On March 12, ten years after the financial crisis, I again joined the Fed Up Campaign (the “green shirts,” as they have been named by the government bureaucrats), along with members from Spaces D.C., to march on Wall Street.
Participants came from North Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, Arizona and California to support the coalition. We held court in front of George Washington’s statue at the historic site where he was sworn in as the first President of the United States in 1789 and diagonally across from the New York Stock Exchange aka Wall Street.
“We are Fed up and not going to take it anymore” the hundreds strong marchers said, with posters, banners and signs in hand and flying high despite the wind and the cold.
We then marched to the very secure and barred-to-the-max New York Federal Reserve, led by Ruben Lucio Jr., Victoria Ruiz and Sean Sebastian. We stopped traffic.
New York is the seat of the most powerful of twelve Federal Reserve presidents. Nearly all appointees to these fiscal seats of power have been culturally Snow White and have come from the Wall Street they are meant to regulate.
These twelve presidents and the Federal Reserve Board of seven are part of a process that reviews and sets the country’s interest rate every six weeks. They bailed out Wall Street and left non-bankers (“the people”) holding the bag. No relief, forgiveness or checks to us. Millions lost their, jobs, homes, good health, emotional well-being and esprit d’ vive.
After 10 years, we are still not back up to par and the rumor is that these guys want to increase interest rates unnecessarily and push us into another crash. No one except the filthy, dirty rich can afford that. The rest of us cannot survive government-dictated unaffordable interest on our money. Therefore, we cannot be silent.
Jeff Haedtler, campaign manager for Fed Up, reinforced and reaffirmed these sentiments and leads the effort to galvanize a consensus to push forward a change.
“When the economy crashed ten years ago, the New York Fed was at the center of the crisis,” Haedtler said. “With a vacancy opening up there, we have an opportunity to do things differently this time. The New York Fed president is the most important position in the economy that Donald Trump doesn’t control. It is crucial that the person chosen be someone who represents our communities, who understands that the economic recovery still isn’t over in many places, who is independent from Wall Street, and is committed to fighting for full employment and a stable financial system.”
We must read up, educate ourselves and demand our constitutionally mandated rights over the governance of our money! We cannot sit by and allow so many people to toil paycheck-to-paycheck at the edge of the poverty cliff only to become poorer than poor, homeless and on the street. Nor should low wage earners and new Americans have their families torn apart and shipped away like some excess commodity. We are better than that. It’s all about money and man-made legalities.
So, we all need to have big mouths and use them to share our real-life stories. We must insist that wages, jobs and social/racial/ gender disparity and discrimination be alleviated, permanently.
