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Words are not violence – Why Will Smith was wrong to strike Chris Rock.

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This article submitted by Levi Kump

It is news to exactly no one, that Sunday night, Will Smith responded to a contentious, and arguably tasteless joke, by walking on stage at the Acadamy Awards and slapping the the offending party, one Chris Rock, across the face. Much has been made already about whether or not the incident was staged, though the ensuing furor has rendered that debate largely moot. Many people have chimed in on the issue, some saying the Smith was unequivocally wrong, and some, including no less than The National Post’s Barbara Kay, coming down on the the side of a face slap being fair play.

Let it be known, I believe Smith and Kay, are both wrong. First and foremost, because one of the tenets of civilization in general, is the old adage that, “ones right to get angry, stops at the next fellow’s nose”. Nothing new here. Setting aside for a moment that the slap was to the cheek/jaw area, I believe that notion still holds water. Genuine or not, this incident implies that there are some statements for which the only possible rebuttal, is the fist. The challenges with this way of thinking are legion, and until only a few years ago, seemed to have already been worked out in western society. Not the least of said problems is this: if words are violence itself, and answerable as such, then we no longer have any reason to use words. When one equates the verbal with the somatic, it is a very quick descent indeed, to using violence in any given situation. Why struggle for the ‘mot juste’, when one can move stright to a head kick?

Following this line of reasoning, we end up back, hundreds of years, to the time of, “might makes right”; which again, our civilization had once worked out, but now seems to be forgetting. One of the more common lines of reasoning for the “speech as violence” crowd, is that disparities in power give far more weight to some people’s words, than others. In the Smith/Rock debacle, this is hardly worth a mention, as both men are of the same demographic, read: multi-millionaires of the same skin tone. Though there are those who will point out, as did Barbera Kay, that the target of Rock’s joke, was not Will Smith himself, but rather his wife, Jada, who does in fact suffer from an auto immune disease, and whose hair loss is by no means her own fault. A powerful comedian making jokes about a/an (equally powerful?) woman’s physical condition should be off limits, or so goes the argument. The easy reply here is that there are
those, myself among them, who do not believe that anything should be off limits in speech.

Noting here that, not unlike our separation of words and action, society did away with the idea of ‘lese majest’ some time back. There are yet some who do not believe in this, and who think that the relative power of two parties (and exactly how do we quantify this?) matter to a verbal exchange. That the words of the more powerful party are in fact so weighty, that again, the only fair response, is a physical one. This begs the question, that if the words of the powerful are
unfairly weighted, how much more so are thier blows? It is to me, an untenable position. Slapping a man for speech only ends badly for everyone. Until very recently, we all seem to have understood this.

There was once a common convention, that words, for all their power, are clearly not violence. The fact that this is now somehow considered up for debate, does not bode well for society writ large. Any reasonable person will admit that words can be incredibly hurtful, damaging, and cruel. To deny this is foolish. Physical violence however, has all those dangers, along with a side order of split lips, contusions, and concussions. Indeed, whatever “damage” one suffers from words, one is still left with the ability to speak in rebuttal. A solid blow of any kind can not only dissuade retort, but neuter it completely. Perhaps this is what the proponents of violent response are after in the first place? If so, its  disappointing. As I said, i thought we had worked this out.

 

Levi Kump is a former competitive international Muay Thai champion. 

He is a trainer and owner of One Martial Arts, a fitness facility in Edmonton. 

 

 

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Banks

Welcome Back, Wells Fargo!

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Racket News Racket News

By Eric Salzman

The heavyweight champion of financial crime gets seemingly its millionth chance to show it’s reformed

The past two decades have been tough ones for Wells Fargo and the many victims of its sprawling crime wave. While the banking industry is full of scammers, Wells took turning time honored street-hustles into multi-billion dollar white-collar hustles to a new level.

The Federal Reserve announced last month that Wells Fargo is no longer subject to the asset growth restriction the Fed finally enforced in 2018 after multiple scandals. This was a major enforcement action that prohibited Wells from growing existing loan portfolios, purchasing other bank branches or entering into any new activities that would result in their asset base growing.

Upon hearing the news that Wells was being released from the Fed’s penalty boxmy mind turned to this pivotal moment in the classic movie “Slapshot.”

