Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Wells Fargo Crooks Stole From Customers, Reaped Obscene Rewards—and Stuck Us With the Bill

“The business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Bernie Sanders proclaimed repeatedly on the stump. Wall Street’s big banks seem intent on proving his case. Most recently, Wells Fargo—whose CEO, John Stumpf, was celebrated as “banker of the year” by American Banker in 2013—has been fined $185 million for abusing its own customers. From 2011 to 2015, the company opened nearly 2 million bank accounts and more than 500,000 credit cards for customers who didn’t ask for them, engaging in fraud, identify theft, and forgery along the way. Its customers, as former Wells Fargo sales manager Beth Jacobson put it, were “all riding the stagecoach to hell.”

Post-Bernie Blaze Fires Up His Democratic-Socialist Delegates

When Tom Gallagher was a Massachusetts delegate for Senator George McGovern in 1984, Democratic National Conventions were a bit different.

“This was before it was just one big infomercial,” Gallagher, now 67 and living in San Francisco, said.

At the convention in 1984, McGovern had only 23 delegates to his name, and Gallagher was one of four who refused to switch his vote to former vice president Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, despite McGovern’s urging his delegates to do so.