Two months ago, I reported that National People's Action (NPA) was planning to sit down on two of the biggest banks, hoping to hear them cry Uncle. Yes, I know that sounds overly optimistic--to the point of deranged? Maybe not. Large corporations get jumpy when thousands of protesters show up at their annual stockholders' meetings. It hurts their stock prices. Demonstrations like these got Wal-Mart to raise wages and offer better health insurance in Chicago a few years ago. It can work. And this week NPA will show up in force at stockholders' meetings for two of the worst banks: Wells Fargo in San Francisco on Tuesday and Bank of America in Raleigh, North Carolina on Wednesday. Besides, this week's actions are only one part of NPA's larger strategy (That plan, fully explained in that February posting I mentioned, is to pressure the three main regulators--Bernanke, Bair and Dugan--to clamp down on the worst actors and embarrass said worst actors with noisy street action.)
And here's the cool part: you can mug for the teevee cameras right here in Missouri and demonstrate how you feel about Bank of America, et. al. Because there's going to be a rally in Kansas City on Tuesday.
Last time NPA held a rally protesting the behavior of the banks, thousands showed up. It was the Showdown in Chicago--which the Post-Dispatch ignored, but which most papers nationwide covered. In fact, every time a TV station wants to illustrate how pissed off the populace is at banks, it dredges footage from that rally out of the archives. They have to use video from that rally because there have been no others. Till now.
In Missouri, it's at Barney Allis Plaza, 12th and Wyandotte in downtown KC at 1:00 Tuesday. The rally will start there and eventually we'll march to the Bank of America. There will be demonstrations like this all over the country. We're softening BoA up for the big march in Raleigh the next day.
The weather should be perfect. If you don't live in Kansas City, you can hitch a ride. GRO will be taking buses from Columbia and Mexico (contact Lily Tinker Fortel at lily@gromo.org, 573-999-1262) and two vans (seats still available as of Sunday afternoon) from St. Louis (contact Jeff Ordower at ordowerj@gmail.com, 314-267-4664).
Go on. Tell me you know somebody who isn't pissed at the big banks. Even many of the tea partyers hate them. It doesn't matter which side of the spectrum people are on; they'd like to see those bloodsuckers at Wells Fargo and Bank of America hung naked by their toenails over a bonfire.
Unfortunately, the financial environment that bred the current crisis was also bipartisan. Oh sure, we could blame Republicans Phil Gramm, Texas, and Jim Leach, Iowa, for introducing in 1999 the bill that repealed the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, an act which kept speculation tamped down. But those two Republicans only led the charge. In their wake was a 90-8 vote in the Senate, a 362-57 vote in the House, and a signature--as if it were needed--by Bill Clinton.
Not until January of 2010, a year and a half after the global economy wobbled on the edge of a chasm, only to be pulled back from the brink by almost a trillion bucks loaned to the very villains who caused the wipe-out, did Obama, with Paul Volcker at his side, propose reinstating many of the Glass-Steagall regulations. What took you so long?! And anyway, it's not as if a proposal strong enough to do the job will survive the butchering, compromising, and selling out that will go on during markup. If such a miracle did occur, Congress would freeze in a bi-partisan iceberg (real Dems vs. Rs and Blue Dogs) when it came time to vote on actual reform.
Part of the reason adequate reform isn't likely to pass is the banks themselves. They used taxpayer money from the bailouts to lobby against reform--and, they know how to spread the moolah to the right campaign coffers. Meanwhile, in 2009 the top five banks made their highest profits ever. And they paid bonuses amounting to $140 billion--about the amount of money it would take to cover the shortfalls in fifty states from the Great Recession that the banks caused.
Damn straight we're pissed.
The banks "have their boot on the neck of the American Dream." It's time to take it to the streets. At least that's part of the strategy that National People's Action has mapped out for pressuring the banks to stop ripping people off and start lending to small businesses and investing in communities. Last October, NPA led a coalition of groups that turned out thousands of protesters at the annual American Bankers Association convention in Chicago. They called it Showdown in Chicago, and now every time a TV station wants to illustrate the anger of the populace at the banks, they dredge some video of those protests out of the archives.
It's time to give MSNBC and CNN new footage. NPA plans to double down, triple down, quadruple down on the protests. There will be regional demonstrations in late April through mid-May. The plan is to focus on the two worst offenders and to turn the clubby atmosphere of their annual stockholders' meetings into circuses. All the members of last October's coalition--SEIU, for example, and the AFL/CIO--are itching to get going. Each march will involve at least a thousand, maybe far more--a flood of loud, angry and yet articulate protesters.
The NPA strategy is two pronged.
First, progressives can accomplish a lot by focusing their energy on regulators rather than on legislators: Ben Bernanke at the Fed, Sheila Bair at the FDIC, and John C. Dugan at the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). In Mexico, MO, Jordan Estevao, an NPA organizer, recently explained the strategy to activists at GRO, one of the members of the Showdown in Chicago coalition.
He asked how many of us had been to Bernanke's house to discuss the banking problem. Lotsa laughter. But, referring to the protests against Bernanke's nomination, Estevao said that "because we 'went to his house,' he's now ... afraid of us." NPA is scheduled to meet with Bernanke on March 9th to discuss the actions they feel the Fed needs to be taking. For example, NPA will urge Bernanke to see that the Community Reinvestment Act is enforced.
At an ACORN rally in front of Wells Fargo (what used to be the Wachovia complex at Jefferson and Market), one of the members, Darryl Moore, talked to me about some of the shenanigans that the financial giants are up to. He pointed out, for instance, that major financial institutions are overseen by watchdogs. The problem with the watchdogs is that they are companies hired by the financial institutions themselves.
I wonder if Goldman Sachs or AIG actually writes into the contract which risky or unethical practices these watchdogs lapdogs are bound to overlook. Or is a wink and nod good enough?
Apparently the lapdogs do not forbid these institutions from taking billions in bailout money and then using tens of millions of it to fight the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that President Obama is aiming to create. That's what ACORN members were doing in front of Wells Fargo on Tuesday, publicizing the fact that the big banks and mortgage lenders are going all out to kill reform. True, smothering the infant agency in its crib isn't likely to happen. But they would be satisfied if they could just weaken the legislation so that it never does more than totter around, presenting no real threat to them.
Roszina Jones had some harsh words about the banks achieving either one of those goals. Most of the protesters were into chants, like "We want a watchdog, not a lapdog." But Roszina, now, she rants. She started this riff by yelling about how Wells Fargo has taken her taxes and used it:
so you can fight and increase your pay and your money while we stand here in debt and don't have no money. I don't get to drive a Beemer. I don't live in no mansion. I work hard every day, work at minimum wage and you take my money to take it to the (inaudible) TV show to talk against Obama's financial reform. It's gonna help me get out of debt and you wanna keep me in debt. That's not justice. That's injustice.
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Two months ago, I reported that National People's Action (NPA) was planning to 
