How To Recover From A Scandal?...Just Call It "Board Refreshment Actions"

 Wells Fargo makes sweeping board changes after scandals

15.08.2017 2:48pm PDT

Mark Calvey Senior Reporter San Francisco Business Times

Wells Fargo has taken what it calls “board refreshment actions” as it struggles to right the ship from a series of scandals that have damaged its once-sterling reputation as Main Street’s bank.

Bloomberg News had this to say back in July:
The entire board at Wells Fargo received less than 80 percent support this year, including four with less than 60 percent support.
Wells Fargo’s board faced pressure from investors because of its failure to prevent a scandal that led to the bank being fined $185 million by regulators in September for opening retail bank accounts without customer approval

"Board Refreshment Actions"
IS THIS BEING FORCEFUL ENOUGH?
The San Francisco-based bank said that Vice Chairman Betsy Duke will succeed Stephen Sanger as independent chairman effective Jan. 1.

“The changes announced today reflect a thoughtful and deliberate process by the board that was informed by the company’s engagement with shareholders and other stakeholders, as well as the board’s annual self-evaluation that was conducted after the 2017 annual meeting and prior to its typical year-end timing,” said Sanger in a statement. 

Reporter Mike Calvy adds this note:

"Wells Fargo is trying to recover from a fake accounts scandal in which up to 2 million credit and deposit accounts were opened without customers’ authorizations. Wells said this month that there may be a “significant increase” in the number of customers affected as it expanded the scope of its internal investigation.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the bank improperly placed insurance on auto loan borrowers, triggering repossessions and tarnishing credit records.

"We view the changes to the board as necessary to help the company move forward from the its sales practice issues," Gerard Cassidy, a banking analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said in a note to clients.. . "
But today’s changes may do little to quell calls for more changes in Wells Fargo’s boardroom, C-suite and corporate culture that allowed such misbehavior to persist for years.

Critics of Wells Fargo, including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, are calling for more than a “refreshment” of the bank’s board. Warren sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen calling for the regulator to oust most of the bank’s board

Link > https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news

Why The Drew Street Parking Lot Is Worsley's Worse Site-Selection For His Real Estate Empire Schemes

Just five years ago in preparation for a 3D Visualization study by Corey Whittaker on the impact of light rail extending into the downtown historic area for a Central Main Plan, a similar proposal for a 6-story mixed-use building in the adjacent BofA parking lot got nixed

When a long-time Arizona politician who's elected to public office while at the same time acquiring a big portfolio of properties on Main Street here in The New Urban Downtown Mesa  as 'a private developer' [who happens to be married to Utah-money family-interests], there's bound to be questions asked about possible conflicts-of-interest.
That is unless these schemes can "fly under-the-radar" during months of undisclosed and behind-the-scenes meetings with city officials and cohorts of friends in high places. There could be scandals ahead in the volatile mix.

After the rejection in November 2016 by Mesa taxpayers to approve sales/transaction tax increases to fund a $200 Million Pie-In-The-Sky shaky proposal to radically transform downtown into a satellite campus for ASU that devoured downtown Tempe, preceded by another preposterous plan the year before for City Center Urban Plaza Mesa that was only 30%-funded, an un-named group of investors snatched-up title to real estate with offers to purchase at $100 per square foot properties along the path of the Valley Metro Light Rail Central Mesa Extension into the historic downtown area two years ago with Mayor John Giles proclaiming at the opening ceremonies "It's the Salvation Train" for downtown economic development. But - Salvation for who? The over-riding question remains: Is this all in the public interest?

After Giles celebrated his first full-term in office, and after the taxpayer revolt against his $500,000+ privately-financed Public Relations fiasco that turned into a major screw-up, plans for an ASU satellite campus got knocked-down, million$ in investments waiting on-the-sidelines got into quiet high-gear to seriously speculate on their fortunes-to-be-made - one of the prime drivers of capital inflow is Bob Worsley, who people say won't use his own money to finance his personal and private-developer schemes and dreams.

One recently made-public proposal for what's rumored as a $40 Million project, 15 stories high with a 75-room hotel, 75 "above-market apartments, atop a 3-story parking lot and a street-level food hall, all resting in details in an MOU to convert a free public-parking lot deeded to the city years ago in perpetuity for free public parking in this parcel. The plan is outlined in yellow lines [proceed with caution]. It is now under consideration when the Mesa City Council approved a Memorandum of Understanding at the end of June for possible development that expires in one year.
Just six days before the unanimous city council approval, a new corporation registration named MACDevLLC was filed and registered with the Arizona Corporation Commission to conduct business activitities from an address listed as the 5,369 Sq Ft residence of Bob Worley who lives here in Mesa with his wife Christi Worsley.
The Drew Street Parking Lot is in the middle and in back of mostly one-story and two-story historic properties fronting on Main Street, at the bottom of the image, and just across an east-west alleyway from Center Street to the left and MacDonald Street to the right.
Its ground area is less than one acre.
Drew Street, running down the middle, is a high-traffic school zone for public charter school Heritage Academy - historic in its own right - with frontage on the west side of Center Street.
Worsley and unknown partners previously had purchased 29-35 W Main Street on the SEC of Drew/Main Street where it stood vacant for years due to a possible foreclosure action. 

