Law

County attorney Trent faces conflicts of interest in choosing whether to prosecute Derek Colling

Albany County (WY) for Proper Policing Founding Member, Karlee Provenza, submitted this piece to five major newspapers in Wyoming, including the Laramie Boomerang and WyoFile. All of the pursued outlets declined to run the op-ed.

by Karlee Provenza
December 20, 2018

Albany County officials have found themselves in tough situations since Sheriff’s Corporal Derek Colling shot and killed unarmed Robbie Ramirez on November. 4th.

Albany County Sheriff Dave O’Malley faced controversy for hiring Colling in 2011, given Colling’s history of violence. Colling had previously killed two people in the line of duty, he was fired from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for another on-duty assault, and he cost the City of Las Vegas $100,000 in a civil lawsuit.

Now that Colling has killed a Laramie resident, people in Albany County are wondering whether O’Malley should shoulder some of the responsibility for Ramirez’s death.

Albany County Attorney Peggy Trent is also in hot water. She has refused multiple requests to publicly release the body and dash camera footage of Ramirez’s killing, even after she showed it to journalists and allowed television stations to cherry pick bits for rebroadcast. This leaves Trent awkwardly trying to explain why it was okay to release the video to some members of the public, but not others.

Meanwhile, Trent faces a separate dilemma as the county’s prosecutor.

As County Attorney, Trent represents the people of Albany County. But she also represents the Albany County Sheriff’s Department. How, then, is she supposed to decide whether to prosecute an employee of the Albany County Sheriff’s Department (her client) on behalf the people of Albany County (also her client)?

The short answer is: she shouldn’t decide. Trent faces a clear ethical conflict of interest, and she should recuse herself from this case.

Laws regarding prosecutorial conflicts of interest are not very clear in cases that involve police defendants. Police rarely face criminal charges in court, so there is simply little legal precedent in this arena to guide us.

But what is absolutely clear is that police and prosecutors have close, symbiotic relationships. Prosecutors rely heavily on police. Police literally bring them work by arresting suspected criminals. When prosecutors decide to pursue charges, they rely on police investigation and testimony to secure convictions. Since the public tends to evaluate prosecutors on their ability to convict criminals, prosecutors’ jobs literally depend on police.

Police-prosecutor relationships are especially tight in rural places like Albany County (and most of Wyoming). The same officers work with the same prosecutors day in and day out, forming valuable personal as well as professional bonds and cultivating a sense of trust. When you spend years working daily alongside police to protect the community, it is exceedingly difficult to switch roles and go after someone your professional life depends on.

Trent may or may not have legal ground to remain the prosecuting attorney on Colling’s case—Wyoming law is ambiguous. But if she chooses to remain, there is absolutely no guarantee she can put aside biases that would impact her decision-making. This would threaten the fairness of any trial, leaving open the possibility that a conviction could be overturned. It would also risk making a mockery of our legal system. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall cautioned: “… actual prejudice in such circumstances misses the point, for what is at stake is the public perception of the integrity of our criminal justice system.”

There would be several viable options for continuing to administer Colling’s case after Trent’s recusal. The case could be moved to another county, or another county’s attorney could be put in charge. Similarly, the Wyoming Attorney General’s office could take the case or appoint a special prosecutor.

Each option presents challenges. And these options may even decrease the likelihood that Colling faces charges—an outcome that would likely dismay many Albany County residents.

But people who are concerned about Robbie Ramirez’s death at the hands of police should also be concerned about a criminal justice system that allows conflicts of interest to go unchecked.

We cannot stand aside and allow for corruption because it is easy or convenient. Regardless of whether someone thinks Colling should face charges, it should be obvious that Trent’s situation is problematic.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has stated, a prosecutor’s obligation “…is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

A forum on police reform will take place from 6 – 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 4, at the Lincoln Community Center (365 W Grand Ave.) in Laramie. Snacks and child care will be available. More information is available on the ACOPP site.

