Labor & Employment Law

Wall Street Reform Actions Go Nationwide

By Mike Hall

Kansas City activists tell Wall Street banks, it’s time to pay up.

When Wells Fargo shareholders gather for the big bank’s annual shareholders meeting today in San Francisco, they’ll have a lot of company?about 1,000 workers and community and religious activists. They plan to tell Wells Fargo CEOs it’s time to start paying for the jobs they destroyed and that working people “will not be your ATM.”

The San Francisco march and rally is part of a huge week of mobilization for Wall Street reform spearheaded by the AFL-CIO, Working America and community allies, including a Thursday march and rally on Wall Street that is expected to draw 10,000 marchers and nearly as many “virtual marchers.” Click here for more information on the virtual march.

All the actions target Wall Street’s Big Six banks?Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo/Wachovia. Several are set to coincide with the banks’ annual shareholders meeting. Yesterday, in announcing plans for a 1,000-plus strong march and rally through Chicago’s financial district, Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon said:

We want to make sure that the banks hear us loud and clear…we are fed up with their behavior and we are not going to take it any longer.

Along with the New York, Chicago and San Francisco action, demonstrations and marches are set for today in Kansas City, Mo., and tomorrow in Charlotte, N.C., during Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting.

Marchers also will demand that Wall Street pays up for its part in creating the nation’s 11-million jobs deficit. At the press conference outside Goldman Sachs’ Chicago office, Gannon said:

We need serious measures to create jobs, we need these jobs now, we need these jobs today. Wall Street bankers should pay for the disastrous job loss this country has seen…we’re asking for a modest financial transaction tax…that would help generate $100 billion to $300 billion annually to pay for job creation through this country.

Most economists say that along with generating job creation funds, the tax would help put a halt to the complicated, risky?some say shady?financial practices and products such as derivative, hedge funds and even more obscure products that fueled the economy’s crash. As Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote:

[C]omplexity is core to the business of Wall Street. There’s a lot of money to be had over there. About 40 percent of domestic profits, in fact. And you get more of that money if no one understands what you’re doing. You can dictate terms to your customers, stay ahead of your competitors and confuse your regulators. And then, of course, there’s the holy grail: a high-return product that’s so complicated that people can’t tell where its risks are and so it’s treated as if it has no risk at all.

The best thing we could do, it seems to me, is slap a significant global tax on financial transactions such that the industry becomes a lot less profitable and these behaviors become less lucrative.

The transaction tax is one of four proposals the AFL-CIO supports so banks pay a fair share to restore the economy. The other three are:

• New fees on Wall Street banks to pay back the cost of the bank bailout.
• A special levy on Wall Street bonuses.
• Closing the loophole for hedge fund and private equity managers?the wealthiest people in the country?and taxing them at ordinary income rates.

For more information on Working America’s “I Am Not Your ATM” campaign, click here. To join Thursday’s virtual march on Wall Street, click here. For the latest on the AFL-CIO’s Good Jobs Now?Make Wall Street Pay mobilization, click here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 27, 2010 (boomark / email).