Here are some of Wells Fargo’s lowlights both before and after the Fed’s enforcement action:

  • December 2022: Wells Fargo paid more than $2 billion to consumers and $1.7 billion in civil penalties after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found mismanagement — including illegal fees and interest charges — in several of its biggest product lines, such as auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts.
  • September 2021: Wells Fargo paid $72.6 million to the Justice Department for overcharging foreign exchange customers from 2010-2017.
  • February 2020: Wells Fargo paid $3 billion to settle criminal and civil investigations by the Justice Department and SEC into its aggressive sales practices between 2002 and 2016. About $500 million was eventually distributed to investors.
  • January 2020: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) banned two senior executives, former CEO John Stumpf and ex-Head of Community Bank Carrie Tolstedt, from the banking industry. Stumpf and Tolstedt also incurred civil penalties of $17.5 million and $17 million.
  • August 2018: The Justice Department levied a $2.09 billion fine on Wells Fargo for its actions during the subprime mortgage crisis, particularly its mortgage lending practices between 2005 and 2007.
  • April 2018: Federal regulators at the CFPB and OCC examined Wells’ auto loan insurance and mortgage lending practices and ordered the bank to pay $1 billion in damages.
  • February 2018: The aforementioned Fed enforcement action. In addition to the asset growth restriction, Wells was ordered to replace three directors.
  • October 2017: Wells Fargo admitted wrongdoing after 110,000 clients were fined for missing a mortgage payment deadline — delays for which the bank was ultimately deemed at fault.
  • July 2017: As many as 570,000 Wells Fargo customers were wrongly charged for auto insurance on car loans after the bank failed to verify whether those customers already had existing insurance. As a result, up to 20,000 customers may have defaulted on car loans.
  • September 2016: Wells Fargo acknowledged its employees had created 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts between 2002 and 2016 that “may not have been authorized by consumers,” according to CFPB. As a result, the lender was forced to pay $185 million in damages to the CFPB, OCC, and City and County of Los Angeles.

Additionally, somehow in 2023 Wells even managed to drop $1 billion in a civil settlement with shareholders for overstating their progress in complying with their 2018 agreement with the Fed to clean themselves up!

I imagine if Wells were in any other business, it wouldn’t be allowed to continue. But Wells is part of the “Too Big to Fail” club. Taking away its federal banking charter would be too disruptive for the financial markets, so instead they got what ended up being a seven-year growth ban. Not exactly rough justice.

While not the biggest settlement, my favorite Wells scam was the 2021 settlement of the seven-year pilfering operation, ripping off corporate customers’ foreign exchange transactions.

Like many banks, Wells Fargo offers its corporate clients with global operations foreign exchange (FX) services. For example, if a company is based in the U.S. but has extensive dealings in Canada, it may receive payments in Canadian dollars (CAD) that need to be exchanged for U.S. dollars (USD) and vice versa. Wells, like many banks, has foreign exchange specialists who do these conversions. Ideally, the banks optimize their clients’ revenue and decrease risk, in return for a markup fee, or “spread.”

There’s a lot of trust involved with this activity as the corporate customers generally have little idea where FX is trading minute by minute, nor do they know what time of day the actual orders for FX transactions — commonly called “BSwifts” — come in. For an unscrupulous bank, it’s a license to steal, which is exactly what Wells did.

According to the complaint, Wells regularly marked up transactions at higher spreads than what was agreed upon. This was just one of the variety of naughty schemes Wells used to clobber their customers. My two favorites were “The Big Figure Trick” and the “BSwift Pinata.”

The Big Figure Trick

Let’s say a client needs to sell USD for CAD, and that the $1 USD is worth $1.32 CAD. In banking parlance, the 32 cents is called the “Big Figure.” Wells would buy the CAD at $1.32 for $1 USD and then transpose the actual exchange rate on the customer statement from $1.32 to $1.23. If the customer didn’t notice, Wells would pocket the difference. On a transaction where the client is buying 5 million CAD with USD, the ill-gotten gain for Wells would be about $277,000 USD!

