QED

I’m going to close out this week with a quip from one of my favorite people on Twitter.

Get a clue

After the morning I had yesterday—involving losing my Metro fare card and all the steps necessary to replace it—I was rather taken by this headline at NPR:

Because wouldn’t “Glowing Space Blobs” make a great band title?

As for the fare card saga, I still have a couple more mountains to scale, since—having cancelled the lost card, bought a new one and registered it with WMATA—I must now contact my HR department to transfer the $400 in benefit to the new number. That’s going to be a slice of an entirely different cake.

It's 2016: do you know where your money is?

Here are some numbers from the Wells Fargo & Company widespread fraudulent practices that brought CEO John Stumpf to Capitol Hill yesterday.

- Phony accounts created without customers’ knowledge or permission: 565,443 credit cards, 1.5 million deposit accounts.

- Fees charged to customers/victims over a period of years: $400,000 and counting (including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees)

- Credit scores lowered or ruined: unknown

- Fines assessed to WFC by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: $185 million, which they’ll find between the cushions in the sofas in the executive lounge 

- Low-level bank employees fired…two weeks ago: 5300

- Senior managers (or even mid-level ones) who’ve had their salary, bonus or job security affected: bloody sod all.

Stumpf spent about an hour dodging questions at a Senate hearing, mostly from Democrats; Republicans may have been busy planning their next statement on why they’re not considering the President’s nominee to SCOTUS. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gave Stumpf an earful, as he kept maintaining that he and other executives knew nothing about the systemic practices, even after they launched a half-hearted “investigation” into allegations…back in 2013, and that it’s up to WFC’s board to make any, you know, decisions on whether anyone with a C or a V in their title should expect a lower bonus this year. Not his.

(Warren used words on Stumpf that he is probably and surprisingly unused to hearing. "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission." Warren has a bigger set of brass ones than all 99 of her colleagues in the Senate have rolled together.)

No, he doesn't know anything about making monetary decisions, as the CEO of a major financial institution. “I’m not an expert in compensation,” he said.

But I’ll bet he checks his direct deposit notifications religiously and accounts for every penny in bonus and executive entitlements.

I wonder if his accounts are with WFC?

Stumpf’s disclaimer and crocodile apology (“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public. I want to apologize for violating the trust our customers have invested in Wells Fargo. And I want to apologize for not doing more sooner to address the causes of this unacceptable activity.”) follows the usual pattern for his ilk. He’s not sorry that his company of 265,000 employees embarked on a multi-year predation of the most vulnerable of its individual customers; after all, think of all those years he was raking in his salary and bonus. He’s not even sorry that they got caught at it. He’s only sorry that it’s looking like there might be some negative consequences to him personally.

He doesn’t give a rat’s about anyone else, up or down the food chain.

Those numbers at the top of this post? None of them is of the least concern to Stumpf. The only one that matters is that he keeps his $19.3 million annual package.

You know what’s really wonderful about all this? As in “I wonder what the actual fuck is going on”? That it’s 2016, nine years after all those too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages were first exposed as engaging in industrial-strength long-term fraud. (And, when caught, went all Uriah Heep in the company of their multitudes of attorneys.) 

And yet here we are again.

WTAF.

Tanks for the memories

Interesting, a hundred years after the first deployment of tanks on the battlefield, a museum in Normandy has had to close, and in the process has auctioned off its inventory of uniforms, guns, vehicles, planes and equipment.

Which included two Sherman tanks.

The Tank Museum was only open for about three years. They say it was the downturn in the economy coupled with lower tourism following multiple terrorist attacks in Paris that forced it to shut its doors.

The Cadillac M5 A1 tank went for €230,000; the Chrysler M4A for €280,000. A BMW motorcycle that saw service in the Afrika Korps fetched €130,000. And a 1943 Harley Davidson motorcycle brought in €54,000.

