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Showdown in Chicago: Thousands Protest Bankers
UPDATE: Check out photos and a video from today’s rally.
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.
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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.
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Way to go AFL-CIO and Chicago participants. Keep up the good work.
Why does the AFL-CIO form the mother of all credit unions and have the fruits of our savings come back to us not Wall St. gamblers?
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Who is Trumka kidding? The idea that the bankers of this country works for us is absolutely absurd! They work to exploit money out of their customers so they can afford the plush homes, country clubs, and the power that goes along with controlling the funds. We can say that the banks work for us when we have a workers state and the banks are controlled by the working people and the funds are used for the betterment of society without the administrators ripping off a cushy life style and exerting unearned power.
Of course Trumka is spouting the Democratic Party line and rolling the logs for the Obama Administration. Talking truth to the rank and file would create problems that he and the rest of the labor “leaders” couldn’t contain.
We NEED a workers party that will struggle for a workers government and then we will control the banks and the administrators that run them.
Wealth accumulated without work is theft. These brokers and bankers making money by trading paper are not working.
“Our economy has been all but destroyed. We have to build a whole new one, based on good jobs, not on bad debt.”
What a challenge! Brave words and true! It’s time to think outside the box- cause there ain’t much left inside this box no more!
How to pay for building “a new economy, based on good jobs not bad debts”? With Federal Reserve Notes – dollars – borrowed by the government from the Fed? Notes issued by the Fed, a private “zombie” bank that’s been issuing trillions and trillions of dollars worth of promises to the banks and insurance companies, and which isn’t bankrupt only because the rush for the exit hasn’t yet become a panic?
The truest voice of the working people in Congress, Dennis Kucinich, has pointed to the way forward: stop trying to salvage the financial system – no more bailouts – cut the whole rotten thing loose from the real economy and let it go. Then directly issue a new currency backed by the promise that it will be good for paying taxes, not by borrowing it into existence like we’ve been doing, but by spending it into existence directly, using it to pay for goods and services, putting people back to work.
We think taking on the health insurance industry is tough – wait till we hear them howling when we try taking on the whole financial system.
Impossible you say, and yet, it has to happen.
Too much for Obama to take on? It was in January, but won’t be if the working people understand the issue and know that for us it’s life and death. It won’t be if we’re solidly behind him!
You could not have been any more accurate on the need for an economy set up outside the box. The Federal Reserve is being manipulated by big European banks along with our corrupt banks and insurance agencies. I have been a part of this health care fight from the beginning and we are fighting like hell for table scraps. We lost 27 trillion in 8 years and our entire middle class was decimated between 1986 and 2008. Our government is controlled and manipulated by the 3 monopolies Energy, Insurance, and Wall Street. Any goods, services, ideas that might help our economy will not be allowed if it threatens any of the industries within each power structure. When the facts are Banks gave over a trillion in campaign contributions while Energy gave 500 billion to both party’s for the past 10 years. Our $20 or $1000 donations have little influence over the influence of Exxon when they have earnings of $14,000 a second. When we face facts its overwhelmingly obvious just how far in the tank government has gone. It is amazing there are any real proposals that protect citizens at all. Here is an example of an idea to undercut government and create an economy, http://www.usaei.us. This has some interesting ideas. There are a number of really good ideas out there, but they all confront one of the three monopolies that are protected by their paid politicians.
If we can unite the same populace that is ready to take on the banks to accept a national plan that creates a new economy and can be American based and owned. That can be achieved with or without the government, we can be free again. Right now, we are all slaves.
there Is a good book “Meltdown:The end of the age of greed byPaul Mason economics editor for the BBC’s “Newsnight” program.He equates the current fiscal crisis as a repeat of 1929 and suggested having banks become heavily regulated utilities to invest in communities.his focus was on North America and western Europe
Great words, Hopefully the people that need to hear them were not deaf to them.
It is time the Union Movement puts all its power against the big bankers… When we start to take our finances out of their hands, (pockets) and put them into the hands of smaller local banks that did not receive trillion dollar bailouts is the only time they will start to realize it is time for change.
I will urge my union, (Operating Engineers Local 12) to move its Holiday Vacation fund from Wells Fargo to a smaller independent bank. Perhaps one that honors Unions and what we stand for.
Congress all but guaranteed that the banks would NOT work for us when they forewarned them of upcoming regulations by giving them months in which to comply. The consumer ‘safeguards’ that Congress put in place will be totally useless by the time the ‘comply by’ date rolls around. The banks are raising interest rates and lowering credit limits at an astonishing pace. And they aren’t just ‘going after’ their bad customers. Everyone, except of course their cronies, are paying the price for their poor judgment in lending to anyone with a pulse! I, like others, am sick and tired of seeing my credit score drop through no fault of my own. I have pretty much ceased using any credit cards. If I can’t pay cash for it and it isn’t a ‘can’t live without it’ necessity I don’t buy it. Unlike a year or so ago when I would ‘whip out the plastic’ for pretty much anything I wanted, need it or not! My goal? Pay ‘em off and put ‘em away! I won’t close the accounts though because even that doesn’t look good on that infamous ‘credit report’.