Conversely, if the customer did notice the difference, Wells would just blame it on the grunts in its operational back office, saying they accidentally transposed the number and “correct” the transaction. From the complaint, here is some give and take between two Wells FX specialists:

“You can play the transposition error game if you get called out.” Another FX sales specialist noted to a colleague about a previous transaction that a customer “didn’t flinch at the big fig the other day. Want to take a bit more?”

The BSwift Piñata

The way this hustle would work is, let’s say the Wells corporate customer was receiving payment from one of their Canadian clients. The Canadian client’s bank would send a BSwift message to Wells. The Wells client was in the dark about the U.S. dollar-Canadian dollar exchange rate because it had no idea what time of day the message arrived. Wells took advantage of that by purchasing U.S. dollars for Canadian dollars first. For simplicity, think of the U.S. dollar-Canadian dollar exchange rate as a widget that Wells bought for $1. If the widget increased in value, say to $1.10 during the day, Wells would sell the widget they purchased for $1 to the client for $1.10 and pocket 10 cents. If the price of the widget Wells bought for $1 fell to 95 cents, Wells would just give up their $1 purchase to the client, plus whatever markup they agreed to.

Heads, Wells wins. Tails, client loses.

The complaint notes that a Wells FX specialist wrote that he:

“Bumped spreads up a pinch,” that “these clients who are in the mode of just processing wires will most likely not notice this slight change in pricing” and that it “could have a very quick positive impact on revenue without a lot of risk.”

Talk about a boiler room operation. Personally, I think calling what you are doing to a client a “piñata” should have easily put Wells in the Fed’s penalty box another 5 years at least!

Wells has been released from the Fed’s 2018 enforcement order. I would like to think they have learned their lesson and are reformed, but I would lay good odds against it. A leopard can’t change its spots.

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International

Woman wins settlement after YMCA banned her for complaining about man in girls’ locker room

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Julie Jaman will receive $65,000 as part of the settlement after being banned from a local swimming pool for objecting to a man in a female shower with little girls present

A Washington State grandmother won a $65,000 settlement from the City of Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula YMCA after she was banned from a swimming pool for objecting to a cross-dressing man watching small girls change clothes.

As covered by LifeSiteNews in 2022, Julie Jaman testified before the Port Townsend City Council about her experience showering in the local pool’s facilities when she heard “a man’s voice in the women’s dressing area.” When she investigated, she said that she saw “a man in a women’s swimsuit, watching little girls pull down their bathing suits in order to use the toilets in the dressing room.”

She also told a local newspaper, “There were gaps in the curtain and there I was, naked, with soap and water on me, and this guy, right there very close to me. I asked, ‘Do you have a penis?’ He said, ‘That’s none of your business.’ That’s when I told him, ‘Get out of here, right now.” She appealed to a nearby female manager, who she says replied, “you’re discriminating and you can’t use the pool anymore and I’m calling the police.”

After speaking to police and reviewing police reports, the Port Townsend FreePress reported that Jaman had an “emotional response to a strange male being in the bathroom and helping a young girl take off her bathing suit,” and was described as “screaming” by a complainant.

“In an effort by the city and the YMCA to apply the neo-cultural gender rules at Mountain View Pool dressing, shower room facilities, women and children are being put at risk,” Jaman declared at the time.

A YMCA marketing and communications manager responded at the time by disputing her version of events, claiming the male was not “engaging” with the young girls but was simply escorting them to the dressing room, and that the confrontation was just one in a series of many that led to her ban.

She sued, however, and on June 30 the group representing her, the Center for American Liberty (CAL), announced that the city and the YMCA chapter had agreed to a $65,000 settlement, which also provides that the city will “remove certain information about Ms. Jaman from its website, further underscoring the baselessness of the actions taken against her.”

“This case was never just about one woman being banned from a publicly owned pool, it was about the fundamental right of every American to speak truth without fear of retaliation,” said Mark Trammell, CEO of CAL. “Julie Jaman bravely stood her ground, endured attacks on her character, and today’s settlement affirms that government officials cannot silence dissenting voices through intimidation or retribution.”

“I never imagined that expressing concerns about the safety and privacy of women and girls would lead to me being shunned and banned,” Jaman added. “I’m grateful that justice has been served and that my voice was heard. This is a victory for common sense, women’s rights, and the right to speak the truth.”

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