Trumka Demands Real Reform on Wall Street, Across the Economy
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On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making the U.S. economy work for working people.
Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO leadership team’s national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive vision for the economy—and to fight back against the corporate agenda that left workers behind.
We’ve let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have undermined the economy, Trumka said:
Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For the pain they’ve inflicted on families who face financial ruin—unemployment, wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.
In Georgia, New AFL-CIO Leaders Take on Banks, Support Flight Attendants
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The AFL-CIO’s new leadership team is kicking off its first days with a tour around the country, listening to workers and energized to turn around the economy. Today, they visited Atlanta to focus on the foreclosure crisis that has driven millions out of their homes—and the banks that enabled it.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker brought a message to an area hit by more than 40,000 foreclosures in just the past six months: We need an economy that protects everyone, not just finance-industry CEOs.
Speaking to a breakfast of faith leaders and community activists in Atlanta, Trumka said the finance industry undermined the economy by engaging in predatory practices in the hopes of profiting off of the most vulnerable:
It’s time banks are held accountable for the pain they’ve inflicted on families now faced with financial ruin, even foreclosures and bankruptcy. The banks and their fly-by-night business partners took advantage of people who wanted to buy a home, knowing full well they’d have to default, and lose their homes to the bank.
Trumka said that our economic crisis is due to the greed and irresponsibility of an economy that worked for only a few, while most workers struggled with stagnant wages and debt:
Our financial system is a shambles and we’re not going to restore its luster until we rein in the abuse by financial institutions like Wachovia that threw our economy into crisis.
At Home in Union-Made Utopia: PBS Looks at the Housing Co-Op Movement
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Three elderly New Yorkers—Yok Ziebel, Julie Luguvoy and Pete Rosenblum—are meeting at the apartment complex in the Bronx where they grew up together. They embrace with all of the affection of lifelong friends. They joke with each other (Ziebel: “Did you lose weight?” Rosenblum: “No, I’m shrinking.” Ziebel: “We’re all shrinking.”). They reminisce.
This sweet moment begins a splendid, subtle documentary, “At Home in Utopia,” created by Michal Goldman and Ellen Brodsky, which will be shown on the PBS “Independent Lens” series April 28. (Check your local PBS station schedule here.)
Ziebel, Luguvoy and Rosenblum grew up in one of the most remarkable and least-known experiments in the history of the union movement—the housing cooperatives of New York City, built mainly by immigrant Jewish workers in the early 20th century.
These workers agreed on very little. They were socialists, liberals, labor Zionists, communists, anarchists and everything in between. They engaged in some ferocious political fights in their day.
Yet they all had something powerful in common. They thought unions should aim for “a shenere un besere velt”—a more beautiful and better world, as the Yiddish socialist Workmen’s Circle put it—even if they passionately disagreed about what that world would look like.
How to get from here to there? That’s where the housing cooperatives (and other kinds of cooperatives) came in.
‘Shockingly Little Oversight’ of Taxpayer $$$ in Wall Street Bailout
It should come as no surprise that the same Bush administration that gave suitcases full of taxpayer cash to Iraq with no accountability about how it was spent has done pretty much the same thing in its handling of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
As Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren puts it:
There has been shockingly little oversight of the money.
