On the latest Planet Money podcast (MP3), a former San Francisco Wells Fargo banker describes the bullying and coercion she faced from senior management while working at the bank's head office, and how the bank forced her out when she blew the whistle on fraud and then blacklisted her with other banks, forcing her out of the sector altogether.

Wells Fargo's Board of Directors have finally exercised their right to claw back part of the hundreds of millions of dollars taken home by two senior executives who were compensated on the basis of the fraudulent earnings the bank took in while opening 2,000,000 secret accounts in their customers' names, taking money out of those customers' real accounts to pay for the fees and penalties accrued by the fake accounts, and trashing their customers' credit in the process.

When four named whistleblowers came forward to reveal that they'd been illegally fired from Wells Fargo for reporting that the company was experiencing widespread fraud, it was deja vu all over again: Wells also punished whistleblowers who sounded the alarm during the subprime crisis, and was thus so totally compromised that they needed a $36B taxpayer bailout.

Beth Jacobson was a Wells Fargo loan officer who blew the whistle on the bank's predatory, racist loan-fraud in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis, which tanked the world's economy and nearly wiped out Wells Fargo (they were rescued with a $36B taxpayer-funded bailout).

Normally, companies that give "performance pay" to their execs can only write off the first $1M: but when Wells Fargo gave $125M to Carrie Tolstedt (shown above receiving American Banker's 2010 award for being "the most powerful woman in banking") as she "retired" after overseeing a 5-year period in which Wells Fargo's top brass were aware that their employees were opening 2 million fake accounts in their customers' names, Wells structured the payment as a "bonus," meaning that the company took a $78 million off its taxes, pocketing $27m in savings.

CNN Money has found multiple whistleblowers from Wells Fargo who were willing to go on the record and report that they were fired in retaliation for coming forward to report the massive fraud in which Wells Fargo employees opened up 2,000,000 fake accounts in their customers' names, raiding their real accounts to open them, then racking up fees and penalties, and trashing their customers' credit ratings.

Yesterday, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf addressed the Senate Banking Committee about his bank's years of fraud, driven by threats of firing for low-level employees if they didn't meet unrealistic sales-targets, overseen by an executive who was given a $125m retirement bonus when she quit last summer, just before the scandal broke (though the bank had known it was going on since 2011).

After Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf recited a drawn-out No True Scottsman Fallacy disguised as a hollow apology at the Senate Banking Committee's Wells Fargo hearing, senator Elizabeth Warren tore into him.

From CNN:

Warren slammed Stumpf for failing to fire any senior executives linked to the scandal, while Wells Fargo's aggressive sales tactics helped pump up the bank's stock price.

A wag on the internet pointed out similarities between an enthusiastic review of a Herman Miller chair at BenchmarkReviews.com and a press release issued by the company selling it.

I notice that the article has in the last 24 hours been amended to identify some sections as being written by Herman Miller, which were previously not identified as such.

Jürgen Stumpf's Berlin wine-bars in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte run on the honor system: show up, drink wine, and pay what you think you owe on the way out the door.

Each of Mr. Stumpf's three honor-system wine bars (a fourth, down some stairs on Kollwitzstrasse, is temporarily closed while it deals with licensing issues) carries a different assortment of red and white wines.

There's a battle raging in Missoula, Montana over "urban chickens." One one side are people who want to raise their own food and bring a little bit of farm life into the city. On the other are those who say the birds are noisy, unhealthy, and stink. — Read the rest

On SuicideGirls.com, I interviewed author/photographer/post-blogger Susannah Breslin about her new book, You're a Bad Man Aren't You. It is because of Ms. Breslin that the terms "bukkake," "Osteogenesis Imperfecta Fetish," and "stumpfucking" have become part of my vocabulary.

XJ: What would you tell would-be readers who are expecting, shall we say, one-handed reading?