Being Sen. Elizabeth Warren sure looks like a lot of fun.
Warren is the A-list celebrity of performance art outrage at Wall Street bankers, and her talents were on full display in a Tuesday hearing on Wells Fargo. The bank is in trouble for opening hundreds of thousands of fake bank and credit card accounts.
“OK, so you haven’t resigned. You haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings. You haven’t fired a single senior executive,” Warren barked at the bank’s CEO.
She later boasted in a tweet: “Watch my questioning of @WellsFargo CEO John Stumpf & his gutless leadership.”
What Warren left out is that the people she yells at usually have faced at least some kind of punishment. Sure, bankers seem to have a knack for avoiding jail time, but these institutions aren’t getting away scot-free.
Warren hammered Wells Fargo after it was announced that the bank would be fined $185 million by the feds. She blew up at the CEO after it was announced that 5,300 people involved in the scam were out of a job. And criminal charges might still be coming, if she can be patient enough to let the slow wheels of justice do their thing.
Just imagine how mad Warren would be if Wells Fargo were facing no consequences at all. Boy, she would be steaming.
She might even be as mad as House Republicans, who on Wednesday still couldn’t get a straight answer about how the IRS managed to destroy thousands of emails linked to the IRS targeting scandal. No one fired, no one at fault, no criminal wrongdoing.
Or maybe she would be as mad as the Republicans on the Veterans’ Affairs committees, who are hoping that someday, more than seven people might be fired for the healthcare wait-time scandal. For two years now, Republicans have been led along by a former P&G executive who sees the VA as a rebranding challenge, not something in dire need of a housecleaning.
Perhaps, if Wells Fargo were as unaccountable as most federal agencies, Warren might almost be as angry as Republicans who have had to fight for every scrap of paper left by Hillary Clinton in the State Department, even though they should have been logged routinely as required by federal law.
It’s an iron law of government that justice is dispensed more quickly to the private sector than the public sector, probably because the public sector is in charge of dispensing justice.
So hey, Sen. Warren: You want to get really mad, let loose and yell at people? Why don’t you pick a fight with a corrupt federal agency once in a while?
Then you’ll know true frustration.
