by Tefere Gebre, Executive Director, Orange County Labor Federation
The reckless greed of big Wall Street banks such as Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase helped wreck the American economy and kill American jobs.
While working families lost jobs, homes, retirement savings and hope, Wall Street took $700 billion in taxpayer bailouts and went right back to business as usual-. they choked up credit, handed about $145 billion in pay and bonuses to their executives who tanked our economy and hired an army of lobbyists to fight financial reform.
Our nation is 11 million jobs in the hole. Hard working Americans are angry, frustrated and fed up! We need good jobs now. It’s time to make the big Wall Street banks pay.
Here is what we mean by “Make Wall Street Banks pay”.
In the short term, economic recovery requires funding jobs at least in part by borrowing for the spending to really stimulate the economy. But in the medium to long term, we need to pay back the borrowed money we spend today and have the tax base to address our long-term infrastructure deficit. We believe it is only fair to ask Wall Street to pay for repairing the economy. After all, they are the once, who’s reckless greed helped kill our jobs.
Working families support a four-part package of measures to ensure the government has the funding to pay back what we need to spend to create jobs. These measures have the additional benefits of moving the financial sector back to its proper role as the servant, not the master, of the real economy- a creator of jobs rather than a destroyer of jobs.
First, we strongly support President Obama’s proposal to impose fees on Wall Street banks such as Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase to pay back the cost of the bank bailout.
Second, we support the imposition of a special levy on Wall Street bonuses, as proposed in the United Kingdom.
Third, we support taxing the income of hedge fund and private equity managers, the wealthiest people in the country, at ordinary income rates, by closing the carried interest loophole.
Fourth and most important, working families join the International Trade union Confederation in supporting a financial speculation tax, and we call upon the Obama administration to support the proposals for an internationally coordinated adoption of such a tax by the world’s major financial market counties. Such a tax would levy a small fee on all financial market transactions, including derivatives, futures and options. Legendary investors Warren Buffett and Pete Peterson support this approach because it would limit unhealthy speculation. This tax would have no impact on real investors, would discourage financial speculation and would produce significant amounts of ongoing revenue- on the order of $100 billion to $300 billion annually that could be used to solve some of the most urgent needs to move our economy forward.
The Orange County Labor Federation and it’s 97 affiliated unions will be joined with community members in an informational rally on Wednesday, March 24th at noon in front of Bank of America and Chase banks on Main Street in Santa Ana. We will ask this banks to lend again, to stop spending billion to kill good legislation to fix Wall Street and to PAY UP! For good jobs.
Comments