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Former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was befuddled this week upon learning that banks aren’t in the business of environmental cleanup when a project they’ve financed goes wrong. Granted, AOC is generally befuddled by the complexities of a standard traffic signal at an intersection, but we digress.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Maxine Waters brought Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan before a panel Tuesday as part of a broad, four-hour inquiry into widely reported fraudulent misconduct in recent years by Wells Fargo employees.
Rep. Porridge Brains, however, took things in a completely different direction when it was her turn to spew inane comments and asinine nonsense at Sloan.
“Why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?” Ocasio-Cortez asked at one point.
Um… What?
Sloan responded simply, “I don’t know how to answer that question, because we weren’t.”
“You were financing, involved in debt financing in CoreCivic and GEO Group, correct?” Ocasio-Cortez pressed, referring to two companies that manage private detention and rehabilitation facilities.
Then “She Who is Pregnant with Stupidity” asked whether the bank was “responsible for the damages incurred by climate change” because of its financing of fossil fuel companies, such as reinvestment costs.
“I don’t know how you’d calculate that,” Sloan replied.
“Hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access pipeline, why shouldn’t Wells Fargo pay for the cleanup of it, since they paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.
“Because we don’t operate the pipeline,” Sloan replied. “We provide financing to the company that’s operating the pipeline. Our responsibility is to ensure that at the time that we make that loan, that that customer –we have a group of people in Wells Fargo, including an environmental oversight group.”
Ocasio-Cortez interrupted to ask why Wells Fargo would consider lending money to a project criticized widely on environmental grounds.
“Again, the reason that we were one of the 17 or 19 banks that financed that, was because our team reviewed the environmental impact,” Sloan said. “And we concluded it was a risk we were willing to take.”
Is it just us or is AOC in a competition to ‘out dumb’ herself?
Here’s the Chicks on the Right:
