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.
Showdown in Chicago
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I’m in Chicago for the American Bankers Association meeting. Oddly, I haven’t been invited to the Roaring ’20s dance party I hear they’re having.
Why wouldn’t they celebrate the era of wild money and hot times (which slid into the Great Depression)? After all, the bankers are doing well these days.
They’re doing well because after financial institutions caused the global economic crisis, we bailed them out, to the tune of some $700 billion.
Now they’re in good enough shape to pay the suits $7 billion in bonuses for driving working families and our economy to our knees—to the verge of a second full-fledged depression.
Things might be turning around for the bankers, but for the rest of us, unemployment heads toward 10 percent and home foreclosures continue to devastate families and communities. Working families have lost health care, pensions and savings—and in exchange we’ve gotten predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees and sky-high credit card interest rates.
Dancing with Jay and Daisy
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When you’re a member of the American Bankers Association (ABA) meeting in Chicago amid the worst U.S. jobless crisis and most disastrous economy since the 1930s Depression, what’s the logical move to make?
Dress up in a Roaring ’20s costume and party like it’s 1929.
Proving yet again that not only do taxpayer-bailed-out CEOs have no shame, word has it that they plan to flaunt their taxpayer-fueled wealth in our faces, the ABA is sponsoring its Roaring ’20s party in conjunction with its Oct. 27–29 meeting.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will lead thousands of mad-as-hell Americans in a rally outside the ABA meeting on Oct. 27, demanding financial reform and re-regulation that will allow us to rebuild our communities, our lives and our economy.
(If you’re in Chicago, join us Oct. 27 at 10:30 a.m. CST. The march departs from the corner of East Wacker Drive and Stetson Avenue. After about a 15-minute march, the rally will be outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers at 301 E. North Water St.)
Because when they’re not stocking up on Jay and Daisy attire, Big Bankers and financial institutions are using the $700 billion in taxpayer bailout money to attack proposals like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would actually help working people while decreasing the chance of another Big Bank-fueled financial meltdown. Of course, they’re not using all of our money to fight reform. Some of it—about $7 billion—is going to bonuses for top CEOs.
A Robust Public Option Creates Competition
Stopping by “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC last night, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka discussed why the AFL-CIO supports health care reform legislation that makes sure Big Insurance doesn’t monopolize the health care field—and why the bill passed this week by the Senate Finance Committee, which does not include a public option, must be improved as it goes through Congress.
Right now as your last guest [Wendell Potter, former Cigna executive] said, American insurance companies have a stranglehold on the health care industry. In 90 percent of the markets, they’re called highly concentrated, or there’s one or two companies that control them. As a result, profits have gone up 1,000 percent and premiums have gone up 300 percent. The only way to hold them accountable is to create competition and the only way you can create competition is with a robust public option.
Alison Stewart, who filled in for Maddow, asked Trumka:
Let’s talk about the public option. Is it a make or break issue?
His answer:
Absolutely.
The Chamber of Commerce’s Jobs Deception Campaign
Unions are popularly known as “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In contrast, the Chamber of Commerce schemes to take away employees’ weekend—along with overtime pay, the minimum wage, Buy America rules, employee’ freedom to form unions, child labor standard protections….The list is long and ugly.
So it’s farcical that today the Chamber launched a campaign estimated to run in the tens of millions of dollars to promote job creation.
The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation—until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reining in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.
Chocolate, Whiskey and More at the Union Store
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Last week, the UAW published a list of 2010 union-made cars, trucks, vans and other vehicles. It’s also Union Label Week, which we hold annually to highlight how union-made goods are high in quality and help support middle-class communities. These two events reminded me: Making a case for Buy American means we in the union movement need to do our job and show U.S. consumers how and where to buy American, and buy union.
Or at least we can try. I’ve seen an awful lot of brand-new BMWs, Mercedes and Lexus brands of all types driving around here in Washington, D.C., recently. Something tells me my money helped purchase those vehicles—no doubt some of the drivers are beneficiaries of taxpayer-bailed out financial institutions.
Still, not everyone is laughing all the way to making high-end purchases of foreign-made goods with U.S. taxpayer dollars. And for those who still have a conscious that can be appealed to, this list is for you.
The Revolution Will Be Twittered
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How appropriate Michael Moore premiered “Capitalism: A Love Story” in Pittsburgh this week, to coincide with our 26th AFL-CIO Convention. Moore, in an action spearheaded by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), marched with AFL-CIO delegates to the movie theater, and afterward, encouraged all of us to sponsor it in theaters throughout the country, because, as he says at the end of the film, he needs help to spark the populist revolution.
He’ll have a great partner with the new leadership of the AFL-CIO. Late yesterday, delegates elected Richard Trumka president, Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer, and re-elected Arlene Holt Baker executive vice president. The team is a mini-revolution in itself: It’s the first time the top leadership of the AFL-CIO includes two women, and Shuler, 39, is the youngest-ever unionist ever to hold so high a position in the labor movement.
I Can Has Health Care?
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You’d have to be living in a cave, or in a willful veil of ignorance, not to know how people in this country are suffering in our broken health care system. If you have health insurance through your job, that’s one more reason to be desperately afraid of losing that job (with unemployment at 9.4 percent, no less;), if you get it as an individual or a family, you have to worry that your insurance company will find a reason to dump you the minute you need it most (whether you’re insured through your job or on your own, your health care costs are exploding. Then, of course, there are the 47 million people without insurance in the United States.
Blah blah blah.
But did you know that the lolcat community is suffering? If, so far, you’ve been able to push the health care crisis to the back of your mind and put off making your voice heard, how does it make you feel to see that Dr. Tinycat can’t get care because he’s out of network?
Trumka to Congress: Want Workers’ Support? Back a Public Option
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AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka appeared on CNBC this morning for a frank talk about health care, politics and the future of the country.
As described this week in Huffington Post, Trumka is laying out a fundamental proposition: When it comes time for millions of union members to mobilize, educate other union members and get out the vote, they’ll work on behalf of candidates who support real health care reform that provides quality, affordable health care to all and gives people the opportunity to choose a public health insurance plan alongside private options:
We finally said, look, this is the minimum. If you’re going to do something, do something that works. If you’re going to have health insurance reform, you must have a public option in it. if you don’t, don’t expect us to support you.
Findlay, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce Kills Parade Because Unions Backed It
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The Chamber of Commerce—that’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—proved once again how anti-American it is when it comes to supporting U.S. industry.
In Findlay, Ohio, unions had been organizing a parade and all-day event for this Saturday to highlight American-made products and the need for U.S. trade and economic policies that reward job growth in this country. The unions worked hard to get the business community involved and spent months meeting with the city’s Republican mayor, who supported the plans.
But in the end, GreaterFindayInc., the local Chamber arm, killed the Heart of Commerce and Community Celebration.
Says Donnie Blatt, United Steelworkers (USW) Rapid Response coordinator for District 1: “GreaterFindlayInc. did everything they could to sabotage us. They told business not to cooperate with us.”