All these headliners sold for much more than their estimated price, which was good news for Patrick Nerrant, an ex-Air France pilot, who built the collection and the museum, starting with a WWII plane he restored himself. He also restored the tanks, all nine of them, which were in working condition as of the weekend.

All told, the auction brought in €3.8 million ($4.2 million). No mention so far as to who the buyers are, or what they plan on doing with the tanks (or any of the rest of the kit).

According to NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley, Nerrant “kept a couple” of tanks for himself. But with the closing of the museum, he’s retiring.

Gratitude Monday: Sisterhood

Today is my sister’s birthday. I won’t tell you which one, but she’s living in retirement in Sedona.

Penny’s one of my favorite people ever. She’s one of those rare individuals with what I call the gift of happiness. Whatever crap happens, Penny does not load up with anger, regret or a chip on the shoulder; she figures out the best way through for her and then carries on.

It’s a remarkable capability.

Penny suffered a hearing loss that began with birth. It wasn’t diagnosed until she entered kindergarten; up until then the family just thought she was kind of slow. Ha, ha!

Yeah, classroom instruction was a challenge. When she started special ed in the 6^th grade, things got better. She took lip reading lessons, and used to practice with Dad in the evenings.

In the 7^th grade she decided she wanted to teach the hearing impaired. All the experts discouraged this ambition—they didn’t see her as the kind of student who’d succeed in the education field. Or even in academia. They thought vocational school was the way to go.

Well, ha, ha again. B.A. in English, two M.A.s in education and a full career in teaching at Alhambra High School with additional stints teaching ESL at night. Every Christmas she had about 80 gifts from current and former students. When she retired they held three separate parties for her.

I’ve always admired Penny’s tenacity. When she fixes her mind on doing something, you’d better just shut the hell up and stand aside, because she’s going to do it. She’s not seduced by instant gratification; once she sets her goal, she keeps her eyes on the prize and keeps going.

I have a theory about how Penny’s been able to accomplish so much: for a good part of her life she literally did not hear the gainsayers, so she developed the ability to not listen to them when she did hear them. I wish I had that kind of confidence.

Over the decades, Penny’s hearing got worse. (People wonder why I'm LOUD? This is one of the reasons.) Every cold caused more deterioration, so that when she flew, she couldn’t sit in the emergency exit row because she couldn’t hear any of the instructions. One time she was coming to North Carolina to visit me, and when the plane diverted to somewhere in Tennessee because of fog at RDU, she didn’t know what was happening until it landed and she could see someone’s face talking about it.

I’ve occasionally thought what a raw deal it was to have to go through life suffering through garbled conversations, not savoring the subtleties of a Chopin étude or only finding out you’re in Tennessee instead of North Carolina when the plane lands. I asked her about it once and she shrugged: that’s the hand she was dealt, so she played it.

In recent years, phone calls with her were more difficult. The last few I had were via a transcription service, so I’d say something, there’d be a pause and then she’d respond. Imagine trying to talk about some personal subjects this way.

But a couple of years ago, she did a lot of research on technology, outcomes and insurance coverage, and she got a cochlear implant. It’s like a complete recharge; back to full duplex communication. One of the first things she remarked about how wonderful it was to hear the birds singing.

Penny has opinions, of course, but she doesn’t waste a lot of time expressing the negative ones. This lends all the more weight to those she does share. Example: a relative-by-marriage spent some unknown amount of money to buy me something I never wanted and that personified the term “butt-ugly”. Stunned, I asked (somewhat rhetorically), “Why would she do that?” Penny never missed a beat. “Because she’s stupid.”

Now that I’m across the country again, I miss the ease of visiting her. We have a Christmas tradition: we cook grilled butterflied leg of lamb with a savory sauce, and saute of two squashes. You’re supposed to be able to make it in 60 minutes but it always takes us longer. Possibly due to the wine that accompanies the effort.

Anyhow—happy birthday, Penny. What a gift you are as a sister and a friend.