We Should All Start 'Taking Responsibility' for our Transgressions

Hey Americans! Let’s all start taking responsibility for what we do wrong. Let’s all start being accountable for our actions or our lack of action.

John Stumpf, the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, one of the nation’s biggest “too-big-to-fail” banks, is showing us the way in to this bright new stand-up world.

When the government discovered that his bank had since as long ago as 2011 been boosting its bottom line by creating millions of credit card accounts in the name of but behind the backs of existing Wells Fargo clients, and then running up charges on those accounts, charging the unawares named holders of the cards late fees and interest for those charges, it slapped the bank with a $185-million fine. But as with prior criminal behavior by the nation’s biggest banks (think Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase), it didn’t indict any bank executives this time either.

But hey, this John Stumpf is a stand-up guy. He has told the media and the Senate Banking Committee that he takes “full responsibility” for the gigantic defrauding of the country’s third largest bank’s customers, and says that he is “accountable” for the high-pressure sales tactics demnded of low-level bank salespeople to make them produce sales of bank products — the policy that led over 5300 of those employees to set up the fraudulent accounts.

But here’s the beautiful thing: Standing up and saying “I take full responsibilty” and “I’m accountable” is really easy! You don’t have to actually do anything and nothing happens to you! In fact, Stumpf admitted under questioning by Senate Banking Committee member Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, that he earned $19.3 million last year alone, $ 4 million of that a bonus for doing such a fine job of running the operation — this in a year in which the bank and its board of directors was well aware that it was being investigated for the gigantic fraud. “Taking responsibilty” and being “accountable” doesn’t apparently involve actually taking responsiblity or being accountable, as in stepping down from one’s lucrative post as CEO, much less leaving one’s firm. It doesn’t apparently even mean taking a pay cut. Pretty neat really.

That’s not true though for the thousands of employees who engaged in the actual act of creating the fraudulent charge accounts. They have all been fired by the bank, no doubt at Stumpf’s direction. They took a substantial paycut for their criminal behavior, which one might say is a kind of “taking responsibility” for what they did, though perhaps they didn’t do it voluntarily.

Model stand-up guy John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo Bank
 

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