In 2012 Corey Whittaker employed by the City of Mesa to do a 3D Visualization for the impact of light rail into the downtown historic area, made these images public of the study area that shows Main Street running up in the center east on the diagonal. Directly at the center point is the intersection of Drew Street with Main Street running to the right side and south.
It shows 1-story and 2-story building rooftops fronting on the south side of Main Street that have free public parking spaces for business employees and their customers behind them in the black-topped parking lots. The one in the center left connected to Drew Street, comprising less than an acre in ground footprint is where Worsley wants to site his 15-stories scheme for a hotel and apartment tower for real estate development. 

A lower height 6-story building, seen boxed-out in yellow at center left in the image to the right in the 3D visualization next to the historic Alhambra Hotel @ 43 S MacDonald Street, got nixed due to the fact that it was way out-of-scale and out-of-proportion to the desired architectural balance in this historic area.
The newest construction in the immediate area started with small and incremental growth on First Avenue [seen to the right running up and east]  with the opening of the first downtown construction in 30 years of 2014 Real Estate Design Award-Winning Encore on First @ 25 W 1st Avenue, then Phase 2 Encore On First @ 47 W 1st Avenue by Mesa Housing Associates for affordable and attainable housing, followed just last year with the historic adaptive re-use by Venue Projects/Community Development Partners of the old downtrodden 2-story hotel @ 43 S MacDonald Street on the National Register of Historic Places into the Alhambra Residence Hall for students enrolled at Benedictine University. The Encore buildings [with a third one in-the-works for market-rate housing at the SEC of MacDonald/1st Avenue are low-profile construction that fit in the 3D visualizations in the Central Main Plan. Ground-breaking on Phase3 - the new Residences on First - has for some unexplained reasons been delayed.
Any scheme to plop down a 15-story 75-room hotel/75 'above market-rate' luxury apartments is simply a non-conforming use that is way out-of-scale in the Central Main Plan.
Four years ago, the 5-story Encore On First was built at a cost of about $30 Million for 81 apartments.
It's highly improbable at this point-in-time that Worsley's Pie-In-The-Sky real estate schemes for a 15-story complex will ever getting off-the-ground or even pass the muster and citizen/neighborhood input for a review of his sketchy plans presented in a Memorandum of Understanding approved unanimously by the entire Mesa City Council on June 27, 2017. It will expire in one year. If review by the downtown community recommends that the building height get cut-down to 8-10 stories - it might not be economically feasible to convince would-be real estate speculators to risk millions in investments at the intended less-than-an-acre parking lot in an active school zone.

Perhaps the speculative risk-taking might be better re-directed to the entire city block just one block to the East on Main Street/First Avenue and Sirrine/S Hibbert that's next to the Mesa Arts Center, seen in the image to the left.
It has a lot to offer with a huge footprint that's probably the most valuable almost 10-acre piece of property here now in The New Urban Downtown Mesa.
...and it comes with a big bonus in a pre-existing 3-story parking garage owned by the city.

What was there before has disappeared with demolition work completed two weeks ago 
Leaving yet another empty and open vacant parcel of land in the heart of city.
Title to the entire city block is held by StateFarm Insurance owner and Sunbelt Holdings Chief Executive Officer John Graham, now widely recognized most recently as the developer of Portland Park in Phoenix.
He's hedging his bets with a shift to urban infill development by balancing-out $230 Million in real estate land investments along the Elliott Road Tech Corridor in East Mesa.

Mesa Elliot Technology Park Expands to 270 Acres with Land Buy

April 3, 2017

Sunbelt Investment Holdings Inc., based in San Diego, CA, acquired 67.5 acres near the corner of Ellsworth and Elliot Roads in Mesa, AZ for $11.8 million. The buy from El Dorado Holdings Inc. of Phoenix means Sunbelt now has 270 acres for its planned, mixed-use project, Mesa Elliot Technology Park. Sunbelt previously acquired approximately 203 acres about three and half years ago.
Brent Moser, Mike Sutton and Brooks Griffith with Cushman & Wakefield in Phoenix negotiated the land transaction. Meanwhile, Cushman’s Andy Markham, Mike Haenel and Phil Haenel have the marketing assignment. Markham said he expects to have a new site plan available for the expanded business park shortly ....readers might note the proximity to Eastmark is of interest in more ways than one
Link > https://www.connect.media

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Close to Mesa Arts Center appears to be the game plan for millionaires to dive into the risk pool for real estate speculation here in downtown Mesa - just make sure you know to Swim-with-The-Sharks and avoid having your real schemes turn into scams.
Play hard and take a few deep breaths before taking the plunge.
 