Mug Shots and Bankruptcy Proceedings

May 11, 2018
Matt Stannard

The other day I stumbled upon this example of the practice of publishing people’s bankruptcy proceedings. Declare bankruptcy at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Spokane, and the Tri-City Herald will publish your name, address, total debts, and total assets.

They’re a matter of public record, of course, but one’s conscience asks why such painful information needs to be publicized in this way (if there are public policy-oriented reasons for disseminating bankruptcy information, surely there are better ways to do it), even as one’s legal mind may understand the theoretical reasoning: Bankruptcy is the public legal forgiveness of debt.

But as I cited in a recent public banking article over at Occupy, debt itself is a political and sociological invention.

In his 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber chronicles the transition from communal systems of sharing – including shared obligations – to capitalism’s assimilation of all relationships into a system that generates profits for investors. Integral to that process is the individuation (and demonization) of debt, one of the many relationships that are stripped away, often through literal violence.

 

In addition to Graeber, in that article I also cite Linda Coco, a law professor and innovative legal clinician concerned with how debt and financial distress damage us. I learned about Professor Coco’s work when I read her 2016 article on bankruptcy as discipline in the Wyoming Law Review. Concerned with how bankruptcy court procedures construct and reinforce a narrative of fiscal failure, Coco concludes:

The bankruptcy petition codes [petitioner’s] financial life according to a legal and procedural logic found in the bankruptcy legal world . . . [their] financial lives and their identities are properly rendered into a recognizable pattern. Their information is fixed within the grid of the schedules and organized over time in the Statement of Financial Affairs. Their financial life is organized and controlled. It becomes legible in two-dimensional space. It is clearly analyzed and rendered for and in the bankruptcy process . . . a normalizing force in American social and cultural life. The internalization by disciplinary techniques of these dominant discourses results in the collective doxa of a group in which “more and more people must attune their conduct to that of others, the web of actions must be organized more and more strictly and accurately, if each individual action is to fill its social function. Individuals are compelled to regulate their conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner.’  Therefore, discourses of economic utility and individual responsibility create the standards by which individuals compare themselves to each other, the manner in which individuals distinguish themselves, the way that individuals rank and measure each other, generate ideas of good and bad, and ultimately decide what is normal and abnormal behavior. The social group views individuals experiencing over-indebtedness and financial distress as aberrant. Financial failures are people who have not mastered the requirements of economic productivity and utility. According to the economic utility models, individuals experiencing financial difficulty are believed to be unable to exercise restraint and self-control.

Professor Coco’s article is a profound exposition of an insidious ideological machine. Another law professor, similarly concerned, is Mehrsa Baradaran, whose recent prolific work effort proposes that we create supportive, rather than adversarial, relationships with our financial structures. For Baradaran, this reformation includes a more authentic and class-conscious interpretation of the Bank Holding Company Act’s public benefits requirement, and the creation of postal banks with a mandate to provide credit and liquidity to the economically marginalized.

Those would be relatively modest reforms, if we’re being honest with ourselves. But conventional American economic thinking sees such proposals as pretty much Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. If such a reconciliation of Americans’ material vulnerability with the building of democratized and compassionate financial utilities is difficult to conceive in the present moment, one reason for this is the not just the ritualized discipline of financial failure, but also its ritualized spectacle. These newspaper bankruptcy notices are a manifestation of that spectacle. They are like, although perhaps not completely like, “mugshots” magazines available for sale (because people buy them) in gas station convenience stores across the Midwest.

“Of all capitalism’s tricks,” I wrote in the Occupy article, “the trickiest is convincing people that debt, credit and currency have an objective existence and power beyond what we give them.” Marching debtors out naked onto the public stage while their debts and assets are called out as dry, existing things is one way to reinforce that topos.

Featured image: Philip Nicholas Bankruptcy Proceeding, signed by John Quincy Adams as Commissioner.

