CHICAGO – Thousands of angry protestors marched the city streets and displayed effigies of the nation’s leading bankers outside the American Bankers Association’s annual convention yesterday to protest the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds going to the banking bailout.
ABA officials claimed inside the annual gathering for hundreds of bankers that investment firms – not banks – are to blame for the financial meltdown.
"The financial crisis is unfortunately often referred to as a banking crisis," said Edward Yingling, president of the ABA, who asserted during opening remarks that large financial failures such as AIG, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not banks. "You did not make any abusive subprime loans; you did not take big bonuses for products that later blew up," he told the bankers.
Protesters shook larger-than-life cutouts of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, while others dressed as grim reapers and held a sign saying "Greed Kills." Some held "Wanted" signs bearing the faces of bank executives deemed "Wall Street Robber Bankers." They carried signs with slogans that included, "No Bonuses for Big Banks," and chanted sayings such as, "Bust up big banks!"
The group assailed the bankers’ opposition to the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, restrictions on credit card abuses, and efforts to rein in subprime mortgages and overdraft protection charges.
Most of the protesters on the Chicago were brought in by the Service Employees International Union or the community group National Peoples Action and many of them were bused in from across the Midwest. The message was one of anger at bank executives' large bonuses, home foreclosures and predatory lending. The group is demanding that "banks end their over-reliance on greed and profits and commit to using their taxpayer bailouts and backstops to help America's economy recover," according to a news release from the SEI.
The morning protests started at the Chicago offices of Goldman Sachs, then the group marched down the street to the offices of Wells Fargo, before moving to the convention on a fleet of yellow school buses.
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