Bank of America and Wells Fargo gouging - Jerry Brown should step in

California Attorney General Jerry Brown should look into this. According to The Associated Press via The Huffington Post, Wells Fargo was ordered to pay $205 million to its customers as part of a successful class-action lawsuit.

What Wells Fargo was doing was allowing debit purchases to go through when a customer's account was overdrawn. But Bank of America has the same practice, and this blogger experienced it after a client bounced a check.

What Bank of America does is pile on one payment when you're overdrawn, thus triggering another overdraft charge and making more money from it. Then, when the non-paid vendor tries to collect again, the Bank of America issues a second overdraft charge!

My sources in and out of Bank of America have confirmed this problem. In other words, Bank of America has practiced the same process Wells Fargo was accused of and is now ordered to pay its customers back to settle.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup accused Wells Fargo of profiteering

According to the AP, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who's in the Northern District Court of California in San Francisco, accused Wells Fargo of profiteering, specifically "Internal bank memos and e-mails leave no doubt that, overdraft revenue being a big profit center, the bank's dominant, indeed sole, motive was to maximize the number of overdrafts."

In this blogger's experience with his Bank of America account, there were as many as not one, but three overdraft penalties drawn in one day, and four in two days, separated by the weekend, from two vendors!

What should happen is simple: one overdraft penalty for one charge unpaid. That's it. Bank of America should be the focus of California Attorney General Jerry Brown's gaze, and sooner rather than later.

Oakland Mayor's Race: SEIU 1021 endorsement meeting's clumsy start

The Oakland Mayor's Race is not without its share of groups who think they can influence the race by excluding certain candidates. The Oakland SEIU 1021 Union Organization is just one of them.

As this is written, the Oakland SEIU 1021 is about to hold its interviews of candidates for the Oakland Mayor's Race. From many conversations held Tuesday, it appears the SEIU finally got its act together and contacted all of the candidates, instead of just three: Former State Senator Don Perata, and Oakland Councilmembers Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan (District Four and At-Large, respectively.)

Now, from the information communicated to this blogger, the SEIU's talking to more than just the three, although as of this writing the Joe Tuman for Mayor campaign was left out of the SEIU process.

UPDATE: a text from the Joe Tuman Campaign explains that after "several phone calls" they were invited for later tonight.

In all, it was an awful state of affairs punctuated by this email letter to Ariana Casanova, the event organizer with the Oakland SEIU from the "Friends of Terrance Candell for Mayor" campaign (paragraphs broken by this blogger):

Dr. Terrance Candell calls out other candidates 

Dear Ariana,

You met with our candidate on February 3rd, 2010. Other unions have met with him and are close to endorsement. How, then, can you act as if he does not exist. Our constituents within your union have told us that you intended to discriminate against Terence Candell. We hope that this is not evidence of that. Our campaign never received any notice of Wednesday's interviews of Oakland Mayoral Candidates.

We assume that means that we will be allowed participation without having to render advance questions, since you never advanced them to us. Do not misunderstand. Our candidate is the frontrunner in this race. The rest just have KTVU, who has ignored him since he paid them $10,000 for airtime for his campaign.

Dr. Candell was the first Oakland Mayoral Candidate on the ballot. Don MacCleay and Greg Harland are also on the ballot. Terence Candell has a regular show on local Channel 78 Comcast. You might want to check that out. Your membership deserves a chance to hear him.

We understand that you don't like him. However, you cannot deceive the people and your membership by denying him due process. That is very unprofessional.

Dyra - Campaign Chair

Friends of Candell

Green Party Candidate Don Macleay was also not contacted, so he sent this email to Ariana:

I am also asking to attend and particpate requesting the SEIU 1021 endorsment in the Mayor's race.

Please let me know how to proceed.
Is there a questionaire?
What time should we arrive?
What else should I know or do?

Don Macleay

Who's Ariana Casanova?

Ariana Casanova's an organizer with the Oakland SEIU and an activist involved in several issues from the Nik Nak Liquor Store to protests against banks during the financial crisis, and who this blogger called three times without a single return phone call. I've never seen or met Ariana Casanova and I had a lot of questions for her after my conversations.

According to several sources, Ariana Casanova's not shy about telling Oakland Mayor's Race candidates if they're even worth paying attention to. The woman with the cool-sounding name allegedly told one candidate he needed to raise $325,000 and that he should not even try because he was not going to win.

That unguarded view is what started the problem where candidates were excluded.

When this space got word of the problem, a text was sent to Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan who was set to participate in the SEIU event. The text communicated the intention of exposing the SEIU game playing and encouraged her to back out.

After a time, the problem, at least for Dr. Terrance Candell, was solved. He's part of the SEIU process as is Don Macleay.

Oakland Mayor's Race candidate Greg Harland, who doesn't want union backing, said he rejected the SEIU's last minute invitation.

However it turns out, if the SEIU handled its interview process the way it's explained here, and by all accounts this is accurate, their final recommendation for the Oakland Mayor's Race is not worth paying attention to. That's also true for The League of Women Voters.

Stay tuned.

Oakland City Council Race: Libby Schaaf files papers for run

Libby Schaaf, who's constant attention to detail and hard work ethic has earned her California Attorney General Jerry Brown's endorsement, officially filed her paper work to run for the Oakland City Council District Four Seat on Tuesday.

Even before Libby filed the papers, she managed to raise over $76,000. This space supports Libby Schaaf for City Council District Four Seat.

The question is, did the other candidates file their papers?  If not, then the field of challengers will have been reduced and we will know who the competitors finally are.