A Stakeholders’ Case for Public Banking and a Public Cannabis Bank in California

by Matt Stannard and Marc Armstrong
Commonomics USA
Presented to Cannabis Banking Working Group, Los Angeles, California, August 10, 2017

As our organization, Commonomics USA, is concerned with policies that prioritize the commons, we talk a lot about stakeholders. Stakeholders are also an appropriate place to start in this meeting, because neither a Cannabis Banking Working Group nor a special session on public banking would exist but for strong public demands: for a policy of legal recreational cannabis, for financial protection and security for the MRB industry, and, as we’re seeing throughout California, for public banks.

 

 

When viewed from the lens of stakeholder needs, the question becomes what banking system creates security, predictability, opportunity, and sustainability for the primary stakeholders in California’s transition to a new cannabis economy. Those stakeholders are (1) California residents, who voted to regulate rather than prohibit recreational cannabis, but want to be free of crimes, including financial crimes, associated with marijuana-related finance and commerce; and (2), California marijuana-related businesses, of whom many cities are paying special attention to businesses emerging from communities historically victimized by the war on drugs.  In Commonomics USA’s experience, publicly-owned and maintained systems often do a better job meeting those particular needs–security, predictability, opportunity, and sustainability–than privately-owned systems, for the greatest number of stakeholders, and especially for disadvantaged stakeholders.

California needs a solution to the cannabis banking conundrum by January 2018. As statements to the Working Group have established, private banks are reluctant to “touch” cannabis money absent a prior “first touch” by the State of California. Although it is unclear whether the federal Department of Justice has the resources or political capital to hinder commerce in states that have legalized recreational cannabis, and experts have told this Working Group that the Cole Memorandum and FinCEN guidelines might “prove to be more resilient” than many suppose, federal prohibition is vexing, particularly with respect to financial transactions for MRB money, and especially against the backdrop of a DOJ led by a vocal critic of recreational marijuana.

The legal and policy context for these problems is ambiguous and unpredictable. The federal government has not explicitly asserted that states cannot set different controlled substance schedules and policies. As legal scholars have pointed out, certain provisions of the CSA seem to anticipate this. Moreover, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear an objection to state-level legalization from other states. Meanwhile, the state of California collects taxes and fees from California MRBs now and will continue to do so no matter how this Working Group answers the banking questions. The federal government, through the Department of Justice and Department of Treasury, has not seriously questioned the tax and fee revenue from California MRBs and there has not been a distinction between tax and fee revenues from medical and recreational cannabis .

This raises interesting philosophical questions: When the state government touches that money, what is the legal basis for it being clean enough to be deposited in a bank? Is the state compromising its fiduciary responsibilities by assuming that these monies are not at risk of seizure? Is mixing tax receipts between different industries merely perpetuating the obfuscation and lack of transparency of an underground economy? We ask these questions because we believe that the legal basis for the state’s ability to legitimize cannabis money needs to be built and made explicit.The federal government has jurisdiction over interstate commerce, but California needs to develop the legal and policy framework for in-state commerce of a product that is federally illegal and, in the case of recreational cannabis, potentially the target of federal hostility. A public bank solution will allow California the opportunity to express the first iteration of the terms of any such answer–by asking the administration and the Federal Reserve banks whether the policy objectives of federal financial crimes and drug laundering laws favor a centralized state bank in the driver’s seat, or a continuation of the decentralized, ad hoc, and often surreptitious practices of cash collection and quirky experiments by small private banks.

Rather than looking at this as a cannabis problem, this is really a banking problem–a problem of the inability/unwillingness of the private banking sector to address both a segment of the population and a pressing social need. That’s a familiar situation for those of us in the banking and public policy world–particularly those of us interested in public banks. In fact, as California stands at the precipice of a cannabis banking crises, it is also immersed in two other banking crises, slow-burning problems that hurt the state’s communities and its economy. The first is the economic toll that big private banks have taken on the state. California’s state and local treasuries have suffered greatly under the interest rates and fees charged by big banks, the costs of financing infrastructure and development, and the reluctance of private finance to fund the kinds of development Californians need. Capital appreciation bonds saddling school districts with interest charges that dwarf the size of the principle are probably the most egregious, but the results are the same: costly public financing, lack of access to financing for public sector goods, and a cynical sense that we can no longer afford to fund good ideas.