 

Conditional Conjunctive: Update On "A Long-Struggling Corner"



Up early per usual hitting the touch-illuminated keyboard on a Surface Pro 2 drafting a new post to update what's going on - or not - here in The New Urban Downtown Mesa while a short-lived phenomenon of bursts of lighting flash in the southern sky through the window over the home work-station.
Just a few weeks after the City's Office for Downtown Transformation inflates the spoon-fed mainstream media hype for yet another "trial-balloon" for another Pie-In-The-Sky plan by Arizona State politician-turned-private-real-estate-developer Bob Worsley for a 75-room 15-story hotel and 75 above-market rate apartments plunked down in a nondescript mixed-use proposal over a parking lot in the downtown historic area behind the south side of Main Street, let's step back to another one of those "it could happen here" Make-Over stories that has not gotten off-the-ground 17 months after getting published:

Downtown Mesa property could see $42 million makeover 
Maria Polletta, The Republic | azcentral.com Published 8:02 a.m. MT March 30, 2016 | Updated 11:41 a.m. MT March 31, 2016
"The project would inject new life into a long-struggling downtown corner, shaking up the negative image the property has had for years. . . "
Question: Just another one of those bites-the-dust things?
Tapping into the current lingo for urban planning gone-bad - or going nowhere-fast - is this just another empty "eyesore" here in the urban landscape?
Or transit-oriented development temporarily stalled?
The NWC of Country Club @ Main Street is a high-visibility location. No doubt about that for sure; but why is it still sitting empty except for one last vestige of Mesa's car-driven culture: Bailey's Brake Service.
Another Question: Did someone "put the brakes on" progress  moving this forward?
Like most of downtown Mesa's real estate and property history, this site-selection has a long and twisted story that's taken a number of detours creating drama that are detailed in the good reporting by Maria Polletta back in March 2016 about market-rate housing.
Please take the time to read the report 17 months ago for this site's history:  
Link > http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/mesa/2016/03/30/proposed-market-rate-housing-project-aimed-revitalizing-long-struggling-corner-downtown-mesa/82088846/
Did this market-rate housing initiative get stopped in-the-tracks just a few months ago by an alleged demand to the developer Chicanos Por La Causa by Mayor John Giles getting into negotiations by the City to steer the financing to a Utah-based lender?
Any actions like that to specify what lender to use would no doubt, if true, cross over the line of what's acceptable practice in real estate law: it's called STEERING.  

 

BREAKTHROUGH: Local News That's Not Controlled by The Chain-of-Command

Your MesaZona blogger is a strong stalwart supporter of independent news reporting that's not restrained by spoon-fed established mainstream media - like this narrative:
A ProPublica Podcast:
The Breakthrough:
How a Small News Outlet Brought Down the State Hero
by Jessica Huseman ProPublica,  11.08.2017 @ 08:00
 

It's a take-off point that inspires this blog site from the get-go to creatively disrupt what passes as "news" here in The New Urban Downtown Mesa on a number of fronts, without any investigative reporting.
Too often what is in the public interest gets hijacked by official press releases from the City of Mesa Newsroom, , or an on-call cadre of "contributors"  and/or staff writers for corporate-owned media outlets like The East Valley Tribune or The Arizona Republic, or a new outlet published by former CNA Kelly Mixer calling itself MyMesaNews.com, who graduated from a leadership training workshop sponsored by the Mesa Chamber of Commerce that does "unilateral" coverage of what they want [that means 'one-sided'].
In spite of a second-hand telling of a side-remark by Sally Jo Harrison, President/CEO of the Chamber that your MesaZona blogger is "a trouble-maker" and Mesa Mayor John Giles calling yours truly to-his-face "a rabble-rouser", any reasonable person might ask Why?
It is in the public interest to have an option to make you think even in spite of verbal attacks for making trouble or for rousing residents here in Mesa whom the mayor refers to as "Rabble" - the majority of people who have disconnected from civic involvement, dis-enfranchised and un-engaged in what passes as government where few participate in the oversight of those elected and employed inside City Hall.

