Central Florida JwJ joined the Central Florida AFL-CIO as part of a nationwide effort to demand good jobs and a stop to bank bailouts. On Friday March 26th, a group of 30 people started leafletting in front of a Wachovia Bank located on Wall Street in Downtown Orlando. As people leaflettted, a representative was there on behalf of big bankers to thank customers for their hard earned tax dollars in bankers’ pockets. At the end, a delegation walked into the local branch to deliver the Crook of the Month Award.
Goldman Sachs’ speculation and profiteering was a major cause of the recession and now their CEO is giving out $16.7 billion in bonuses. They got a bailout, what do all of us get?
On January 21, Boston community leaders and activists marched on Goldman Sachs to demand that Executive Bonuses be used to fund the Ellison Jobs Bill. The amount of Goldman Sachs’ bonuses would cover more than half of the $30 billion jobs bill that would put unemployed people to work improving our communities.
On October 27th, more than 400 JwJ activists came from Detroit, Buffalo, Columbus, Indiana, DC, Chicago, and across Illinois to join the 5,000+ protestors at the American Bankers Association meeting in Chicago. Our delegation included workers, union members, students, and working people who are tired of watching Wall Street get in the way of meaningful reform on issues like Healthcare and financial reform. (Our coalitions in several other cities, including Orlando, FL and South Bend, IN, held solidarity actions.)
In Chicago we joined allied organizations including National People’s Action, SEIU, AFL-CIO, and many more to send a message to the bankers that we will no longer will be idle bystanders in the fight for the direction and future of our country.
Our message was summarized by new AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, “Business as usual is over. We are shutting you down now!”
One of the noteworthy pieces to lift up from this mobilization is that regular people and grassroots
Looking to get fired up before heading to the Showdown in Chicago, October 27? Here are a few reasons we’re looking forward to facing the American Bankers Association meeting in person next week.
After driving their companies and the entire economy into the ground, Wall Street took bailouts that add up to $15,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. They claimed they were ‘too big to fail.’
We consider these to be corporate crimes, which is why JwJ coalitions across the country have been staging actions, wrapping the ‘bailout bandits’ with crime scene tape and demanding new regulations and a major jobs program.
The simple fact is that “too big to fail” is as much a political as an economic issue. Failed banks are taken over every year by
People gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in DC yesterday to protest a meeting of the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), a lobbying group of the US’s top financial institutions. Protestors staged a mock trial of the FSR to try them for their criminal use of taxpayer’s TARP money from last year’s bailout to enrich themselves instead of putting money back into the economy to help end the recession.
The Financial Services Roundtable is a group of 90 companies in the finance and insurance industry who received an estimated $213.8 billion in taxpayer funds as a part of the bail-out. The FSR spent $43.9 million on lobbying from 2000-2008. They have lobbied Congress to:
oppose accountability for TARP recipients
oppose solutions to the housing crisis
oppose basic consumer protections
oppose the Employee Free Choice Act
Thursday’s protest and mock trial was organized by National JwJ, DC JwJ, and SEIU and included participants from the Teamsters, AFSCME, CWA, Americans for Financial Reform, and other union and community groups.
