Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office
Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office
jacobin.com
Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office
104 comments
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Wells Fargo are thieves who steal from their customers. If you use them, you're about 15 years delayed in getting out. Security issue.
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I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.
A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.
The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn't sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn't pull any further tricks. I said we were "missing" a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill "appeared" in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.
I can even forgive that, that's one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn't have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.
Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of "apology checks" over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.
The only reason I didn't lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn't be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.
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Who more qualified than a company that is banned from doing business in some parts of the US due to being caught defrauding customers?
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We should do an uno reverse and nationalize wells fargo.
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Musk would just learn from them and open a bunch of bank accounts for everyone in the USA and have him control them all.
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This is literally what he wants Twitter to be.
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we all know that's gonna happen anyway.
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Reminder that Wells Fargo was caught opening millions of accounts without permission. This company should not be trusted with anything.
One of the rare cases where a company actually paid a huge $3 billion settlement.
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And was banned from doing business in California
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I was one of those millions. Cost me way more than I got back in the settlement. Wells Fargo is a criminal organization.
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It hardly made a dent, though.
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Totally. It wasn’t close to being enough. The entire board should have been arrested for fraud, at the very least. At least it wasn’t some laughably low amount like we’re used to, I’m surprised it was even this high.
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This is exactly why fees would be revenue based. A flat 1% of annual revenue per offense would very quickly get that shit to stop.
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Just an operating cost.
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3B is peanuts to them. I want to see fines that cripple a company's yearly profits so that, in lieu of criminal investigations and repercussions, the execs at the very least get punished by their board of directors and shareholders. There's only one language they understand. Another poster called it "operating costs". That's what we need to get rid of; punitive fines need to regain their punitive nature in order to be anywhere close to effective.
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Needs executive jail time of 1 year per million dollars too.
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No doubt. If fines and settlements are all we can muster, then there needs to be real personal consequences for those responsible as well as the corporation taking responsibility. Until we fully decouple money and politics, I have a hard time imagining that kind of proportionate punishment ever being doled out.
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This is true. At the time it sounded so serious. Hand slaps and finger wags. It’s totally ok to cheat steal and lie if you are rich. Rules don’t apply to you. It’s completely mad.
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Yep if there was any justice in the world this would have put Wells Fargo deep in the ground but fucking no
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Seriously. There's no reasonable argument that they should have been allowed to continue to exist after that.
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They don't need to privatize the USPS, they just need to lobby for the government's monopoly on post, established by act of Congress in the 1800s, to be removed. Then they can create a competing postal system, like Lysander Spooner did with the American Letter Mail Company. If they really think they can make a profitable service that competes with the USPS, let them try.
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Yeah and you think that the current federal government would allow the USPS to compete fairly with the private corporation that their buddy owns?
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They don't want to compete. That's not the point of any of this. They want to strip it for parts because Trump has rang the dinner bell for the vultures to feast on everything we have built in this country.
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It's not a monopoly, everyone collectively agrees USPS is shit compared to their competitors FedEx and UPS
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thats only because USPS has been purposely crippled by dejoy and the gop, even fore pandemic bush forced USPS to fund pensions for 75 years in advance. thats what they are after.
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everyone collectively agrees
Evidence of this?
USPS is shit compared to their competitors FedEx and UPS
At what? Packages or letters? Bulk shipping? International? Domestic?
Define, refine, and support your terms and arguments.
Then again you decided on @RoosterBoy@lemm.ee as a handle, so I suppose we should all expect nothing but "cock-a-doodle-doos" out of you.
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As someone who uses USPS to deliver mail or packages whenever I need to do that it definitely isn't universally agreed on. It has reasonable prices compared to the other ones and I've never had issues with packages taking too long or getting lost.
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That’s not really true. USPS isn’t a monopoly—it’s a public service with a legal obligation to deliver to every address in the U.S., no matter how remote or unprofitable. FedEx and UPS can cherry-pick the routes that make money and skip the rest. In fact, they often rely on USPS for the final leg of rural deliveries because it's cheaper for them than doing it themselves.
