Jobs With Justice

1. Two thirds of U.S. corporations paid no U.S. income tax from 1998-2005.  Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Walmart find ways to evade taxes, and get taxpayer money to pick up their tab.
2. Wall Street speculators pay themselves record pay and bonuses and spend millions lobbying against financial regulations -- subsidized by the rest of us.
3. Tax rates on millionaires keep dropping.
4. The income gap between the richest 10% of Americans and the rest of us has been widening for 30 years.

Tax them, break them up, rein them in - www.taxwallstreet.org.

"Trust-buster" Teddy Roosevelt understood.  Jobs with Justice has been calling it out.  Even Robert Reich seems to get it.

This whole "too big to fail" idea is more than just a threat to our economy.  So much economic power in so few hands is a fundamental threat to democratic process.  "Too Big To Fail" lets these Wall Street speculators turn our national financial system into their personal casino, where they get the winnings and pass the losses to us taxpayers.  "Too Big To Fail" lets them accumulate obscene amounts of money, with which they seduce Congress to further weaken consumer protections and job-killing trade and economic policy.  When a Senator can say the banks "own" the Congress, we've reached a crisis indeed.

As Reich, Dean Baker, and others note, even if all the banks pay back their TARP money,

Jobs with Justice coalitions in several major airport locations across the country, including: Seattle, Portland, Denver, St. Louis, Orlando, Washington DC, and Boston are actively supporting the nationwide campaign to organize 40,000 airport security screeners.  This campaign, considered to be the largest union organizing effort in the U.S., includes workers at airports across the country, where union activists and allies are demonstrating support for the women and men who help keep air travel as safe as possible.

Background:

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, AFGE successfully urged the U.S. government to take charge of airport screening from a collection of private employers and make all airport screeners federal employees.  But the legislation that federalized airport screeners, creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), also stripped the newly federalized workers of their rights.  The law gave the new TSA sole discretion to decide the terms of employment of the security workforce, including their collective bargaining rights.

President George W. Bush successfully used the fear created by the terrorist attacks to move his anti-union agenda in creating the TSA.  Bush administration officials claimed that union representation of workers would deny TSA the “flexibility” required to wage the war against terrorism.

The AFL-CIO and Jobs with Justice went another round against big banks this week.

Jobs with Justice mobilized this week with the AFL-CIO’s “Make Wall Street Pay” week of action.  Building on our week of action to save jobs earlier this month, JwJ Coalitions participated in actions in at least 12 cities this week.  Some 200 actions are reported nationwide, and the profile of these actions is rising as well, as this week’s New York Times article illustrates.

In Washington, DC the Billionaires for Bailouts asked lunchtime passersby to spare a few million dollars for their bonuses.   Actions are escalating in several cities as anger mounts against CEO pay and consumer gouging.  Over 1,000 people rallied at a Bank of America branch in Philadelphia, with 50 entering the bank and disrupting business.  In Orlando, nearly 100 blocked the Bank of America branch, and 12 withdrew their money from the bank.