What can go way wrong in this status quo, is brought to light in a report from Vermont that inspired the publishing of this post: it starts out the story like this and is, once again, a cautionary tale about what does happen all too frequently until  a citizen-journalist digs into the fake fog hiding fraud, crimes and misdemeanors of not-so-minor proportions: 
You can listen to the podcast by hitting this link > https://soundcloud.com/propublica/the-breakthrough-how-a-small-news-outlet-brought-down-the-state-hero


Or take the time to read a transcript
"Bill Stenger was a local hero. One of Vermont’s most important businessmen, he had created hundreds of jobs with mega-developments across the state. In 2011, the Vermont Chamber of Commerce named him “citizen of the year.” And, for years, a sign hung on the door of the City of Newport’s offices that read, “Thank You, Bill Stenger.”
But not all of Stenger’s businesses were what they seemed, a small nonprofit news organization revealed. . . "

 

Anne Galloway is the founder and editor of VTDigger. When she launched the online outlet in 2009, she was its only employee. Today, she has 11 reporters and an annual budget of $1.3 million. Much of her newsroom’s success has stemmed from its dogged investigation into Stenger, his Miami-based business partner Ariel Quiros and their project, Jay Peak ski resort.

When the multimillion-dollar development was announced
in 2012, it immediately smelled fishy to Galloway . . . and it promised 10,000 jobs.
“It just seemed too good to be true,” she said. “It seemed too big.” She was right.
Galloway and her team dug deep, fought multiple legal battles over records and worked to gain the trust of investors losing confidence in the project. They chronicled complaints that this development was starting to feel like a scam, and reported on the cozy relationship Stenger had with state oversight authorities. . .
Newer projects were left incomplete, and investors were left bilked. Galloway and her team knew about almost all of this — they just couldn’t get anyone to go on the record.Galloway and her team dug deep, fought multiple legal battles over records and worked to gain the trust of investors losing confidence in the project. They chronicled complaints that this development was starting to feel like a scam, and reported on the cozy relationship Stenger had with state oversight authorities. . .
Hear how it all began on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

VTDigger.org | Vermont News

https://vtdigger.org/

VTDigger.org is an independent, investigative news organization covering Vermont

 

From WikiLeaks: Another Vault 7 Release > COUCH POTATO

 CouchPotato

10 August, 2017                  

Today, August 10th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the the User Guide for the CoachPotato project of the CIA. CouchPotato is a remote tool for collection against RTSP/H.264 video streams. It provides the ability to collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame. It utilizes ffmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding as well as RTSP connectivity. CouchPotato relies on being launched in an ICE v3 Fire and Collect compatible loader.
Original source: https://wikileaks.org/#CouchPotato 

WikiLeaks Exposes CIA CouchPotato Tool For Hacking Security ...

https://hothardware.com...

3 days ago - These documents are part of what WikiLeaks calls Vault 7, the latest of which ... According to WikiLeaks, CouchPotato is a remote tool for ...

 

 

CIA Uses ‘CouchPotato’ To Record Video Streams From Security Cameras #Vault7

Short Bytes: Wikileaks’ second leak in the month of August is a CIA hacking tool called CouchPotoato which dates back to 2014. The tool can be controlled using the command line to extort footage from RTSP/H.264 video streams, mostly used for security cameras, and save them on a disk.

According to the leaked documents, CouchPotato leverages a modified version of FFmpeg – an open source library for encoding and decoding various audio/video formats. Many of the unwanted codecs and features have been stripped to reduce the size of the tool.

The tool only requires the URL of the video stream to sniff the data. Thus, it eliminates the need to compromise a network. In the case of restricted networks, the CouchPotato can be initiated from within the network.
The H.264 codec and RTSP protocol in the story are used for streaming media, like movies and other video content, over the internet. A well-known application is in the case of surveillance cameras. So, CouchPotato might have been designed to extract footages from such devices saving video streams to some storage over the internet or inside some private network.

The leaked documents also describe some shortcomings of the alleged CIA hacking tool. One of the significant issues observed is high CPU usage which was somewhere between 50% to 70% during the internal tests on a Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine.
There have been several years since the tool came into existence, the leaked user guide dates back to February 2014. CouchPotato is another addition to Wikileaks’ Vault7 series, under which they are publicizing CIA-related tools almost every week
Link > https://fossbytes.com/couchpotato-cia-hacking-tool/

Inspiring Creative Living Transforms The New Urban DTMesa Landscape

It's a work-in-progress accelerating what's next for affordable and attainable housing downtown here on Main Street when a company named Community Development Partners envisions and re-imagines what can get built from the ground-up by moving ahead quickly with the ongoing construction of Phase 2 Rancho Del Arte - two new buildings are "raising the roof" sky-high with stunning designs drawn up by Perlman Architects for El Rancho Del Sol located on East Main Street - it's a turning-point tipping around the prevalent old and tired and typical mindset that "it's OK for Mesa to be boring" . . .
A new vision is getting real, very real.

The Problem With Confederate Monuments

NOLA Mayor deals with "sanitized history"

Published on Aug 13, 2017

Views: 2,756

Towns across the American south are reckoning with whether or not to tear down Confederate statues in public spaces. For New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, taking down the monuments felt like a necessity, despite the tension it brought forth in his city. “I didn’t start the problems with race in this country, but I did force the people of New Orleans to confront them,” Landrieu reflected in in this short interview at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival.