“Sneaky” comes to mind to describe the government and the banksters regarding two settlements between US banks and government regulators who alleged that the banks were guilty of widespread abuse of the foreclosure system that allowed banks to seize homes from defaulting borrowers. The banksters agreed to pay out more than $20 billion on Monday to resolve claims arising from the mortgage crisis.

Throughout Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s rough day in front of the House Financial Services Committee, multiple representatives called for the bank to be broken up, suggesting that the megabank is simply too big to manage effectively.

But as the five-hour hearing neared its conclusion, the ranking member of the committee, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., went beyond her fellow representatives’ calls to break up Wells Fargo, stating that she is going to actually move to break up the bank.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that Wells Fargo should be broken up,” Waters said. “It’s too big to manage and I’m moving forward to break up the bank.”

According to a represenative from Waters’ office, Waters told reporters after the hearing that she plans to pursue legislation to break up the bank.

Read on.

The Los Angeles city attorney has reached a $13.5-million settlement with U.S. Bank to resolve allegations that the nation’s fifth-largest bank operated as a slumlord and allowed hundreds of foreclosed properties to deteriorate, fostering crime and blight in L.A. neighborhoods slammed by the housing crisis.

The settlement, announced Thursday, requires the Minneapolis-based firm to maintain its foreclosed properties in “accordance with all applicable laws and standards for two years.” A full-time bank employee will work with city agencies to resolve code violations of foreclosed properties across Los Angeles, the city attorney’s office said.

U.S. Bank spokesman Dana E. Ripley said the bank would be working…

The numbers at the heart of the scandal at Wells Fargo (WFC) are staggering. Over 5,300 employees were fired for creating millions of accounts without customers’ permission, under intense corporate pressure to meet high sales targets.

Zoomed out to a massive scale like this, and with lawmakers focused on finding and chewing out the higher-ups who might be responsible, it’s easy to forget this fraud ensnared actual human beings.

Yahoo Finance spoke to a few of them to get their stories about their relationships with Wells Fargo, and how they learned they had accounts created without their knowledge or permission. We also learned about what it was like to deal with credit bureaus to make sure the bogus accounts didn’t blemish their credit reports.

A surprise $30,000 line of credit

Take Micheline Maynard, a journalist and author based in Boston, one of the millions of Wells Fargo victims…

And I wonder when the Wells Fargo former and current employees will sue the bank for OT (certainly they did OT) that they most likely weren’t paid for their time when they were pressured by upper management for sales goals to open fake accounts for customers who had know idea of these accounts.

Zerohedge:

The lawsuit (Polonsky v. Wells Fargo Bank & Co., BC634475, California Superior Court, Los Angeles County )  filed on Thursday, alleged that “Wells Fargo fired or demoted employees who failed to meet unrealistic quotas while at the same time providing promotions to employees who met these quotas by opening fraudulent accounts.”

The lawsuit on behalf of people who worked for Wells Fargo in California over the past 10 years, including current employees, focuses on those who followed the rules and were penalized for not meeting sales quotas. It accuses Wells Fargo of wrongful termination…

Truthout:

I recently spoke to a former Wells Fargo employee turned whistleblower about the ongoing issues of fraud and predatory banking practices implemented by the bank regarding the ongoing housing and mortgage fraud. Beth Jacobson is a former high level employee of the bank, who told me:

“In 1998, I was hired by Wells Fargo Home Mortgage as a ‘Home Mortgage Consultant’ or loan officer. I worked for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage (‘Wells Fargo’) until December, 2007. After a period of time, I was promoted to Sales Manager. I told DOJ over six years ago about Wells Fargo’s quotas. At that time it was subprime loans. A loan officer had to fund three subprime loans per month. If there was a quarter when that didn’t happen, they were fired. So the result is prime borrowers were put in subprime loans so that the loan officer kept their job.

[John] Stumpf…

From Elizabeth Warren facebook:

Elizabeth Warren

I was on a plane recently, waiting to get off when the guy in the row in front of me turned around and said, “You look a lot like Elizabeth Warren.” (I get that a lot.) He laughed when I told him I was, and he said he was a big fan (always nice to hear). But then he paused and said he didn’t think that I should be so angry with the big banks. I told him: “The truth is, I AM angry.” And then, because I’d just read it, I added: “And if you read David Dayen’s new book, you will be too.”

Chain of Title is a careful documentation of the mortgage fraud at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, and the story of how three people fought back. If you’re looking for a…

Wells Fargo & Co.’s board was accused of breaching its duty to investors in a lawsuit that also names Carrie Tolstedt, the executive whose community banking unit created unauthorized customer accounts to reap extra fees.

The suit adds to the mounting pressure on Wells Fargo and Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf since the bank agreed Sept. 8 to pay $185 million in fines and penalties to resolve regulators’ allegations it created more than 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts without customers’ authorization. Analysts and congressional leaders have called for the bank to claw back Tolstedt’s compensation and for Stumpf to resign.

Board members’ refusal to scale back Tolstedt’s retirement benefits is “a breach of their fiduciary duties to shareholders,” according to the complaint, which may be the first such investor case. The suit, in which Stumpf is a defendant along with Tolstedt and the board, asks a San Francisco state…

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and explains why criminal prosecutions of executives time after time are not happening. The video is below and if you would like to view with a transcript, click here.

CNN Money:

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.

“They ruined my life,” Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.