WALL STREET AND BIG BANKS WANT YOUR MIDDLE CLASS TAX MONEY



Union members advocate for Wall Street reform
during the 111th Congress.

 Rochester, N.Y.-- Our financial system is being attacked in Congress, and if it collapses again because of reckless greed, working people will bear the brunt. CEO-backed politicians will raid our Social Security, our Medicare and our public services to bail out the fat cats. Take action now.

Tell your members of Congress: Deregulation leads to financial crises. Don’t deregulate Wall Street and then rob working people to pay for the bailouts that will follow.

In 2008, Big Banks and Wall Street CEOs created the worst financial mess since the Great Depression. As a result, 14 million Americans still are unemployed today.  However, and despite popular belief, we remain a very wealthy country.  The fact is our nation's wealth was transferred from consumers and the middle class to the portfolios and bank accounts of the top two percent of Americans.

While unemployment is high and our economic recovery is pathetically slow and fragile, corporations are still lobbying furiously to undo the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Many parts of this new Wall Street Reform Act-- including a requirement that outrageous CEO pay be publicly compared with worker pay-- haven’t even gone into effect yet. But already, House Republicans are siding with corporate CEOs, trying to repeal the bill piece by piece.

What’s the Big Bank/CEO/House Republican plan? Deregulate. And if the economy collapses again because of reckless greed, rob working Americans to pay for bailouts while the rich get richer.

Tell Congress to leave the Wall Street Reform Act alone-- and that if deregulation leads to another financial panic, we won’t pay a dime for bailouts.

We couldn't be more serious

This is serious folks. This is the time to take action. As House Republicans pick at pieces and “provisions” of financial reform, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that deregulation brought our economy to the brink of collapse. That didn’t happen all at once, either. It happened in pieces since the 1970s. Little by little, corporations pushed their agenda, and they got away with it.

That’s why working people must push back hard when corporations and greedy CEOs lobby for even a small piece of deregulation.

Tell Congress to leave the Wall Street Reform Act alone-- if deregulation leads to another financial crisis, we’ll know exactly whom to blame.

So far, this week Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have proposed repealing several important provisions of Wall Street reform, including CEO-to-worker compensation disclosure-- before they even go into effect. They also want to create new loopholes in the law for private equity fund managers, companies that use derivatives, credit rating firms and companies that issue up to $50 million in securities.

photo:  Bess Watts

The fact is, America deserves to know what CEOs make compared with their workers, and we simply cannot afford to deregulate Wall Street.

But more broadly, we can’t give an inch and allow the deregulators to bankrupt America again.

Efforts at repealing pieces of Wall Street reform are just the beginning of Wall Street thinking it can return to its old ways. We’ve got to put that notion to rest, right now.

Tell your members of Congress you oppose repealing any part of Wall Street reform, that you demand CEO-to-worker pay ratios be made public and that working people can’t afford more financial disasters.