Also worth noting: USPS doesn’t get taxpayer funding for operations and is saddled with ridiculous requirements, like pre-funding retiree benefits decades in advance—a rule no private company has to follow. Then people cut funding or impose restrictions and turn around to say, “See? Government doesn’t work.”
So yeah, it’s not perfect—but comparing it to FedEx or UPS without acknowledging the completely different rules they play by misses the point entirely.
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You're kidding, right?
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Everybody?
I think you're talking out your ass.
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I have never had USPS leave a package half torn open, closer to the sidewalk than my gate. I know it showed up like that and in that position from camera footage.
Thanks FedEx ground, you fucking garbage collection of contractors.
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Tell you what, let’s have a contest: we each mail 100 letters, me from USPS and you from FedEx, and we track which ones arrive first
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I like my mail service. They did take the mailbox on the block during Trumps first term though, but people complained and we got it back.
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People, shall we plot to eliminate Wells Fargo as a banking entity? Sign up for a local credit union instead, perchance?
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Wait, is it possible to plot for good, or is all plotting nefarious?
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I consider plotting to be value neutral!
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Seriously FUCK these guys who think everything should be run like a business
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This sounds like a scheme hatched in 1887.
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Right? I thought this was a side plot in The Music Man
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Democrats need to inject FUD into all privatization efforts, by saying they will investigate and reverse it if it happens.
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I strongly support the notion that any federal assets sold off illegally by trump should be imminent domained.
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Any entity that participated in privatization volunteers to be socialized.
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They all volunteered to be socialized when they fucked up in 2008.
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Why do you think the democrats are going to do anything?
They have been sitting on their hands the whole time time Trump is doing all of this shit just like they sat on their hands after Biden won.
Abandon democrats.
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I'd like to privatize Wells Fargo, where I also mean "dismantle and leave behind an unrecognizable corpse"
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Where’s a private equity firm when you need one??
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Guess who'll be affected the most?
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I never even check the mail. I hope I didn't miss jury duty.
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Meanwhile, in developed countries, post offices offer banking services.
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Decades of bilking the elderly with unneeded services, imagine the fees they could charge for a real need. Ching Ching Ching
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It's gone so well for us in the UK, I can't imagine the entire organisation being asset stripped and then held for random at the taxpayer's expense.
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Stupidy, if Wells Fargo weren’t greedy dumbasses they could intergrat there banking into the Post Office.
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WELLS FARGO??
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Less people, more money. Interesting business strategy.
Doubtless a certain type of USian voter will go for it.
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The only mail I get is junk. They can keep that garbage.
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Good for you. Lots of people depend on getting medication by mail, especially in rural areas.
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Ads generally get more frequent after privatization.
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The US Postal Service is a constitutionally-mandated service for all residents of the USA. It is not a for-profit business
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If I was put in charge of a privatized Post Office I 'd start by stopping regular mail service and focus on packages. Just not profitable enough.
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It’s a public fucking service. It’s not supposed to be profitable. It was never intended to be profitable. Asking “but where’s the profit” about fucking EVERYTHING is literally the cancer that’s killing our civilization in general, and this country in particular.
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And that's what they mean when they want to run the government like a business... It's been clear from the current administration that their goal is to get rid of everything that doesn't bring in profit... Because the numbers must go up... It's so frustrating... This is just another level... The business's that lobby to make everything shitty are now trying to cut out the middle man I guess....
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I agree. I am was just talking about a hypothetical privatized postal co. It is a service. Imagine how many people would send Christmas cards at $10 a card.
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Thank you for articulating one of the many reasons that it should not be privatized.
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Some things -and I know this is wild- do not need to be profitable! Courts, fire departments, schools.... There are segments of a functioning society that have nothing to do with making money! I know it sounds Cuckoo bananas and like some woke Marxist shit but those beloved Founding Fathers they talk about on Fox News wrote about weird ideas like "Common Defense" and "General Welfare" and "Pursuit of Happiness" Not so much on profitability.
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Profit shouldn't be the point
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104 comments