The second banking crisis is the unavailability of basic banking services to so many Californians. According to the 2015 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, almost 900,000 residents of the state lack basic banking services, and thousands more — over 19% of households — are “underbanked,” meaning they subsist financially with short-term and very expensive services. Lack of access to affordable services contributes to financial precariousness and insecurity, which is harmful to the individuals, families, and communities affected, and a barrier to sustainable economic security across the state.

So privately owned banks seem to trip over a number of market failures, of which cannabis revenue is one. The reasons may be different–in the case of cannabis revenue, a heavy-handed federal government–but the common denominator is that the tendency to view banking as merely a business opportunity rather than a public utility has meant and will continue to mean that huge populations are unserved, and huge public needs unmet.

But the State of California stands in a unique position to take on these challenges. California is the sixth largest economy in the world. Policy-wise, it has pushed itself ahead of the federal government and much of the rest of the nation on policies from post-carbon energy to family leave, from struggling to forge a universal health insurance system to protecting immigrant communities. New government-owned, nonprofit JPAs are being formed to produce renewable energy. One might say California is forging a new economy. We think a new economy needs a new bank–a bank of its very own, that leverages the power of banking based on deliberative policy objectives rather than using profit and loss as a starting point for financial policymaking.

After studying public banks and public banking campaigns for many years, and listening intently to the discussions in these Cannabis Banking Working Group meetings, as well as several divestment and public banking meetings across the state, we offer this four-stage proposal as a starting point for discussion.

The first phase would be the drafting and legislative enabling of a public bank: The Department of Business Oversight would define a Public Bank Charter for a depository bank serving the unmet banking needs of the California public. California’s legislature would pass the enabling laws to support and protect this bank license. In this phase, the state would develop a business plan as part of its application to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for a master account number. We believe that this phase can begin immediately and, as a matter of fiduciary responsibility, would lower the risk of the subsequent phases. Should the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco grant the master account to this public bank without a fight, the landscape dramatically changes.

The first phase also includes capitalization. Many possibilities exist for capitalizing the bank, including debt or equity financing, issuing corporate bond and pension funds with the cannabis industry or the general public stepping forward to participate; or even constrained common stock in the fashion of the ownership of the Green Bay Packers.

In the second phase, the state bank creates depository services for MRBs and the unbanked and underbanked. Limited commercial account services could include demand deposit account services, cash concentration services, depository reporting, and automated payroll deposits for employees. Core, low-cost, retail banking services for the un- and under-banked market could include simple transactional and savings accounts, automated payroll deposit, peer-to-peer money transfer, international remittances, and debit cards. Low-cost methods used to access bank accounts could include online devices, existing ATM/Kiosks, and mobile phones.

In the third phase, the bank develops its capacity for risk management, compliance automation, and payment automation. The objective would be to lower the cost of compliance by using analytics and monitoring software to provide important reports using automated procedures and monitoring products. This Working Group has already heard about these capabilities from other participants. These products will provide greater transparency to the financial system. These participants have also mentioned payment automation capabilities, and we recommend that this phase includes this important technology. This can be done with an app that would complete payment transactions between cannabis consumers and cannabis businesses with an account at the public bank. If necessary or desirable, it could avoid the VISA, MasterCard and American Express network and transfer funds from the buyer’s California bank account to the seller’s account in the public bank.

