Saqib Bhatti on Wells Fargo, Jeremie Greer on Taxes and Inequality

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(cc photo: Jobs With Justice)

This week on CounterSpin: Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it pretty clearly to the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo when she said, “You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket.” But what that powerful statement still omits is that Wells Fargo didn’t cheat any and all customers: Its fraud—opening some 2 million accounts for people without their knowledge—was targeted specifically at black and brown communities. These same communities are at the sharp end of Wells Fargo practices in other arenas—like pipelines and private prisons. Activists are using this scandal to call attention to a range of other problems at the bank—problems not addressed by a couple of top executives giving back some of their golden parachutes. Saqib Bhatti is director of the ReFund America Project and co-executive director of the Action Center on Race & The Economy (ACRE). We’ll talk with him about the Forgo Wells campaign.

Transcript: ‘Many Banks Are Problematic, but Wells Fargo is the Worst’

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(cc photo: Timothy Krause)

Also on the show: Corporate media are very interested in Donald Trump’s taxes, as well they should be. But there’s plenty to be said about unfairness in the tax system even before we get to the tax dodger in chief. Jeremie Greer is vice president of policy and research at the Corporation for Enterprise Development; they say the tax code doesn’t reflect inequality; it actually drives it. We’ll talk with him about CFED’s Turn It Right-Side Up campaign.

Transcript: ‘1 Percent of Taxpayers Receive More Than the Bottom 80 Percent’