Fighting Back: CWA Activists and Allies Are Taking on Wall Street and the 1 Percent

"Washington works great if you're a big bank, if you have armies of lobbyists and lawyers and zillions of dollars to spend on super PACs. The only way we will change that is if we fight back." –Senator Elizabeth Warren

About 10,000 CWAers and allies joined the kickoff of CWA's national campaign, Take on Wall Street. On a telephone town hall call in February, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and CWA President Chris Shelton talked about how we will stop Wall Street abuses and the "too big to fail" banks.

Go to takeonwallstreet.org for fact sheets, actions and information about the campaign.

Listen to the call at takeonwallstreet.org/warren-reich-call

Shelton said that across the board, people, whether Democrats, Republicans or Independents, are fed up with Wall Street's overwhelming power in our nation's economy and politics.

"We've seen the 1 percent grow obscenely wealthy while everyone else's wages stagnate. We've seen the corporate push for job-killing trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and coordinated attacks on public and private sector workers from the Supreme Court to statehouses and every place in between. We see our democracy being drowned by the unchecked mega-contributions of the Wall Street "banksters" and hedge fund moguls. Behind all of these developments is the out-of-control power of Wall Street and the big banks," he said.

Senator Warren, who Shelton described as Wall Street's worst nightmare, noted that after the Great Depression in 1929, "government put a cop on Wall Street, by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission. It made it safe for ordinary people to put their money in the bank, by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). It separated ‘boring' banking from high-flying, risky investment banking by enacting the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933," changes that worked for more half a century, she said. 

"Homeowners and students can't use bankruptcy laws to reorganize their debts. But big corporations can." –Former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich

But in the 1980s, the political winds changed. Regulators looked the other way, financial institutions found new ways to trick people, on credit cards, loans and other products, and the wall between "boring" banking and risky investment banking came down, allowing bankers to use FDIC-insured deposits by ordinary people for outrageous investment schemes, Warren said. 

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich noted that in 1990, the five biggest Wall Street banks had 10 percent of all banking assets. Today, the top five banks control 45 percent of all banking assets.

"The relationship between wealth and power has become all too apparent. The more wealth that goes to the big banks, the more power they have to rig the game in their favor," he said. "That's why we need the countervailing power of CWA to take on the big banks. It will be a long fight, and not easy, but we can do it," he said.