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.
Wall Street to Main Street: Lick My Versaces
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Given the raging jobless rate in this country, it’s no surprise that only 10 percent of Americans say now is a “good time” to find a quality job, reflecting no improvement since February, and less than the 33 percent who held similar views as the recession began in January 2008, according to a Gallup poll out this week. The poll concludes:
Job-market conditions across the U.S. are a little better than they were six months ago, but remain far worse than they were during the first year of the recession. Another jobless recovery—no matter its overall shape—is the last thing Americans need after the worst recession since the Great Depression.
It’s bad enough America’s workers can’t find jobs. But even those with jobs are experiencing such a decline in wages that the United States has seen a dramatic increase in economic inequality. According to a new paper by the Center for Economic Policy Research:
While the United States has long been among the most unequal of the world’s rich economies, the economic and social upheaval that began in the 1970s was a striking departure from the movement toward greater equality that…was a central feature of the first 30 years of the postwar period. This is…the direct result of a set of policies designed first and foremost to increase inequality.
Chamber Pot of Commerce
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The day after Barack Obama was elected president, we at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., draped the front of our building with a massive banner: “We’re Turning Around America.” In January, we added another banner supporting passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The AFL-CIO building is just around the corner from the Chamber of Commerce. So apparently after stewing lo these many months, the Chamber decided to drape itself in its own banner, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
The banner proclaims the ludicrous—yet at an estimated $100 million, massively funded—campaign the Chamber announced yesterday to shore up free enterprise and create jobs. Or, as Politics Daily puts it:
Chamber of Commerce Relaunches Capitalism.
Chamber President Tom Donohue, who last week was battling Apple Inc. and other corporations about their decisions to leave the Chamber over its antediluvian climate change stance, had this to say about the campaign:
The free enterprise system, which has done so much for so many, is facing great challenges.
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.
Chamber of Commerce: Out of Touch with the Public
Here’s a proposal that makes sense: The Obama administration wants to set up a consumer financial protection agency to oversee the financial markets and make sure working families aren’t the victims of predatory lending, abusive credit card practices and the kind of irresponsibility and greed that have caused our economic crisis.
But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is putting its big bucks into preventing creation of any agency that would hold financial institutions accountable.
Earlier this month, the Chamber announced it would spend $2 million on an ad campaign opposing a consumer protection agency, and it has taken the lead in lobbying Congress to prevent new rules for our financial system.
Tough new rules—and an agency with the authority to enforce them—would protect families, their communities, the housing market and the entire economy. But the agency might make a small dent in the profits of a handful of huge banks and Wall Street corporations and the salaries and bonuses of CEOs. So the Chamber of Commerce is opposed to it.
