Over a hundred angry working men and women marched outside Bank of American and JP Morgan Chase in Santa Ana on Thursday, to demand that Wall Steet banks do their fair share to help restore and rebuild our economy.
Carl Ritola, delegate for the Orange County Labor Federation from U.A. local 582, expressed his outrage at the bank:
You caused the recession, now fix it!
Orange County Labor Federation President Rick Eiden and Orange County Employees Assocation General Manager Nick Berardino stormed inside Bank of America in Santa Ana to tell management how their members are without work and have lost their homes because of the actions of their financial institution. Eiden made it very clear and warned Bank of America
Orange County unions will not go away and will not stop until the banks start treating American working families fairly.
According to Tefere Gebre, executive director of the Orange County Labor Federation:
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.
Gebre went on to say:
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.
