-person account from a former Wells Fargo personal banker, who recalls working late on Christmas Eve, after the bank had closed and her co-workers had all gone home, trying to persuade her family members and friends to open accounts with the bank so she could meet sales quotas.
“During my time at Wells, my colleagues and I were pressured to sell, sell, sell accounts to people who really didn’t want them — blurring ethical lines along the way,” the former employee writes.
She says she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, unless she wanted to be out a job. Instead, she observed fellow co-workers, who were making their goals, and took their lead with “assumptive sales.”
“We’d tell [customers] what they’d be getting, but we’d never ask customers what they wanted,” she writes. “We’d place them in a position where they may feel uncomfortable saying no; they may think they are actually getting a great deal; they’re simply overwhelmed with too much information all at once; and they’ve sunk the cost of spending the afternoon with one of us, so they might as well just say yes.”
The former banker admits that in the end the desire to make goal was also about her competitive spirit and wanting to do a good job. But, she says, Wells Fargo also created that atmosphere with team meetings and call nights centered around how much employees were selling.
For example, she claims that each branch would host a “huddle” where managers would ask tellers what they were “committed” to for that day, meaning how many accounts could they open, services they could sell.
“Huddles were a chance to be treated like a minor god, or publicly shamed,” she says.
Each week, the former employee says, she and co-workers were required to stay late to cold-call customers, asking them to open accounts. In most cases, she says the employees would call friends and family members and persuade them to open accounts so they could go home.
“A day might end at 7 p.m. with tired high-fives and pats on the back, but it would all be forgotten by the next morning,” she recalls. “And for a lot of bank managers, that wasn’t enough.”
While lawmakers are looking to determine if the opening of fraudulent accounts unfairly targeted senior citizens, the former employee says that her branch specialized in going after younger consumers — namely college students. Because the branch served several college campuses, the woman says she and co-workers knew that many of the accounts they opened for students would either go unfunded or negative in a matter of weeks or months.
Eventually, she says she left Wells Fargo after realizing she had become consumed with work, and the sales goals that went along with it.
The case that will go before the U.S. Supreme Court involves the trademark for The Slants, an Oregon-based rock band whose Asian-American members knowingly took the controversial pejorative for their name as a deliberate commentary on the state of race, culture, and music.
Unlike the Redskins trademark, which the USPTO granted and had repeatedly upheld before ultimately deciding in 2014 to cancel it, the band’s application to trademark the “Slants” name was rejected.
Rejecting or canceling a trademark doesn’t prevent the applicant from using that mark — it just means there are no protections against someone else using the same name. Because the mark could still be used in commerce, courts had previously held that the Lanham Act — the law that includes these prohibitions — was not overly restrictive of the First Amendment right to free expression.
By deeming something offensive or disparaging — and thus unable to be trademarked — the appeals court concluded that the government is expressing its disapproval of a particular name or term.
“When the government discriminates against speech because it disapproves of the message conveyed by the speech, it discriminates on the basis of viewpoint,” read the majority opinion in that case.
In April 2016, the USPTO petitioned the Supremes, arguing that the Lanham act was not a restriction on private speech or conduct, but “simply offers federal benefits on terms that encourage private activity consonant with legislative policy.”
Slants’ frontman Simon Tam responded to the petition [PDF] saying that even though he’d been successful in his appeal, he welcomed the opportunity to bring this issue before SCOTUS, and his actual control of the Slants mark remains in limbo unless the nation’s highest court chimes in.
“This issue is undeniably important,” reads Tam’s brief. “The Court is very likely to address it in the near future, in another case if not in this one.”
One such case is the Redskins’ dispute with the USPTO. The NFL team has also petitioned SCOTUS to hear its appeal, even though a circuit court of appeals has yet to hear oral arguments in the case.
In his brief, Tam had asked SCOTUS to either hear his case alongside the Redskins’ case or at least not wait until the NFL team’s dispute had gone through all the routine appellate stages before hearing them together, as the USPTO “has halted the processing of all trademark applications raising disparagement issues” pending the SCOTUS ruling.
In addition to petitioning for their own appeal, the Redskins filed a brief [PDF] in the Slants case, arguing that the Supremes should not take up that petition, thus allowing the D.C. Circuit ruling to stand, which would benefit the team. At the very least, the Redskins wanted the two matters heard together.
Today’s list of petitions granted did not include the Redskins appeal, nor did it deny that petition. Regardless of whether SCOTUS hears arguments specific to the team’s dispute, the court’s decision (assuming there’s not another tie) will certainly have a direct impact on the status of the Redskins’ trademark.
