NYC: Protest on Wall St. Friday, January 15. Give bankers' bonus money to Haiti - Bail out the People not the Banks

In the wake of the tragic events in Haiti,the organizers of the Martin Luther King Birthday Bail Out the People Not the Banks Protest on Wall St., scheduled for Friday, January 15, at Wall St. and Broad St. from 3:30 to 6:00 p.m., have decided to make Friday's protest a solidarity event with the Haitian people.

Focusing on Haiti in no way changes the fundamental theme of the Wall St. protest; it merely broadens its scope. Just as the banks in their insatiable quest for super profits ravish communities and poor and working people in every region of the U.S., they plunder all the more poor countries like Haiti. The Wall St. protest will demand a real jobs program for the unemployed and underemployed here in NYC. The unemployed need to be bailed out, those who have lost their homes to evictions and foreclosures need to be bailed out, but now it is clearer to many more people than it might have been a few days ago, that Haiti needs to be bailed out. The $18 billion in bonuses that Goldman Sachs plans to pay its top bankers is more than 50% of Haiti's GDP. Accordingly, a central demand of Friday's protest on Wall St. will be that the big banks give all of the money that they set aside for bonuses to the people of Haiti to help them survive and rebuild.

Participants in the protest will be asked to sign the petition below.

A PETITION TO THE HEADS OF WALL STREET'S BIG BANKS:
GIVE ALL THE BANK BONUS MONEY TO HAITI

John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Brian Morgan of Bank of America, Robert H. Benmosche of AIG, and Piyush Gupta of Citibank

We call on the major banks to give all of the money that they have set aside for bonuses to the people of Haiti in their hour of desperate need. Justice and dire necessity demands that those who have profited while others have lost everything now bail out the people of Haiti.

Whatever the full amount of the money that the Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and AIG have set aside for bonuses, that sum will easily be between 10 to 100 times the amount of the combined aid that the people of Haiti will receive from the entire world.

With that kind of money--still very small by comparison to the bail out money that the U.S. government has given to the big banks-- the people of Haiti may actually have the possibility of recovering from the unimaginably devastating blow that has caused so much death, destruction and suffering. Wall Street’s bonus money could rebuild Haiti.

Like New Orleans and the Gulf region of the U.S. 5 years ago, it took a natural disaster to draw attention to the terrible poverty, injustice, and neglect that the people of that region have been historically subjected to. Today, Haiti is today's Katrina.

Rich bankers who have far more money then they could ever need to provide for their families do much better than those who--like most of the people of Haiti--have nothing to fall back on when hit by an earthquake or a hurricane or any crisis.

Rescuing the people of Haiti is not only a humanitarian mission. It is also part and parcel of the global struggle against social inequality and injustice. As we celebrate once again the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., let us never forget that we cannot separate the brutal connection between natural disasters and social inequality.

The crisis in Haiti today is made immeasurably worse by the reality that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere if not the world. We must fight the injustice that is at the root of that poverty, now more than ever. Wall St.’s wealth represents the other side of the injustice equation. That is the reason we are taking our struggle to save Haiti to Wall St.’s big banks.

In addition, Friday's protest will speak to the urgent need for the U.S. Government to:

• Release all Haitian Immigrants being held in detention
• Give work permits to all Haitians who need them
• End the deportation of Haitians
• Allow entry into the U.S. to all of the Haitian refugees who are fleeing the catastrophe

We encourage all who are coming to the protest on Wall St to make a financial donation towards Haitian relief.

You can make a tax-deductible donation to IFCO/Haiti Relief, 418 West 145th St., New York NY 10031. They are taking donations for the Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (or donate first aid and personal hygiene supplies to them; call 718-735-4660.)