I
was asked to speak at the demo on April 23 in front of Wells Fargo, San Francisco.
Below is an expanded and updated version of my remarks.
I
was asked to speak here on how Wells Fargo's policies affect women in
particular. Before I address that issue, I should say that for the
last quarter century I've been working with people who became
disabled through motor vehicle accidents, on-the-job accidents, or
serious illnesses. First they lost their health, then their jobs and
health insurance. After they depleted their life savings, they lost
their homes. Seeing one person or family go through this is pretty
upsetting. Hearing the same stories for 25 years, in the so-called
“richest country in the world,” is enough to make my head
explode.
Situations
like this don't occur in civilized countries. A friend of mine who
spent half her life in Europe says they have social safety nets over
there. Disabled people may not live as well as they did when they
were working, but they aren't thrown out on the street. Now, of
course, it's not just the disabled who are likely to lose their
homes.
This
brings me to the issue of Wells Fargo's crimes against women. I'm
sure you've heard that Wells specifically targeted black and Hispanic
communities with subprime loans. Women got the same treatment.
According to the Consumer Federation of America, although women and
men have roughly the same credit scores, women were 32% more likely
to receive subprime loans than men. This
was true across the board—within every income and ethnic group.
According to Maria Poblet, executive director of Causa Justa (Just
Cause), the majority of foreclosures have been on female-headed
households.
Men
are more likely to divorce or otherwise abandon their families during
times of high unemployment, so it should be no surprise that the
fastest-growing segment of the homeless population consists of women
and their children.
The
elderly have also been targeted, and the majority of the elderly are
women. If you're on Social Security and need a quick loan to fix your
car or pay the 20% of your doctor's bill that Medicare isn't
covering, you can get a “direct deposit advance” from Wells. They
then take money out of your directly deposited Social Security check
until you've paid them back. The catch is that they
charge 274% annual interest.
One out of four bank payday borrowers are on Social Security.
Wells
Fargo has also financed some of the largest payday lenders in the
U.S. Even when they aren't making the payday loan themselves, they're
still sucking up a percentage of the profit.
Wells
invests in for-profit prisons. You probably know that the U.S.
imprisons more people than any other nation. We've got less than 5%
of the world's population and over 23% of its jail and prison
inmates. Over the last 30 years, the number of women prisoners here
has increased by 800%. In other words, women are the fastest-growing
segment of the prison population.
Wells
is a major investor the two largest for-profit prison corporations,
the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Here's
how these corporations work: CCA recently sent letters to 48 states,
offering to buy their prisons in exchange for a 20-year management
contract, plus an assurance that the prisons would remain at 90%
capacity. Even if the crime rate went down, the state would be
contractually obligated to provide a steady stream of inmates, and
pay for them with your tax dollars.
Guards
in private prisons are poorly-paid and poorly-trained, and they don't
have unions. According to Amnesty International, imprisoned women in
the U.S. are subject to humiliation, rape, and even physical torture.
Private prison food is even worse than the food in public prisons,
and the medical care is often non-existent. But that's good for the
bottom lines of the GEO Group, CCA, and Wells Fargo.
When
I told a neighbor about the lack of medical care in prisons, he said,
“Lots of people on the outside don't have medical insurance.”
“Yes,”
I replied, “but if they're having a heart attack, they can always
go to the emergency room. If you're in a cell the guards might just
leave you there.” Many people have died this way.
Around
one million prisoners of both sexes work in call centers,
slaughterhouses, or textile factories, and get paid somewhere between
93 cents and $4.73 per
day.
They get farmed out to Fortune 500 companies like Chevron, Bank of
America, AT&T, and IBM. Another plus for the bottom line, for all
these companies and Wells—but not for the American worker, whose
wages are being undercut, not just by Chinese slave labor but by
slave laborers right here at home.
With
all these lucrative investments, 2011 was a banner year for Wells
Fargo. Yesterday, April 24, they voted to give CEO John Stumpf an
annual salary of $13 million, plus additional compensation worth $7
million.
