Weapon of Choice: Fountain Pen

Woody Guthrie and his famously labeled guitar -- "This machine kills fascists." Eight decades after his work helped to define politics for a generation, some fools still argue that artists should avoid politics. As if that were not what the arts are for.

Two "small" items in today's news put me in mind of our greatest troubadour. I employ the scare quotes because these stories that would have been leading news items in other times, given the scale of the crimes involved. But in a year in which the presidential campaign is about greater and lesser degrees of lies and loathing, and on a day in which North Korea tested a nuke half the size of that with which America leveled Hiroshima*, it may have been easy to overlook trifling frauds measured in the mere billions of dollars.

The two stories I heard were about criminal proceedings that were proceeding on the terms of the criminals. That is to say, these are stories of white-collar crimes in which the rules have rather soft edges.

The first is the story of Wells Fargo, which fired 5,000 employees for defrauding customers. The company also paid $185,000,000 in penalties (perhaps the price of keeping these well-dressed thugs out of jail) and set aside $5,000,000 for repaying defrauded customers. That is to say, the company paid penalties equivalent to two days of earnings, while setting aside the earnings of a typical hour or so for repaying customers.

What did these wayward employees do? Exactly what one would expect them to do. Think about the pressure people who sell cars are under to meet their quotas, and the rewards they get when they meet or exceed targets. Now imagine a salesperson who could cause you to buy a car without you knowing it. That is what these banksters were doing -- selling various kinds of accounts to existing customers without their knowledge, leaving customers to pay penalties if they overdrew the accounts that funded these purchases.

NO: I did not make up that last paragraph. I'm not that smart. The settlement seems hardly necessary -- overbuilt for-profit prisons have plenty of space for these worthies.

UPDATE: Carrie Tolstedt, the executive ultimately responsible for these crimes, has decided to retire early. CEO John Stumpf praised her as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers" while ensuring that she would walk out the door with $124,600,000 in her final paycheck. Banking reforms following the 2008 were supposed to prevent such bonanzas, but loopholes apparently were found.

Meanwhile, an even bigger crime resulted in an actual indictment that was announced today, though jail time seems unlikely for Volkswagen engineer James Robert Liang. He is busily turning in those who helped him to implement the now-famous scheme to thwart emissions testing of VW vehicles, specifically those with "clean" diesel engines. As soon as he realized that he could not meet the ambitious emission targets that had been set for him, he designed a way for the engines to recognize testing equipment and operate in a non-performance mode during tests. The result was the sale of 600,000 vehicles for something like $10,000,000,000, many of which VW is busy buying back. Remedies in this case are being offered to the people who purchased the cars and are considered the primary victims of Liang's scheme, but the real victims are harder to identify -- everyone who suffered needless respiratory problems as a result of thousands of cars exceeding emissions standards over many years.

Siding with Banksters

Today it was reported that Vice President Pence "had to" break a tie in the Senate. Years after financial companies drove a thriving U.S. economy into the proverbial ditch, rules were about to take effect that would allow citizens to file class-action lawsuits against financier malfeasance.

Far from serving the public good, V.P. Pence put his thumb on the scale of justice, in favor of the unjust. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

The action, of course, brings Professor Woodie Guthrie's famous words to mind. To an ordinary person, a bank is at least as dangerous as a bank robber.

Pole-Vaulting Troubadore

During Arlo Guthrie's recent concert at the fabulous Zeiterion in New Bedford, he played a song with an infectious melody and lyrics that were only vaguely familiar. So I found the song on YouTube, and thought he said something about Baltimore. Checking the lyrics, I found that the line I was mis-hearing is actually:

Coming in from London from over the pole

Which of course is geographic! He is referring to the great-circle route from London to Los Angeles. Counter-intuitively, one leaves London headed northwest to get to Los Angeles, which is to the southeast. You can try this kind of routing on a globe by stretching string from one point to another. You can also do it more precisely at Great Circle Mapper.

The lesson, alas, is not entirely accurate. A London-Los Angeles flight does go poleward, but it only gets to about 62 degrees north latitude, not breaking the Arctic Circle.
As for the rest of the geography of the song, we'll save that for another day -- the traveler has a "couple of ki's" he would rather not reveal to Customs.