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More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don’t go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry’s greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual—with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who is joining union members and allies at today’s events, has a clear message to bankers: You work for us.
Business as usual is over. We are shutting it down. You work for us—not the other way around. Your job is to be stewards of our savings, to put and keep working families in homes, to lend the money companies need to create jobs. And you have failed. You’ve turned the American economy into your own private casino, gambling away our financial future with our money, and driving us to the brink of a second Great Depression—then sticking out your hand for taxpayers to bail you out.
Praising Barack Obama’s administration for trying to stop the out-of-control bonuses paid to executives at bailed-out banks, Trumka says we need to go further by setting tough new rules so that the financial industry can’t run our economy into the ground again.
Trumka calls for four key principles to be part of any financial reform:
- * A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to monitor banks and credit card companies and prevent abuses.
- * Reform the Federal Reserve Board or create an agency capable of stopping systemic risk.
- * More transparency so that hedge funds, derivatives and private equity markets can have real oversight.
- * Reform of corporate governance and executive compensation to make the finance industry work on behalf of the real economy, not vice versa.
This shouldn’t be a moment, Trumka says, where we pretend we can go back to the old broken economy that benefited only a few at the expense of everyone else.
Our economy has been all but destroyed. We have to build a whole new one, based on good jobs, not on bad debt; with America investing in and exporting technology and world-class products, not financial crisis; where hard work is rewarded, not colossal failure; where workers have a real voice because they have the freedom to have a union if they want one; and where all of us have the health care we need.
Appearing on the local Fox affiliate this morning, Trumka said it’s an outrage the financial industry took billions in taxpayer dollars, yet uses its resources to lobby against regulations to prevent a crisis like this from happening again:
The bankers who took all the risk and now are doing everything that they can to block reform so that it doesn’t happen again. Now that’s the problem. They want to do the same things over and over again, and they want us to pay the price again.
(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)
11 Comments
Great to hear! Got pictures/video of the events?
Here’s one from a bit earlier today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFqOy6H5N_s
Thanks.
“Trumka calls for four key principles to be part of any financial reform:
* * A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to monitor banks and credit card companies and prevent abuses.–8,000 PLUS BANKS HAVE ALREADY BEEN EXEMPTED IN THE BILL THE HOUSE PASSED FOR THE CPA
* * Reform the Federal Reserve Board or create an agency capable of stopping systemic risk.—Breaking Up the Big Banks, and Why Congress Won’t Do It
AIG Swaps: New York Fed’s Secret Choice To Pay For AIG Swaps Cost Taxpayers $13 Billion
Mr. Trumka, can you say Geithner,Summers,Obama?
* * More transparency so that hedge funds, derivatives and private equity markets can have real oversight.—OTC derivatives ALREADY exempted in the ‘reform’ bill(s) if used by ‘banks’.
* * Reform of corporate governance and executive compensation to make the finance industry work on behalf of the real economy, not vice versa.”—the Obama Administration still hasn’t done anything to change the incentives for excessive risk-taking that are embedded in its own “too big to fail” doctrine. As long as bankers and their creditors believe they have a federal safety net, they will have a cheaper cost of capital that will encourage them to take greater risks. New pay rules will quickly be worked around or through.
No cheering until the game is ‘over’.
That is a distraction and does little to help us build an economy based on good jobs rather than bad debt.
It is going to take a whole lot more than organized labor to bring us to a place where wages are high enough to make it so that people don’t need to go into debt for the necessities.
All of the areas where credit or insurance has needlessly and irresponsibly inserted itself into our necessities, such as health, education, transportation, housing and retirement, need to be addressed by raising wages so that we can take care of our needs without having to pay Wall Street for the privilege.
We also need to eliminate the tax exemption for corporate contributions to PACs, purchases of advertising and payments to lobbyists,.
The guys who got the big bailout money are not there.
The ABA convention is a bunch of second and third-tier bankers who also got screwed, and those mobs of populist air-heads chanting pitiful slogans are just a joke.
Same guys who didn’t show up when Obama gave his speech on Wall Street.
I read elsewhere BofA was there.
I’ve also read that ABA is fighting and lobbying against reforms even if they did get screwed by bigger banks. So taking a protest there makes sense, imho.
But hey, if Fox didn’t promote it on their channel, I guess it’s not newsworthy eh?
The majority of banks in the ABA have less than $125 million in assets, and dosido’s crack about Fox is bullshit, like the rest of his or her silly post.
Apparently dosido “thinks” a bank is a bank is a bank, and nothing else matters, and likewise with the useless protesters in Chicago.
But the continuing nightmare of hundreds of trillions of dollars in outstanding financial derivatives can’t be fixed by blissfully ignorant “populists” in the street or on the internet, or the con-men and whores nominated, elected, and installed by the Democratic Party.
This is a problem that Democrats created with two bills signed by Bill Clinton, Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and the nauseating hypocrite Barack Obama has made it infinitely worse with his runaway underwriting of major New York financial institutions, which have almost no connection with the ABA.
I adore you, Jacob Freeze…on several sites. Maybe the protesters are not protesting the real culprits aka Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup…. But still….getting some kind of national attention is good. Even banks that aren’t as despicable as Citigroup, are still charging “fees” that should be looked into.
If these protests call attention to Ken Lewis, Lloyd Blandfein, Jamie Dimon and make them household names, who cares that this particular group is not as bad as them?
Also, did you know that the Sunday night kick off party had a roaring twenties theme? That in itself is worth protesting.
Roaring Twenties? I retract all my previous remarks! Rush the barricades! Hang ‘em from the nearest lamp-post!
This thing could turn into a “Malthusian catastrophe,” and those animals are dancing the cha-cha!
It isn’t a joke. The global economy has overwhelmed local economies all over the Third World, from Yemen to Kinshasa, and what the heck will happen to a billion unwillingly urbanized paupers already at the edge of starvation, if the global economy crashes under the weight of hundreds of trillions of dollars in interlocking derivatives?