fabulis

Hi.  Jason Goldberg here again.

As you can imagine, today has been a circus.  It is now 3pm east coast time and while we’ve been trying to focus on other things at fabulis today, today’s events have unfortunately been all consuming.  That sucks.  We’re here to work on a fabulis website not to play in the citi circus.

My advisors did encourage me to provide a few more insights into the situation.

Here goes:

• Disclosure: I am personally a fairly significant investor in Citigroup’s stock. (Significant for me, at least. About 10% of my personal assets are in citigroup stock). As such, I have no interest in their screwing up nor in their failure. I want them to succeed.
• The fact is that somehow and some-why, certain Citi officials decided recently that they had a problem with some of the content on fabulis’ website/blog. Yesterday I was even instructed to come into the branch to view a print-out of the “offensive” content on our site which was in “violation” of their compliance officer’s review of our business account.
• The compliance office had instructed the branch to mark our account for closing/termination.
• I’ve had at least a dozen calls with citibank officials today in attempt to defuse the situation. I must say that their initial reaction and response was inadequate — and I let them know that. Their initial reaction was to obfuscate the issues around their reviewing our website content and to instead claim that the issue was all around some missing documentation for our account. Sorry, but I’m not buying that, especially after being told previously by several of their folks that this was a content issue and, as noted above, I was welcomed to come down and take a look at the offending content.
• Do I think Citigroup is a homophobic organization? No.
• Do I think that someone at Citigroup really screwed up? Yes.
• Whatever the reasons for the actions taken by Citibank, there are important first amendment and technology rights issues at stake, not to mention sexual orientation discrimination.  Does Citi insist on approving the content of its newspaper clients?  What about art galleries and libraries? Do they pre-approve the art?  The content of books by publishing clients. Of course not. They may have sexual orientation non-discrimination policies in place and they may outwardly do a lot of good for the GLBT community, but if their front line customer service people are not educated on them, what good does it do?  That one of their employees could raise a compliance issue around the content of fabulis which results in a recommendation from the compliance office to terminate our bank relationship with citibank is outrageous.  Clearly Citibank needs to do a much, much better job at educating its employees about how to handle diversity issues and first amendment issues, let alone basic customer service issues.
• Despite all this, I think that they have heard us and the online community / twitterverse loud and clear, and that this situation should be behind us fairly soon.  I hope so.  I’d so much rather be doing real work.

Stay fabulis.  I’m sure this has one more round to it.  But please, let it be over soon.

-jason