In the fourth phase, the bank provides credit, lowering the cost of public financing, using public credit instead of taxpayer money or municipal bonds for the construction of schools, toll bridges, water and sewer systems, and a sustainable post-carbon energy system. Many additional public goods require financing and have huge social and economic payoffs, from affordable housing loan programs (including loans directed to public employees), that help people live in the same communities where they work, to loans for cooperative startups. The bank could also use its public credit to provide lower costs to wage earners saddled with student loan debt, helping a demographic that has, by many measures, gotten a raw deal in California.

There are four main benefits that a public bank can provide:

  1. Satisfies unmet market needs. In the event of market failures, when private banks are not able to meet the needs of the banking market, a public bank is able to be used to fill in the gaps, to provide deposit account and credit services where there are none.
  2. Cost savings. A public bank has a lower cost of doing business (no bonuses, no extreme salaries, no dividends, etc.) that can be passed on to borrowers, whether students, businesses or municipalities.
  3. Economic sovereignty. A public bank is a democratic approach to public finance, involving both the public and other stakeholders in the loan portfolio decisions.
  4. Counter Cyclicality. A public bank’s equity is not publicly traded on a stock market and is not subject to the same changes in valuation in as rapid a pace as we saw in 2008 and 2009 stock market, where some banks lost upwards to 80% of their equity. Because of this, public banks have the ability to continue to make loans precisely when private banks are terminating lines of credit, ending loan programs, and not accepting deposits.

Some folks, including a public official or two, are tired of public banking advocates bringing up the Bank of North Dakota. So we will only bring it up to explain that there are many roads to banking democracy This proposal, as presented, does not suggest transposing the BND model onto the State of California. It isn’t a proposal to use California’s assets to capitalize the Bank or to seek partnership with or underwriting of the private banking industry. In the wake of natural disasters, BND has the ability to make bridge loans to businesses and homeowners before they are reimbursed by FEMA and suspend mortgage and student loan monthly payments. In 2015, BND obtained more than $2.5 billion in public deposits through pledging services for private banks, in addition to providing $679 million of liquidity through BND’s secured and unsecured federal funds lines. Our proposal doesn’t preclude any of that, but it doesn’t require any of that.

The process outlined in our proposal should occur in tandem with the ongoing effort to relax federal law, consistent with the recommendations of Erwin Chemerinsky, Jolene Forman, Allen Hopper, and Sam Kamin, in their UCLA Law Review article “Cooperative Federalism and Marijuana Regulation.” Passage of the SAFE Act, a robust reaffirmation or strengthening of Cole-style and FinCEN guidelines, all as part of the ongoing effort to reach out to rational federal policymakers–who we believe really do outnumber the louder and less reasonable voices in Washington. California is likely to make that request to the federal government anyway. But doing so having created a public bank in the world’s sixth largest economy, a bank committed to financial oversight of cannabis banking as a matter of public policy, creates a very different context for the dialogue between the federal government and the states concerning cannabis.

Similarly, if it is to find any “banking”-based solution to MRB revenue’s federal illegality, California will inevitably have to face the question of obtaining a Master Account Number from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Why not, then, have the State of California itself, on behalf of a state-owned bank with unprecedented control over the cannabis economy, make that application?

Most people in this room understand the general case for public utilities meeting unmet market needs and, specifically, public banking doing the same. As movements in Oakland, here in L.A., and in other parts of the state suggest, there is widespread support for exploring public banking in California. But the reason we’re having this conversation, here with the Cannabis Banking Working Group, is that this is a “try or die” moment for the cannabis banking question. Some entity or collection of entities must inevitably dialogue with the sources of current federal complications concerning cannabis banking. From a stakeholders’ perspective, we believe it makes a lot of sense for that entity to be the State of California–affirming the decisions the people of the state have made, owning those decisions.

This is a chess game, with economic sovereignty being the big win for California. Understanding the possible moves that the federal government can make is critical. We assume, for instance, that recreational cannabis tax revenue can be collected and placed in one of the state’s accounts in a private bank. What if, in the Attorney General’s quest to disallow recreational use of cannabis, this regulation is changed to disallow this recreational cannabis tax revenue from being legally deposited in private banks? California can collect the tax, but it’ll end up with the same banking issue now experienced by MRB’s. There will be yet another run on pickle barrels, only this time the state will be buying them.

What is needed is a body of state law that creates a Public Bank Charter (or license), defines “municipal affairs” for state charter cities, sets standards for in-state commerce of recreational cannabis, and protects Californians so that they may conduct safe economic transactions in the currency medium of choice.

A public bank can then be created in order to act as the organizational bulwark, protecting California’s interests by meeting unmet market needs and issuing deposit accounts to MRBs and the unbanked, efficiently handling the federally mandated compliance issues, automating payments (including tax payments), and making California’s economic sovereignty a reality.

A public bank acting as a necessary public utility that provides banking services to MRBs, to the unbanked and underbanked, and for lower cost infrastructure and commercial financing, can help California use its status as a global economic power, and its huge economies of scale, to create the appropriate financial infrastructure necessary for this undertaking. The decision to create such a bank as a solution to the cannabis conundrum would send an unprecedented signal to the world that California is stepping into a new cannabis economy and a banking economy that meets the needs of all Californians, businesses no matter the industry, and municipalities.

Matt Stannard is policy director of Commonomics USA. Marc Armstrong is president of Commonomics USA. 

Why Wells Fargo is about to s*** the bed on forced arbitration

by Matt Stannard

“What is the robbing of a bank,” Bertolt Brecht’s character Macheath asks in Threepenny Opera, compared “to the founding of a bank?” What harm can an individual bank robber do, compared to what a bank–particularly a large one–can do?

Banks can do more damage than other big institutions, because financial asymmetry is the core of private banking. Banking for profit makes no sense without it. And because financial asymmetry results in awful consequences for the weaker party, successful banking for profit requires legal asymmetry too. Boilerplate and adhesion contracts can be effective tools for securing that asymmetry.

But history tells us that asymmetry only gets you so far. That’s why, in spite of Wells Fargo having had some early initial success using an arbitration clause to defer the legal consequences of unambiguous fraud, I’m predicting that the ploy has run its course–that not only will courts stop buying it, but that its continued deployment, successful or not, will sink the bank’s effort to clean up its public image.

If you aren’t abreast of this: Wells Fargo was recently caught having opened 2 million fake accounts in their customers’ names. The bank was fined a paltry $185 million, fired 5,300 of its employees, and tossed $5 million back to its customers. Now the bank wants a federal court to dismiss a class-action lawsuit by customers so defrauded, and their motion argues that customers gave up the right to sue for anything when agreeing to the arbitration clause contained in the bank’s complex and dickish customer agreements. In other words, Wells Fargo argues that when customers signed up for their non-fraudulent accounts, they gave up the right to sue for things like having their signatures forged in the opening of fraudulent accounts. What’s more, that argument has already worked for the bank: Among other instances, last year Wells Fargo got Ninth Circuit Court Judge Vince Chhabria to buy it in September 2015, also in a case arising from the bank opening up additional accounts for customers without permission (after this year’s settlement over the 2 million fraudulent accounts, that case was reopened and joined with a similar suit being filed in that district).

Michael Hiltzik’s LA Times piece is the best reading on this absurd, semi-successful legal strategy. I like the article because Hiltzik is sensitive to both the ethics and optics of Wells Fargo’s incredibly condescending attitude towards its customers:.

Nothing demonstrates that more than the bank’s insistence on forcing the victims of its vast fake-account scam into binding arbitration, a system in which customers are at an overwhelming disadvantage . . . the San Francisco-based bank has succeeded in getting several judges to toss fraud lawsuits over the bogus accounts by asserting that, even though the accounts are fake, they stem from legitimate accounts the victims opened, in which they agreed to submit any future disputes with the bank to an arbitrator . . . [to get] a flavor of just how abusive the Wells Fargo arbitration strategy is . . . [California resident Shahriar] Jabbari had opened savings and checking accounts with the bank in 2011, but within two years discovered that he had seven more that he hadn’t authorized. Soon enough, he was getting dunning notices from collection agencies for unpaid fees on those accounts, some of which had been opened with manifestly forged signatures or even no signatures at all. [Kaylee] Heffelfinger’s experience was similar. She opened a checking and a savings account with Wells Fargo in March 2012, the lawsuit says. Wells employees started opening bogus accounts in her name even before that, starting in January. She ended up with seven accounts, some opened with forged signatures and fake Social Security numbers. Wells Fargo demanded in its defense that the case go to arbitration, noting that its arbitration clause was exceedingly broad: Anyone who became a Wells Fargo customer was agreeing to boilerplate in their customer agreements that covered any dispute with the bank whatsoever, including “claims based on broken promises or contracts, torts, or other wrongful actions.”

Wells Fargo’s legal argument isolates the singular decision to open an initial account (which requires agreeing to arbitration) and goes on to argue that the fraudulent opening of an additional account is covered by the same arbitration clause. It’s pretty outrageous that any court anywhere has allowed this to happen, deferring to a membrane of an argument that carries such awful policy implications and whose outcome can only be inequity to any individual plaintiff. The continued use of the already abusive tactic of forced arbitration to dodge fraudulent behavior threatens to unravel the entire shaky regime of forced arbitration altogether, either via regulatory changes or a quick dip in its litigatory success rate. Even if such regulations spark lengthy court battles of their own, that’s money the banks have to spend on legal fees while their public ethos sinks to lower lows. 

That’s why I think Zane Christensen, the Utah attorney representing plaintiffs in the class action at federal court in Utah, is correct in asserting that the tactic has run its course and that courts will soon see the horrendous implications of allowing it. If judges have gone along with it thus far, they’ve done so for two reasons: (1) a desire for “judicial economy” that often overrides concerns for justice, and (2) the classism of many judges, their unwillingness or inability to see the asymmetry between big banks and ordinary people as a question of equity under law. Irrespective of that, I think the jig is up.

I could be wrong. It may be that nothing can truly convince these particular business entities to behave. After all, banks still racially redline certain areas (Wells Fargo has to pay $2.5 million to 1000 African-American and Latino residents in Baltimore for doing so in 2012), making mortgages and automobile loans inaccessible or abusively expensive to people of color. One bank has even been caught reverse redlining–disproportionately giving people of color increased access to their s***ty deals in order to charge them higher interest rates and fees. Perhaps, like the President-Elect, big private banks will just keep running around doing really repugnant, often racist, always classist things, everybody gets outraged, but nobody’s able to stop them.

But I think I’m right. There’s a lot of political anger floating freely about these days–residual frustration from the elections and a growing sense that materially powerful entities truly can get away with anything–and I wouldn’t want to be a big bank right now. With sufficient financial clout, cities can even step in where the feds refuse to go. Los Angeles just dumped Wells Fargo over consumer abuse. The L.A. city council also asked “the city attorney’s office to draft an ordinance that would amend the city’s responsible banking ordinance to include more protections for whistle-blowers who report suspected illegal bank activity to authorities.” That’s a big deal because, although Santa Cruz County’s decision last year to dump five criminal banks carried a lot of symbolic value, L.A. carries considerably more financial weight. It’s even more important because if enough cities and counties got together, they really could disempower big banks–culminating, as Saqib Bhatti of the Roosevelt Institute hopes, in the creation of municipal public banks, providing even further incentive for private financial institutions to actually change their terms and practices.

If I’m wrong, and Wells Fargo continues to prevail by arguing that fraud is covered by a boilerplate arbitration clause, I promise to open an account there in your name.

Matt Stannard is policy director at Commonomics USA and previously served on the Public Banking Institute’s board of directors.

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